Arts news

• Mona Lisa to be placed in private room as part of sweeping Louvre renovation

  28-01-2025 18:09
  The French president, Emmanuel Macron, also announced a ‘new grand entrance’, funded by the museum’s own resourcesThe Mona Lisa, the world’s most famous portrait, is to get a room of its own in the Louvre, as the world’s most visited museum undergoes major new renovation after its director warned that visiting the overcrowded building had become a “physical ordeal”.Delivering a speech in front of Leonardo da Vinci’s 16th century masterpiece, the Fr
  
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• Mona Lisa to be given ‘special space’ in renovated Louvre, says Emmanuel Macron

  28-01-2025 18:09
  
  President announced plans for new entrance to ease crowding and a separate gallery for Leonardo’s masterpieceLeonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece, the Mona Lisa, is to be given its own “special space” within the Louvre, Emmanuel Macron has said, as he unveiled a plan to renovate the world’s most visited museum.Standing in front of the painting on Tuesday, the French president said the artwork would be moved to a location “independently accessible compared to the re
  
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• Peter Davies obituary

  28-01-2025 16:20
  
  My colleague Peter Davies, who has died aged 80, was an artist, arts administrator and latterly professor at the University of Sunderland. He raised the profile of visual arts in the north of England and also championed Welsh identity – especially through the Beca group of artists he and others formed in the 1970s with his brother, Paul.Between 1974 and 1992 Peter was visual arts officer for the public body Northern Arts, where his greatest successes included establishing the first forest
  
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• ‘African art is not a fleeting trend’: Moroccan museum to celebrate rich creativity of continent’s artists

  28-01-2025 12:39
  
  Reopening after renovation, the Museum of African Contemporary Art Al Maaden will provide a permanent home for the extensive Lazraq family collectionFor more than four decades, the Lazraq family in Morocco has been amassing an extraordinary collection of modern and contemporary African art. One of the most comprehensive private holdings on the continent, it has mostly remained unseen, tucked away in vaults. But from next month, the collection will have a new permanent presence at the Museum of A
  
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• ‘Abnormal art is the only good art’: how Flávio de Carvalho sparked a Brazilian revolution

  28-01-2025 09:00
  
  He donned a skirt to shock his conservative countrymen – and got bundled into a police station for his own protection. As his work appears in the Royal Academy’s Brasil! Brasil! show, we celebrate a luminary of modernismIn 1931, as the Corpus Christi parade made its way through central São Paulo, the Catholic faithful found a tall man walking in the opposite direction. As he went, Flávio de Carvalho flirted with the men, and refused all calls for him to cease his disrup
  
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