How a Historian Got Close, Maybe Too Close, to a Nazi Thief

By the late 1990s, most of the Nazi art experts who helped loot European Jews were either dead or living quiet lives under the radar. Not so Bruno Lohse, who served as the art agent to the Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring,…

Show Me the Monet: Banksy painting sells for £7.5m at auction – video

  Banksy’s reimagining of Claude Monet’s impressionist water lilies has fetched more than £7.5m at auction, easily surpassing expectations. Show Me the Monet was created in 2005 and adds abandoned shopping trolleys and a traffic cone to the famous garden…

Painting of Poetic Commerce

The global pandemic has only magnified an existing loneliness epidemic. It didn’t create it. Yes, loneliness was an epidemic during the time we now refer to as “before” (like the pre-apocalypse world in a work of science fiction.) Even though we have…

Qi Baishi paintings worth £15k ‘bound for student flat’

Three Chinese watercolours which were bound for a student flat have been valued at £15,000. The paintings by Qi Baishi were found by auctioneers valuing the contents of a family home in Staffordshire. They had been bought in the 1950s…

Leonardo da Vinci and the mystery of the world’s most expensive painting

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…

Take a look at the world’s largest painting

Upon its completion next month, the 1,980-square-meter artwork will be cut into 60 pieces, which painter Sacha Jafri is auctioning off in the hope of raising $30 million for charity. Source: http://www.theprogressnews.com/news/nation/take-a-look-at-the-worlds-largest-painting-on-canvas/video_a61332f6-50dc-5925-b89b-bfa5d01c5772.html

Historical painting in the City Hall of Leuven: A reminder of collective trauma

Despite its famed university and openness to the freedom of thought and research, Leuven was not spared the inquisition during the Spanish rule of the Low Countries in the 16th century. The inquisition persecuted not only Jews and heretics but…

Forget FaceApp — now you can turn your selfie into a classical painting

The dust hasn’t quite settled from the FaceApp privacy debacle and yet a new selfie-alteration trend could be on the rise. AI Portrait Ars was built by researchers at the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab and it can turn your selfie into a museum-worthy classical…

Painting bought by Saudi Crown Prince for $ 450 million found to be fake

A painting believed to have been bought on behalf of Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman two years ago for a staggering 450 million dollars is now said to have been a fake. The painting is attributed to Italian…