Art Photos mixed

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Organisers of the forthcoming show From Selfie to Self-Expression at the Saatchi Gallery in London this spring (31 March-30 May) stress*that this will be “the world’s first exhibition exploring the history of the selfie from the old masters to the present day”.

The show, held in partnership with the mobile phone brand Huawei, will include works by masters of self-portraiture such as Cindy Sherman, Van Gogh, Tracey Emin and Gavin Turk.

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This Sunday, the Spanish interior ministry released the results of Operation Pandora, an international police investigation related to an illegal trafficking ring in cultural property, coming mainly from conflict zones. The operation, launched by Spain and Cyprus last autumn, went into action from 17-23 November 2016 and involved authorities from 18 European countries. It led to the arrest of 75 individuals and the seizure of 3,561 cultural objects, half of which were antiquities.The operation—supported by Unesco, Interpol, Europol and the World Customs Organization—involved checks of nearly 50,000 individuals, 30,000 vehicles and 50 ships. By the end of the operation, 92 new investigations related to the fight against illegal trafficking in cultural property were opened in Europe, the Spanish ministry indicated.

Among the objects confiscated in Spain are 500 archaeology artefacts, including 19 stolen in 2014 from the Murcia Archaeological Museum. The analysis of online sales also led to the seizure of 400 coins, from different eras, with questionable provenance. In Greece, a marble tombstone from the Ottoman Empire and an 18th-century icon in the post-Byzantine style representing Saint George were found. In Cyprus, 40 objects were discovered at the post office in Larnaca, where the country’s main airport is located. From the 44 searches carried out in homes and other buildings in Cyprus, 1,383 objects and 13 metal detectors were also seized. France did not participate in the operation.

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The most romantic day of the year is almost here (yes, we're already thinking about 14 February)*and, as ever, the art world has the big night covered. Adventure-seekers in London and Liverpool can reach new heights of pleasure at Grope Mountain—a climbable wall made with custom holds shaped like human orifices and appendages.

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Since it was founded in Wales in 2002, the biennial Artes Mundi Prize has produced winners that live up to its title: “arts of the world”. Xu Bing, the first winner, hails from China, Eija-Liisa Ahtila, the second, from Finland, N.S. Harsha from India, Yael Bartana from Israel, Teresa Margolles from Mexico, while last edition’s recipient was the Chicago-based artist Theaster Gates.

For the first time in its history, this year’s winner is the British artist John Akomfrah, though the themes of his work—which include migration, colonialisation and the environment—could hardly be more international.Akomfrah was announced as the winner of the £40,000 prize at a celebration Thursday evening at the National Museum Cardiff, the host of the Artes Mundi exhibition, alongside another Cardiff-based arts institution, Chapter (until 26 February). He is showing a powerful, 40-minute, two-screen video, Auto Da Fé (2016), which muses on the theme of mass migration over a 400-year period. “I wanted to focus on the fact that many people have to leave because something terrible is happening, it’s not just about leaving for a better life, many people feel they have to leave to have a life at all,” Akomfrah says.

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The Uffizi Galleries in Florence will show more work by female artists starting this spring, as one of the world’s oldest art museums seeks to redress a historic gender imbalance in a long-term initiative. An exhibition aiming to revive the reputation of Suor Plautilla Nelli (1523-87), a nun who is Florence’s first-known female Renaissance painter, is due to open at the Uffizi on 8 March (until 30 April) to coincide with International Women’s Day. Two weeks later, the Uffizi’s sister museum across the River Arno, the Pitti Palace, will open a show of self-portraits by the late Austrian artist and feminist Maria Lassnig (24 March-28 June).

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Uffizi’s new initiative starts with works by the artist-nun, Suor Plautilla Nelli. Photo ©*Rabatti & Domingie

The Plautilla Nelli display will be the first in an “open-ended” annual series of exhibitions dedicated to female artists from history, says Eike Schmidt, the director of the Uffizi and the Pitti Palace. The German-born art historian, who was formerly a curator at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, is one of seven foreign directors appointed in a dramatic shake-up of Italy’s top state museums in 2014.

