Arts news

• The Spoils director says film forces art world to confront ‘loaded issue’ of restitution

  10-11-2024 15:41
  
  Documentary shows the fight to recover paintings that Jewish art dealer was forced to sell by the NazisFrom the Benin bronzes to the Parthenon marbles, debates over the restitution of cultural artefacts are now a fact of life in an international art world forced to reckon with the often controversial history of its treasures.Museums around the world are having to consider implications of retaining items many argue were taken from their owners under persecution or duress. Continue reading...
  
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• Dreaming of a pint and a ‘girl’ back home: first world war soldier’s poignant sketches of life in the trenches

  10-11-2024 12:00
  
  Newly unearthed studies by young private Henry Page have been published to mark Remembrance Sunday“Wish I was at home for Christmas,” runs the chorus of Stop the Cavalry, the seasonal anti-war pop song, in a lyric that voices the dreams of serving soldiers down the ages. The same poignant sentiment is illustrated in the rediscovered drawings of the first world war trench artist and cartoonist Henry Page. But Page, who was a young private in the London Regiment, also wishes he could b
  
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• The week in art: Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael; Drawing the Italian Renaissance – review

  10-11-2024 10:30
  Royal Academy; King’s Gallery, London
  A trio of Renaissance masters look over each other’s shoulders in Florence 1504, while a parallel show of drawings from the Royal Collection gets to the very heart of their artIt’s 25 January 1504, and so cold in Florence that the Arno river is about to freeze over. Thirty men meet in an icy room to decide where to position a giant statue of a little hero somewhere outdoors in public view. Among them are Botticelli, Leonardo and Filippino L
  
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