Jan 20th, 2021 - Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen's gift from collectors Laurens Vancrevel and Frida de Jong “opens up new horizons on surrealist activities”, says expert The largest and most comprehensive library of literature on Surrealism has been donated to the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam. Curators at the museum plan to open a study centre focusing on Surrealism—the first of its kind—after receiving the gift consisting of more than 4,000 publications from the collectors Laurens Vancrevel and Frida de Jong. The pair have also donated 50 Surrealist works to the museum since 2017, ...

Jan 20th, 2021 - The museum where it was kept had been shuttered due to COVID-19. An important copy of Leonardo da Vinci ’s famous “Salvator Mundi” painting is back in the hands of an Italian museum after being stolen at some point in the last year. No one knew it was missing. Police found the copy, which shows Jesus with his right hand raised in a blessing and the left holding a crystal orb, in an apartment in Naples, according to CNN . Painted in the 1510s, possibly by one of da Vinci's students, the artwork replicates the most expensive painting in the world which has not been seen in public since a ...

Jan 19th, 2021 - The copy of Leonardo's $450m painting was taken from the Museum of San Domenico Maggiore last year A 16th-century copy of Leonardo da Vinci's Salvator Mundi that was stolen from a basilica museum in Naples has been recovered by Italian police. Thought to be executed by a student of the Renaissance master, the painting was found during a police search in an apartment around 7km from the Museum of San Domenico Maggiore. The owner of the property, reported to be 36-years-old by Agenzia Italia , has been taken into police custody under suspicion of receiving stolen goods. The work is modelled off ...

Jan 19th, 2021 - Germany became a unified state 150 years ago this week – and no other country has produced such original, provocative and powerful art since, from Richter to Klee, from Dix to Höch S ituated on the edge of the Alps, Neuschwanstein Castle may not look like the birthplace of modern art. Best seen from a perilously crowded footbridge across a vertiginous gorge, it floats in misty rains, a cloudy dream of white spires and battlements. Yet this 19th-century colossus is an architectural homage to one man: a composer who inspired the avant garde to make the leap to modernism. Richard Wagner ’s ...

Jan 19th, 2021 - In the alluring art-world documentary " My Rembrandt ," someone describes the experience of being in sudden, direct proximity to a Rembrandt portrait of a standing figure. He says that it was spooky, like seeing a live human loom right up in front of him. Rembrandt, who painted images of astonishing dark tactile severity ("He creates shadows by not painting them," says one observer), was the mesmeric psychologist of the Old Masters. When you look at one of his paintings, the face it shows is so specific, so lived-in, so there that we seem to be peering directly into the soul of the person it ...

Jan 19th, 2021 - Japanese prints helped inspire the artist's famous series. Paul Cézanne’s muse was not a person but a mountain. Montagne Sainte-Victoire, a mountain overlooking Aix-en-Provence in southern France, fascinated the visionary artist for decades, resulting in over 30 oil paintings and watercolors made over the course of his life. The mountain, whose name means “Mountain of Holy Victory,” was by no means astoundingly large: it measures a modest 3,317 feet. But it is steeped in local and personal lore. For Cézanne, who lived most of his life in Aix, and who established a studio with a view ...

Jan 13th, 2021 - The museum says it had 5.5 million unique website visitors last year, and a 23 percent increase in the number of its social-media followers. Amsterdam’s famed Rijksmuseum , which was closed for much of last year, had its lowest attendance in decades in 2020, with visitors dropping by more than 2 million to just 675,000. That’s the lowest total for the museum since 1964, when it had 686,553 guests. But one bright spot for the Rijksmuseum was its robust online presence, including a total website revamp Where foot traffic was lacking, the web was a different story. According to the museum, ...

Dec 31st, 2020 - Rodin, Bacon and Eileen Agar will be big, but Abramovic’s art attack could eclipse them all. Plus Frank Gehry unleashes a tornado and Helen Levitt shows how street photography should be done by , , and Art Francis Bacon: Man and Beast Screaming apes, isolated in cages – and that’s just the people. Bacon was the most atheist of artists and his vision of humans and other animals is relentlessly Darwinian, so don’t look for cuteness or sentiment in his ruthless dissections of our nature. This is a sideways look at a modern master. JJ • Royal Academy, London, 30 January-18 April. Jean ...

Dec 31st, 2020 - In this intimate scene from Genesis, the artist depicts the moment that Abraham’s wife Sarah learns she will bear a son When Rembrandt van Rijn ’s Abraham and the Angels last appeared at auction, in 1848, it sold for £64 (around £7,670 , or $10,500 USD, today). Come January, when the petite painting returns to the auction block for the first time in 173 years, it’s expected to fetch a substantially higher price: a staggering $20 to $30 million. As Anny Shaw reports for the Art Newspaper , the Dutch Golden Age artist’s 1646 painting is a highlight of Sotheby’s Masters Week sale , ...

Dec 30th, 2020 - ROME (AP) — Like elsewhere in Europe, museums and art galleries closed in Italy in the spring and again in the fall to contain the spread of COVID-19, leaving virtual tours as the best option for art lovers who wanted to see the treasures held by institutions such as the Uffizi Galleries in Florence and the Vatican Museums in Rome. But some exquisite pieces of Italy’s cultural heritage remain on display for in-person viewing inside the country’s churches, which stayed open during the autumn resurgence of the virus. Some churches hold collections of Renaissance art and iconography that ...

Dec 29th, 2020 - Salvator Mundi was sold for a record $450m at auction in 2017 to an anonymous bidder. But the painting’s provenance as the work of Leonardo has been called into question How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know This week we are revisiting some of our favourite episodes from throughout 2020. This episode was first released on 22 May 2020 A long-lost painting authenticated as the work of Leonardo da Vinci was sold for a world record price of $450m in a dramatic auction in New York in 2017. The price stunned the art world and created a storm of attention for a painting that had ...

Dec 29th, 2020 - Impressionism changed the way that artists paint and paved the way for contemporary art. Here are 10 of the most famous Impressionist paintings that revolutionized the art world. Most Famous Impressionist Paintings So what exactly is Impressionism? This radical art movement started in the 19th century in France. Artists rejected traditional painting methods that used precise brush strokes and stylized portraiture. Instead, they took their easels outdoors and depicted the changing light and colors. Impressionism is all about capturing the moment and breaking away from imposed norms. In Paris, ...

Nov 19th, 2020 - Adventures with Van Gogh is a weekly blog by Martin Bailey, our long-standing correspondent and expert on the artist. Published every Friday, his stories will range from newsy items about this most intriguing artist to scholarly pieces based on his own meticulous investigations and discoveries. A separated pair: the story behind Van Gogh’s famed empty chairs An insight into what the two paintings reveal about Vincent's life with Gauguin in the Yellow House On 19 November 1888, Vincent wrote to his brother Theo about his two latest pictures, describing them as “rather funny”. One was of ...