Around a dozen paintings by Nelli, several of them only recently identified in churches and museums across central Italy, will be shown alongside works from her Dominican convent, Schmidt says. The Florence-based Advancing Women Artists Foundation, which has restored a number of Nelli’s works, is funding the publication of a catalogue.

Meanwhile, the decision to show Lassnig’s paintings was inspired by the Uffizi’s famous collection of self-portraits, which dates back to the 17th century. The selection of around 30 works—drawn from the Albertina in Vienna, which is staging an exhibition of Lassnig’s drawings in May—is also a statement of feminist intent. “Lassnig was always concerned about her body as a female body, and the relationship between male and female bodies,” Schmidt says. The exhibition could herald a parallel programme of annual contemporary shows by female artists at the Pitti Palace.

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Change is coming to New York’s oldest fair for new art. Since Ben Genocchio took over as director of the Armory Show (2-5 March) in late 2015 (from Noah Horowitz, who left to become director of the Americas for Art Basel), he has been on a mission to revitalise the format with the hope, he says, of putting the focus back on the art.Genocchio, a former art critic and editorial director of Artnet News, decided to take the Armory Show’s 200,000 sq. ft industrial venue, Piers 92 and 94 on the city’s far west side, as his starting point. “I think trying to understand what distinguishes the fair, good or bad, and making that a key component is a smart way of making it a more distinctive and memorable experience,” he says.

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Benjamin Genocchio has been appointed executive director of the Armory Show

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The New York-based artist Nari Ward had not intended to make a third version of his monumental work, We the People, an installation of shoelaces spelling out the first line of the preamble to the United States Constitution, which he first made in 2011. But he and his assistants will set up a workshop in the lobby of the New-York Historical Society from 20-24 February to create We the People (N-YHS Version) in front of museum visitors.

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Nari Ward, We the People (2011) (Image: Will Brown, Speed Art Museum)

This is “not meant to be entertainment”, the artist explains, but a participatory experience; visitors can trade in their own shoelaces to be used in the piece—which requires around 1,000 pairs—for new ones. And after the live installation, the work will be permanently displayed at the museum lobby, to be officially unveiled on 25 February.The presentation is part of the New-York Historical Society’s Presidency Project, a programme of events and exhibitions held in January and February 2017 to mark the presidential inauguration and explore the notion of citizenship.

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In the breaks between the slalom and the downhill, those traveling to St Moritz for this year’s FIS Alpine World Ski Championships (until 19 February) can also make time for some quiet reflection, courtesy of the German artist Heinz Mack. On a footpath by the city’s lake, framed by evergreen trees, the nearby mountains and with a clear view to the town, stand nine monumental golden columns, each more than seven metres tall and covered in hundreds of thousands of mosaic tiles.The installation, titled The Sky Over Nine Columns, has already been shown in Venice, Istanbul and Valencia. These projects—public and on a grand scale—are among Mack’s favourite because they largely skirt the institutional space, which he long ago identified as too stifling.

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The New York-based non-profit public art producer Creative Time announced today that Elvira Dyangani Ose has joined as senior curator. Ose previously lectured on visual arts at Goldsmiths, University of London and was a member the curatorial group Thought Council at the Fondazione Prada in Milan. Ose will collaborate with Nato Thompson—who joined Creative Time in 2007 and has now been promoted to artistic director—to further shape how the institution engages with the public to develop works of art. In an interview with The Art Newspaper, Ose gives us an idea of what she plans to achieve in New York.

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France's Centre des Monuments Nationaux is continuing its multi-stage restoration of the island abbey of Mont St Michel. This year the Norman-Gothic cloister and its 13th-century courtyard garden will get a €2.2m makeover.

