Over the summer, BBC Radio 4 released a new podcast The Banksy Story which delved into the mysterious artist and coincided with the first ever Banksy retrospective which was held at the Glasgow Gallery of Modern Art. Ex-employees are featured on the podcast and the series aims to “chart the elusive artist’s compelling journey from street artist to global phenomenon”.
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For the first time in over 250 years, a box of love letters sealed during the Seven Years’ War have been opened. They reveal the affection, anxiety, and strife of loved ones attempting to connect with French soldiers onboard a warship. “I could spend the night writing to you,” wrote Marie Dubosc in a letter to her husband Louis Chambrelan, the ship’s first lieutenant.
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Conservation work carried out by the National Trust to mark the 300th anniversary of famed English artist Joshua Reynolds’s birth has revealed a “monstruous figure” in the background of a painting lurking beneath layers of overpaint and varnish. The painting is titled The Death of Cardinal Beaufort (1789) and depicts a scene from Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part 2 (first published in 1594), in which King Henry VI laments the death of the cardinal – his great-uncle – and exclaims, “O! beat away the busy, meddling fiend that lays siege unto this wretch’s soul.”
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The exhibition Holbein at the Tudor Court recently opened at Buckingham Palace’s Queen’s Gallery and includes some of the greatest works by famed Tudor court artist Hans Holbein the Younger, alongside paintings by his contemporaries. Holbein was a German artist who spent two long periods in London, and it is his records of the world of Henry VIII which have shaped the Tudor court in popular culture.
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One of the most treasured paintings at The National Gallery in London was attacked last week by Just Stop Oil activists, almost 110 years since it was attacked by a suffragette. The Toilet of Venus by the leading Spanish Baroque painter Diego Velázquez (1599-1660) has been removed from display after sustaining some damage.
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The collection of award-winning American journalist and broadcaster Barbara Walters, who died in 2022, is due to be sold at Bonhams auction house this week. Walters, who has been described as a “trailblazer who reshaped the media landscape, breaking barriers for women in journalism” lived on New York’s Upper East Side in a house which was listed for sale earlier this year for $19.75 million. She was the first female co-host of a US network news programme (NBC’s Today morning show) and subsequently the first female evening news anchor in America. But she is best remembered for the high-profile interviews she did of politicians, cultural figures, world leaders, and royalty, from Katharine Hepburn and Elizabeth Taylor, to Saddam Hussein, Fidel Castro, and every American President and First Lady from Richard and Pat Nixon to Barack and Michelle Obama.
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A new exhibition has opened at the Casa Buonarroti in Florence, the former home of the famed Italian Renaissance artist Michelangelo, which was converted into a museum by his nephew, Michelangelo Buonarroti the Younger. The exhibition is titled ‘Artemisia in the Museum of Michelangelo’ and celebrates the work of the Baroque artist Artemisia Gentileschi.
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Archaeologists have unearthed a 2,700-year-old headless Assyrian sculpture at the site of the ancient city of Khursbad in northern Iraq. It was first discovered in 1992 but was quickly reburied to protect it against looters.
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Glasgow museums admitted that a £3million sculpture by the eminent French sculptor Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) has been missing for nearly 75 years. Comité Rodin in Paris described the loss as “utterly shameful“, after museum staff were unable to locate the sculpture.
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The Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA) in Ohio is suing the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office over the ownership of an ancient bronze statue valued at $20 million (£16.5 million). Government officials seized the impressive piece in August following allegations that it had been looted from Turkey.
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