In the face of the global energy crisis, museums and cultural heritage sites across Europe have been looking for new ways to cut down on their energy bills. Most recently, the French government have announced that the Louvre in Paris will be turning of the lights in their iconic glass pyramid two hours early, at 11pm instead of 1am.
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Three paintings from the collection of the family of Willem de Kooning will appear at auction for the first time and are expected to sell for a total of $50 million. Produced between 1969 and 1987, Sotheby’s have described the upcoming selection of paintings as “one of the most exceptional groups of paintings by Willem de Kooning to ever appear on the market”.
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A trove of Modernist masterpieces, owned by the late media tycoon William S. Paley (1901-1990), are heading to auction for a staggering $70 million to $100 million (£61 million to £88 million). Once displayed in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the collection will be sold across Sotheby’s Modern and Contemporary art auctions held in London and New York.
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It has been announced that over the course of this year, Manhattan District Attorney’s Office has seized 27 antiquities from the Metropolitan Museum of Art which collectively are valued at more than $13 million.
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Game designer Jason Allen won first place at the Colorado State Fair art competition with a work he made using an artificial intelligence image generator. Allen’s controversial victory has sparked fury online, as human artists yet again fear for the future of their profession. “We’re watching the death of artistry unfold before our eyes,” despaired one Twitter user in reaction to the announcement.
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A masterpiece by pioneering Vorticist artist Helen Saunders (1885-1963) has been discovered hidden underneath a work by fellow Vorticist member Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957). Despite her success as one of the first British artists to pursue Abstraction, Saunders’ work had fallen into obscurity and nearly all her paintings lost.
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Christie’s have announced that they will sell 150 masterpieces from the estate of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, who died at the age of 65 in 2018. The anticipated sale is set to be one of the highest valued single-owner sales ever to come to auction.
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Last week, the University of Michigan released a surprising statement, saying that one of the highlights of their collection is, in fact, a fake. They have realised that a single manuscript leaf, which entered their collection in 1938 and has been presumed, since then, to be an authentic work by the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), was likely made in the early twentieth century by the infamous and prolific fraudster Tobia Nicotra.
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Police in Brazil have arrested a gang of con artists on suspicion of scamming a member’s mother out of more than 709 million reais (£140 million) in art, cash, and jewellery. A phony clairvoyant was allegedly even employed to convince the alleged victim that her art collection was cursed.
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London’s Horniman Museum and Gardens will transfer the ownership of 72 objects to the Nigerian government, including its collection of Benin bronzes. The Horniman, which won museum of the year in July, is the first government-funded institution to return artefacts looted by British forces from Benin City.
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