This follows repairs in 2016 to the 19th-century gilded-copper statue of Archangel Michael that tops the abbey spire, and earlier projects to restore the roof and stained-glass windows.The abbey’s site and topography presented its builders with particular architectural challenges, and the cloister now requires both structural and cosmetic treatment. Rainfall into the garden is causing water to seep through the ceiling of the abbey scriptorium below. In the 19th century, the courtyard was paved over and rain was channelled into a cistern that fed water to the kitchen. However, the removal of the paving slabs and re-creation of the garden in 1965 has made remedial drainage work and improved damp-proofing necessary to better insulate the garden soil from the stone vaulting below.

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The Institute of Fine Arts (IFA) at New York University (NYU) is preparing to launch a four-year graduate course in time-based media conservation. The degree is the first of its kind in the US and reflects the growing need for specialists in the field as the popularity of technology-based works increases.

Thanks to a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, classes will start in autumn 2018, with the first graduate students due to matriculate in 2022. NYU is one of only four graduate-level conservation programmes in the US (along with SUNY Buffalo State, Winterthur/University of Delaware and UCLA/Getty), and as of 2018 it will be the only one to offer a time-based media specialisation. Some European universities, however, have made time-based media conservation a priority for more than two decades. For example, Berlin’s Hochschule für Technik und Wirtschaft established media art courses in 1993 and Bern University of the Arts created its modern materials media programme in 1997.

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The Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville, Maine has received a donation worth more than $100m from the art collectors and honorary alumni Peter and Paula Lunder.

The gift adds over 1,000 works of art to the museum’s collection and will fund the launch of the Lunder Institute of American Art, a research centre that aims to advance critical and creative research in American art and related fields. The donated works span around 500 years and include paintings, sculptures, photographs, works on paper and other media by more than 150 artists such as Vincent van Gogh, Claes Oldenburg and Ai Weiwei.

The Lunders, who previously gave more than 500 works of arts with an estimated value of $100m to the college and museum in 2007, say that the liberal arts college is “the perfect fit for our collection” and they have worked with the museum’s curatorial team “to strategically identify works that deepen its holdings”, according to a press release.

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An Iraqi archaeologist who was recently given emergency training by the British Museum is leading a rescue operation in Nimrud, the Assyrian site which was almost totally destroyed by Isil extremists. The archaeologist has been appointed by Iraq’s State Board of Antiquities and Heritage to investigate the damage and stablise what can be saved.

In April 2015 Isil militants destroyed the ninth-century BC palace of Ashurnasirpal II with its magnificent gypsum reliefs. Last September they flattened the city's Ziggurat. Nimrud, 35 kilometres south of Mosul, was retaken by government forces in November.

The Iraq Emergency Heritage Management Training Scheme, run by the British Museum and the Iraqi authorities, was established in 2015, soon after the destruction. Financed with £2.9m from the UK’s Cultural Protection Fund, it will train a total of 50 archaeologists over a five-year period with workshops in London and Iraq.

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The Louvre is going Dutch this spring with the reopening of its Northern European painting galleries and not one, but three exhibitions devoted to the art of Holland’s 17th-century Golden Age. A major survey, Vermeer and the Masters of Genre Painting, has been in the making for almost five years, says the curator Blaise Ducos. It is a co-production with the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, where the show will travel later this year. Twelve of Vermeer’s characteristically quiet domestic interiors will be presented among rowdier genre scenes by more than a dozen of his peers, including Gerrit Dou and Gerard ter Borch, Pieter de Hooch and Frans van Mieris.

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The new director of the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid will be Miguel Falomir, the museums long-serving curator and current deputy director, according to Spanish press reports. The selection committee tasked with appointing a successor to the outgoing director of 15 years, Miguel Zugaza, voted unanimously for Falomir on 22 February. The trustees of the Prado are due to meet in mid-March to approve the decision, which must then be formalised by Spains Council of Ministers.

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Women’s March, Los Angeles, California, 21 January 2017

In Los Angeles, I remembered what was like to be in a liberal city. I realised that with the people I had met along the journey so far, I had to be careful about what I was saying to so as not to offend anyone.

We talked to a lot of the protesters who attended the march, and of course I related to most of them—but my vision of the US had changed. I could see how distant and disconnected these people were from the people I had met in the Southern states. We are fighting about a global ideology here, universal human rights. But can people care about the global when the local is in disarray?

