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Museum shut due to coronavirus was unaware that 500-year-old Salvator Mundi had been missingItalian police has found a 500-year-old copy of Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi in a Naples flat and returned it to a museum that had no idea it had been stolen.Officers said late Monday they had arrested the 36-year-old owner of the flat on suspicion of receiving stolen goods, after the...

Pioneering Ndebele artist fears young people are losing a sense of their rootsOne of Africa’s best-known artists has made an impassioned appeal for governments and communities across the continent to preserve their traditions and culture in the face of globalisation.Esther Mahlangu, 85, said that she was worried young people in Africa were losing a sense of their roots. Continue reading...

Galleries are closed due to Covid – so a group of artists have taken to displaying their work from their houses for passersby. Our writer takes to the streetsIt is not a good time for art lovers. The second lockdown has closed galleries once more – I’m imagining portraits waiting moodily in the National Gallery in London to be admired again; Van Gogh’s sunflowers...

The artist, who worked with Warhol, befriended Basquiat and painted for Kanye, talks about making art during a tumultuous year and why he left New York CityThe New York City artist George Condo has become New York state artist George Condo, a surprising move for someone so intensely intertwined with the city’s culture. The Hamptons is his new normal, after he ditched Manhattan in...

Philip Guston depicted ‘the banality of evil’ but galleries in the UK and US fear his work could be misinterpretedFirst celebrated for his abstract art, Philip Guston bucked convention, moving into figurative painting that included a repeating motif of hooded Ku Klux Klan members. Now these images have caused the postponement of a major retrospective to honour him – and a heated row within...

Artist Annalee Davis was walking in fields once used for sugarcane in her Barbados homeland when she spotted unfamiliar plants. “I was taught to see them as weeds but now I understand their value offering biodiversity to exhausted land and their historical use in bush medicine.” Davis started pressing and using specially mixed Victorian paint to draw these plants on old plantation ledger pages....

Head of a Bearded Man revealed to be from same wood panel used for Rembrandt’s AndromedaA tiny painting of a weary, melancholic old man long rejected as a fake and consigned to a museum basement has been revealed as one from Rembrandt’s workshop, and possibly by the man himself.The Ashmolean museum in Oxford will this week put on display Head of a Bearded Man...

Romantic seascapes – with political message in washed up life jackets – raise funds for Bethlehem hospitalA Banksy triptych, which aims to make a powerful political statement on the global migrant crisis, sold for £2.2m at an auction in London that also featured works by Rembrandt, Picasso, and Bridget Riley.The three paintings were offered by Banksy to raise money for a hospital in Bethlehem....

French hillside scene in Tree Roots may have been painted hours before artist’s deathThe exact location from where Vincent van Gogh is likely to have painted his final masterpiece, perhaps just hours before his death, has been pinpointed with the help of a postcard.The scene in Tree Roots, a painting of trunks and roots growing on a hillside near the French village of Auvers-sur-Oise...

His grandparents had to sell their paintings for a pittance – and then were killed. Simon Goodman on why the recovery of one means so muchA masterpiece by the Italian Renaissance artist Paolo Uccello, which disappeared after the Nazis forced its owner to sell it for a pittance before sending him and his wife to their deaths, is to be sold this week after...

As lockdown restrictions continue to ease, Guardian readers tell us what pastimes and skills they’ve discovered – and rediscovered – during the pandemic During lockdown, my husband and I have taken daily walks in the countryside that have kept us sane and given us a break from the monotony of confinement. Along the way, I have collected stones to paint. Looking for ways to...

Immaculate Conception painting by Murillo reportedly cleaned by furniture restorerConservation experts in Spain have called for a tightening of the laws covering restoration work after a copy of a famous painting by the baroque artist Bartolomé Esteban Murillo became the latest in a long line of artworks to suffer a damaging and disfiguring repair.A private art collector in Valencia was reportedly charged €1,200 by...

Although offering insights into the artist’s technique, gallery has yet to solve Vermeer’s biggest mysteryA major research project into one of the world’s most popular and captivating paintings has revealed new secrets but the most tantalising question remains: just who was the girl with a pearl earring?Researchers at the Mauritshuis gallery in The Hague on Tuesday revealed the results of extensive investigations into its...

Thieves have stolen the £5m Parsonage Garden at Neunen in Spring by the famous artist from the Singer Laren museumA painting by Vincent van Gogh with an estimated value of up to £5m has been stolen from a Dutch museum currently closed due to the coronavirus pandemic.The thieves took Van Gogh’s Parsonage Garden at Neunen in Spring after smashing through the front glass door...

True identity of sitter found to be 17th-century lord mayor of London, and not French princeA colossal portrait long thought to be of France’s Grand Dauphin that hung for a century in a corridor of the central bank in Paris has been revealed to be British.The true identity of the sitter, with elaborate regalia and pearl-mounted sword, is not the son of Louis XIV...

Pointillist works by Pissarro and Signac returned to the family of a Jewish art collector are expected to raise millions at auctionThree neo-impressionist masterpieces that were looted by the Nazis from the homes of a Jewish collector during the German occupation of France are to be auctioned in London.The works by Camille Pissarro and Paul Signac, described by experts as “exceptional”, were recently handed...

Steve Lazarides was the art renegade’s strategist, photographer and minder. As his shots are published, he recalls the politics, parties and soaring price tags of ‘Matey Boy’One Christmas, Steve Lazarides and Banksy decided to kill Santa. “Reject false icons,” read the slogan hastily spray painted across their shopfront, behind a highly festive effigy they had created of Father Christmas dangling from a noose. Dotted...

Exclusive: Portrait of a Man (Léal Souvenir) will be among star items in Ghent exhibitionThe National Gallery in London is to make an exceptional loan of a painting by Jan van Eyck to a one-off exhibition celebrating the 15th-century Flemish master.Portrait of a Man (Léal Souvenir), one of the earliest dated works by the painter, will be among the star exhibits in Van Eyck...