To me, art and culture are the keys to social improvement. When I was walking with all those people in the Women’s March, I was thinking about that. What this country needs are serious links between the countryside and the cities. The local has got to be involved in the global and people are waiting for these bridges to be built. I believe that our journey could be such a bridge.

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New York’s Hudson Valley is gaining a new arts destination this summer with the launch of Magazzino, a converted warehouse turned arts space that will show postwar and contemporary Italian works of art from the collection of Nancy Olnick and Giorgio Spanu. The 20,000 sq ft space (which includes a small library) has been revamped by the architect Miguel Quismodo and is located on the Hudson River in the town of Cold Spring, around 60 miles from Manhattan.
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Olnick and Spanu created the private space with the aim to expose the work of Italian artists who have “made a significant contribution to society and yet are not widely recognised in the US”, the collectors told The Art Newspaper by email. The warehouse “will be a platform to showcase the artists’ talent and influence”, they added. The inaugural show, due to open on 28*June, will focus on the late gallerist Margherita Stein, who is best-known for promoting artists associated with the Spatialism and Arte Povera movements. Magazzino will offer free admission, however it will be open by appointment only.

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Eagle-eyed visitors to the Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA) have no doubt noticed that one of gallery’s most prized works, Robert Indiana’s LOVE (1970), is not in its usual location. The sculpture, which is the original version of the artist’s popular series, was removed from its home on the mall outside the museum in January to undergo much-needed conservation work.

Decades of exposure to the elements have taken their toll, with water infiltration being the main preservation issue. The sculpture suffers from external and internal corrosion, leading to holes and split seams. Also of concern are the orange and red streaks that mar the work’s original appearance. Unlike later versions, in painted aluminium, the IMA’s LOVE is crafted from Cor-Ten steel—a relatively new material when Indiana made this piece. The paint on his later aluminium pieces offers an extra layer of protection.

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A large suspended piece by Marisa Merz, (Living Sculpture) (1966) (© Tate/Tate Images)

In early February, we asked the artist Dara Birnbaum to share her reactions to the exhibition Marisa Merz: the Sky is a Great Space, at the Met Breuer. The career survey, which closes in May (and travels to Los Angeles) includes more than 100 works made during Merz’s 50-year career, from small drawings to large sculptures that hang from the ceiling. Here, Birnbaum reflects on Merz’s place in the Arte Povera movement and explains how her art echoes through contemporary art.

One of the arguments curators make with this show is that Merz’s abstract sculptures and constructions are directly related to her figurative work. What do you make of that?
The work seems to go in so many different and diverse directions. The fact that she didn’t date many of her works is interesting, as if it wasn’t important to her at the time—like she didn’t want to give a birthdate to some things. So they start to feel like cast-offs, and that seems okay. I personally like it when artists try to engage and experiment with differing aspects of their work. I’d rather see some confusion than a pretence toward simply doing something over again.

In thinking of different angles, are there artists her work reminds you of?
I think there’s a kind of Primitivism that I relate to Marlene Dumas or Huma Bhabha, which keeps coming to mind. It seems that artists like Dumas, Bhabha and Merz want to bring things down to an essence. Louise Bourgeois is another artist who comes to mind in a few of Merz’s works. A bronze [by Merz] from 1983 has some aspect of Bourgeois’s psyche in it. An untitled work from 1989 looks a little like Isa Genzken. A lot of women artists, basically, come to mind, but some men too. In photographs, from an oblique distance, some of her hanging aluminium sheet sculptures resonate with Warhol’s silver balloons, but they are so much heavier in posture and aspect. And some of the works are full of humour and an openness to play that reminds me of Franz West.

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The Nashville and New York-based American businessman, art collector and philanthropist Spencer Hays died on Thursday, 2 March, aged 80. In October 2016, Hays and his wife Marlene announced a gift of 137 turn-of-the-century works from their collection—which is especially strong in Nabi artists including Maurice Denis, Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard—to the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, where it will be shown in a dedicated space. All 600 works in their collection will eventually be given to the museum, the largest gift by a foreign donor to a French institution since 1945.In a statement announcing Hays’s death, France’s Minister of Culture, Audrey Azoulay, said he and Marlene “only considered themselves the provisionary guardians” of their collection. They were each presented with the order of Commander of the Légion d’Honneur by the French president François Hollande last October.

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The Saudi Arabian artist Abdulnasser Gharem will open his first US solo show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Lacma) next month. The artist, who was until recently also a lieutenant colonel in the Saudi Arabian army, is known for his politically and socially engaged works that draw on his Muslim heritage.

Abdulnasser Gharem: Pause (16 April-2 July) includes 11 works of sculpture, prints and film, all of which were created after a significant moment for the artist, when he says “the world stood still”—the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center towers in New York, where two of the hijackers were former classmates. The exhibition also comes on the heels of President Trump’s revised immigration ban, which suspends entry visas to the US for citizens of six Muslim-majority countries—Iran, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, Syria and Libya—for 90 days, with the promise of more “extreme vetting” of migrants in the future. “Some of the works reflect on what’s happening both in Saudi Arabia and in the US,”* Gharem says. “But I am not picking a side, I’m just trying to be a mirror to my society.”

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Road to Mecca, from the series Restored Behaviour (2011). (Image: © Gharem Studio, photo courtesy of Mrs. Georges Marci)

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Beyond Caravaggio
National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin until 14 May

Considering that Caravaggio (1571-1610) made a deep impression on patrons in Rome and indelibly made his mark on Neapolitan art, it is remarkable that by the 1630s his influence was spent, while Bolognese classicism and the flamboyance of Pietro da Cortona’s baroque triumphed. The so-called “Caravaggeschi”—Caravaggio’s followers, contemporary and posthumous—are the subjects of this show. Paradoxically it seems that the works of those who tried most closely to imitate him tend to be weak, while those who borrow more loosely from him strain the style label “Caravaggesque” to breaking point.

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Chief among the treasures to emerge from the Osaka-based Fujita Museum is this ancient wine vessel, which was acquired before 1940 by the family of museum founder Denzaboro Fujita. A very rare example of a Shang dynasty vessel in the form of an animal (there are only about a dozen known examples), this ram-shaped vessel is extraordinary for its artistry and naturalism, its fine patina and near-perfect condition; after 3,000 years, there is just one little break to the tail. It’s also incredibly charming, a sacred beast whose body is embellished with tigers and dragons—with a little bird sitting on its haunches employed as the handle for the cover. “We don’t really understand how and why such vessels were used, because they were made at the time of the advent of language in China,” explains Michael Bass, Christie’s specialist in Chinese works of art. “But it was clearly meant to be appreciated up close.”
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Blue and White Reserve-decorated Peony Dish, Ming dynasty, Xuande mark (1426-1435). Courtesy of Sotheby’s

Ming: The Intervention of Imperial Taste, Sotheby’s New York, 17 March
Estimate: $1m-$1.5m

This handsome Ming plate, measuring 14in in diameter, is highly unusual because of its experimental resist technique, with all the reserves left in white. “There are only four known dishes of this design,” says Angela McAteer, the head of the Chinese works of art department at Sotheby’s. “The technique was either abandoned or forgotten until it was revived in the 18th century.” Two other examples are held by the Palace Museum in Beijing and the Museum of Oriental Ceramics in Osaka, Japan. A third, once owned by the same Parisian collector as this one, was sold at Christie’s in 2015 for $2.6m. “Ours was almost certainly made for imperial use,” McAteer says. “It bears the reign mark on the underside of the rim. It is in perfect condition and the glaze is very unmarked.”

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A diminuative sculpture of a lion and a lighthouse donated by Peter Doig helped a selling show of works by more than 50 fellow artists get off to a flying start yesterday (until 15 March). Within half an hour of opening Cure³, an exhibition in aid of medical research into Parkinson's at Bonhams in London, almost half of the works had found buyers online. As well as Doig's lion (£40,000), other works by leading artists created for the 20cm sq. Perspex boxes provided by the curatorial team at Artwise included a box full of pill packaging and assorted medical bits and bobs by Damien Hirst (£20,000), a blingy bear by Grayson Perry (£15,000) and a buxum soft sculpture by Sarah Lucas, Acts Like a Real Tit.

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More than 20 art and theatre institutions in Lisbon and Porto are participating in the inaugural Biennial of Contemporary Arts in Portugal (17*March-30 April). Capitalising on the burgeoning art scenes in the cities, the show promotes a crossover between visual and performing artists. Among the projects is a staging of Samuel Beckett’s absurdist 1957 play Endgame in a Porto monastery by the Cuban artist Tania Bruguera and a film installation at the Teatro Nacional D. Maria II in Lisbon by the Portuguese duo João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva. The event’s artistic director is John Romão.


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The artist Christo tells The Art Newspaper at Art Dubai that his long awaited project in the desert, The Mastaba, is still on track. For 40 years, Christo has been planning the structure. Comprising 410,000 multi-coloured aluminium barrels, it would be the largest sculpture in the world, and, unlike many of Christo’s projects, permanent.

“My projects are about the real things,” says Christo, “The real wind. The real wet. The real dry. The real things. Not photographs. I don’t know how to use a computer. Not flat surface. Not propaganda. But the real things.”Christo Vladimirov Javacheff, 81, is in the UAE to double down on his efforts to bring his long-awaited*project to fruition and*is brimming with renewed zeal for the structure, which he first conceived for the Abu Dhabi site with his late wife and creative collaborator, Jeanne-Claude.

Christo says*that preparation will take three years, but once done, the colossal structure itself can then be elevated in a matter of weeks, and will stand at 150 meters high, 225 meters deep (at the 60 degree slanted walls) and 300 meters wide at the vertical walls. It will consist of 410,000 multi-coloured aluminium barrels, which will recall Islamic geometric patterns, when viewed from a distance, set in an ascending form reaching a plateau of 126.8 meters wide.

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Christo and Jeanne-Claude in the 1980s. Courtesy Wolfgang Volz

In the 1960s, Christo and Jeanne-Claude had planned a smaller version of The Mastaba to be sited between Houston and Galveston in the US, with the encouragement of the De Menil Foundation. The pair ultimately abandoned the project due to planning regulations.

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A New Day by William Patino

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Do not expect a snapshot, thesis or panorama of today’s Italian art scene in the national pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale—but be prepared for a view of the fantastical. “I think a platform like the Biennale should be less about trying to systematise the Italian art scene and more about offering a different kind of experimental platform [for] artists,” explains Cecilia Alemani, the curator of the 2017 Italian pavilion. “It should be a space of taking risks and trying a different approach”.The curator “did not want to create a museum display, because the pavilion is not a museum, it’s not going to work in that sense,” Alemani says.

“It’s really a place to give artists carte blanche to transform the space radically and to offer the viewer an occasion to walk into the artist’s mind.”

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The American artist Michael Rakowitz and the British artist Heather Phillipson were announced today, 21 March, as the winners of the next two commissions to occupy the Fourth Plinth in London’s Trafalgar Square. Rakowitz will present a replica of the Lamassu statue that once stood at the Nergal Gate in Nineveh, Iraq, and was destroyed by Isis in 2015, while Phillipson will show THE END, a sculpture of a giant mound of whipped cream complete with cherry, fly and a functioning drone on top. The works are due to be unveiled in 2018 and 2020, respectively.

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In 2020, Heather Phillipson will show THE END, a sculpture of a giant mound of whipped cream complete with cherry, fly and a functioning drone on top on the Fourth Plinth

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Living On A Thin Line by Timothy Poulton

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The State Dining Room in Buckingham Palace (Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2017; Photo: Peter Smith)

The State Dining Room at Buckingham Palace remains closed, more than 16 months after damage was discovered in a timber beam that helps hold up the ornately gilded ceiling.

Initially a palace spokesperson had played down reports that the room would need to be closed for official functions and visitors for up to six months.*Subsequent investigations revealed a serious problem, requiring emergency stabilisation and a crash-deck scaffold. The room had been lined with full-length portraits from the royal collection, which had to be removed.

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The veteran Japanese artist Fujiko Nakaya has created a site-specific work made of mist as the centrepiece of BMW Tate Live Exhibition: Ten Days Six Nights (24 March-2 April)—the Tate Modern’s “first ever live exhibition”, says the museum director Frances Morris.Nakaya’s work—titled London Fog (2017) and made in collaboration with Ryuichi Sakamoto and Shiro Takatani—is on show outside the museum’s new Switch House building. The exhibition brings together “old friends with new friends”, Morris says.

Nakaya, who has “lifetime of collaboration” behind her—including with the US artist Robert Rauschenberg whose major survey is also on show at the museum—was the starting point for the exhibition, which combines performances, film, installations, music and dance.

There will be a “continuously changing programme” throughout the duration of the exhibition, says the show’s co-curator Catherine Wood. The exhibition, which is primarily housed in the museum’s subterranean Tanks galleries, is the first in a series of annual live exhibitions that will take place over the next four years, Woods says.

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When the artist Yoko Ono made the film Bottoms in 1967, officials at the Royal Albert Hall in London refused to show the 80-minute piece which consists of nothing but close-up shots of 365 bums. According to the UK newspaper, the i, Marion Herrod, the venue secretary, was enflamed by the proposal, saying: “We are concerned with the protection of the hall and I was not convinced that we should not have disruptive behaviour from way-out elements.”

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Thieves broke into Berlin’s Bode Museum yesterday morning (27 March) and stole a 100kg, pure gold Canadian coin worth an estimated €3.7m.The burglary took place between 3.20am and 3.45am, during a three-hour overnight lull in the local rail service, according to the Tagesspiegel newspaper. Police say they were alerted by a security guard at the museum around 4am; a special art unit of the regional force is investigating the theft.

A ladder that police discovered on the railway next to the museum suggests that the thieves entered through a window three to four metres above the tracks. Located on Museum Island, the Bode houses Berlin’s coin collection, one of the largest in the world, as well as sculpture and Byzantine art.

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Milton Gendel’s photograph of Peggy Guggenheim and her daughter Pegeen Vail with their shih tzus at their home in Venice (1950).

Milton Gendel: 50 Years of Photographs, which opens this month at the Galerie en Atelier Aroa in Neuilly-sur-Seine, is the first exhibition in France to focus on the work of the American-born photographer and art critic.

Gendel became a correspondent for Art News in 1954 and is known for his connections to figures like the artist Salvador Dalí, the art dealer Leo Castelli and the British Royal Family. The show comprises around 70 black-and-white photographs taken throughout Europe, America and Asia and around 72,000 negatives and 60 albums of prints that date from 1946 to 2000. Some highlights include a photograph of Queen Elisabeth II feeding her corgis at Balmoral Castle (1976), a photograph of Peggy Guggenheim and her daughter Pegeen Vail with their shih tzus at their home in Venice (1950) and a collection close-up shots of artists like Alberto Giacometti, Elaine and Willem de Kooning and Lucian Freud.

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Tests conducted by UK scientists show that, from the early 18th century, Chinese artisans used European cobalt blue to produce famille rose porcelain. This is the first scientific evidence that overglaze pigment was imported from Europe from the early part of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1912). Cobalt blue was an important pigment in the production of Chinese porcelain during this period. The cobalt used for blue-and-white ceramics was locally mined in China and has a high manganese content. But famille rose porcelain needed finer European cobalt, which gives a purer blue. European cobalt was also less susceptible to running when the glaze was fired.

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If you find visiting galleries a little intimidating, it’s worth heading to a rather novel, small-scale new venue in Hoxton Square in East London. The Skip Gallery is a.... gallery in a skip (to put it bluntly).

The London-based artists Catherine Borowski and Lee Baker came up with the innovative idea after struggling to find an exhibition space last year.

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