Category: News

hen it comes to Japanese printmaking of the 19th century, Hiroshige and Hokusai have tended to dominate the conversation. But a third figure, Kawanabe Kyōsai, has begun to enter the public view outside Japan, thanks in part to a recently closed survey at London’s Royal Academy of Arts.

Notorious during his lifetime both for his art and for his eccentric personality, Kyōsai only lived to be 58, but during his short career, he managed to pioneer the art of manga. Prolific and profound, he left an enduring legacy of paintings, caricatures, sketches, illustrated books and prints, many of which can be found in the Israel Goldman collection that formed the basis of the Royal Academy show.
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What if you didn’t have to wait for European and American museums to repatriate African artifacts? Mulling this question, Chidi Nwaubani, the founder of NFT project Looty, decided to take matters into his own hands with his project Looty, which bills itself as a “digital restitution project.”
“Our ‘Looters’ [anonymous team members] go to the museums (physically) and take back the artworks (digitally),” a description on its website reads. To do so, the people behind the project take scans of works and create digital renderings that are then made into NFTs.
The Benin Bronzes, a group of thousands of artifacts looted from the Kingdom of Benin in 1897 by British troops, have been the subject of repatriations at museums across Europe and the U.S. lately. Six NFTs based on some of them are available for sale through Looty at a starting price of 0.99 ETH ($1,936).
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A group of artifacts from the collection of the Ethnological Museum of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation will be brought to Namibia as the conclusion of a transnational research project. The Berlin-based organization worked with the Museums Association of Namibia to determine the history and cultural significance of some 1,400 objects.
Of that lot, 23 of the most historically important pieces, including precious jewelry and pottery, will travel back to the Southwest African country for further research. In a statement, the foundation said that while this is not an official return, there are no plans for the artifacts to travel back to Germany.
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Excavated megasites in Moldova, Romania and Ukraine reveal ancient cities shaped by advanced construction techniques and large populations.
“You know there is a book by Jules Verne called the Mysterious Island, where people find themselves on an island and begin to build a civilisation?” asked Mykhailo Videiko, an archaeologist at Borys Grinchenko Kyiv University in Ukraine. “But here it is not a fictional story,” he paused. “This is a real story.” Silenced twice, once by time and again by politics, the ancient civilisation of Cucuteni-Trypillia is once again finding voices to share its story.
The story of Trypillia, as it is commonly known, started 7,000 years ago in what is now Eastern Europe, primarily Moldova, Romania and Ukraine. Excavated settlements offer modern archaeologists one of the earliest known examples of urbanisation and suggest a population that exceeded one million people.
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Griffins, the unique mythological creatures with the head of an eagle and the body of a lion, were often mentioned in ancient Greek plays.
Also known as Gryps, Grypes, Gryphoi — γρύψ (singular) in ancient Greek — they symbolized strength and bravery.
Griffins were considered noble creatures that lived in the time of ancient Greece and other neighboring regions and protected the rich deposits of gold in the mountains of Scythia, today’s north-eastern Europe.
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Officials in Ukraine say that Russia has looted a number of museums and has removed valuable exhibits, including ancient Greek gold artifacts given by the Greeks to the Scythians.
The Scythians were a nomadic people that founded a rich, powerful empire centered in the Crimean Peninsula; the empire endured from around the eighth century B.C. to the second century A.D.
“Russia has taken hold of our Scythian gold,” declared Melitopol’s mayor, Ivan Fyodorov. “This is one of the largest and most expensive collections in Ukraine, and today we don’t know where they took it.”
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Ukrainian officials said Saturday that over 250 cultural institutions have been “damaged or destroyed” and thousands of artifacts looted since Russia launched its invasion on Feb. 24, per the New York Times.
The big picture: Among the items Putin’s forces are accused of stealing are ancient Scythian gold objects from “one of the largest and most expensive collections in Ukraine,” in the Russian-occupied Melitopol, Zaporizhzhia, said the southeastern city’s mayor, Ivan Fedorov.
The Scythian empire gold dated from the 4 century B.C. and was extracted by a man in a white coat with “long tweezers and special gloves,” who raided boxes stored in the cellar of a Melitopol museum, accompanied by a squad of armed Russian soldiers, the NYT reports.
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Benin President Patrice Talon to inaugurate exhibition of historic treasures returned by France last year, nearly 130 years after they were stolen by colonial forces. The 26 pieces, some considered sacred in Benin, will be displayed from Sunday in the presidential palace in Cotonou.
The return of artefacts by France comes as calls grow in Africa for Western countries to hand back colonial spoils from their museums and private collections.
Britain, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany have all received requests from African countries to return lost treasures.
The 26 pieces returned in November after two years of negotiations between Paris and Cotonou, were stolen in 1892 by French colonial forces from Abomey, capital of the former Dahomey kingdom located in south of modern-day Benin.
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The much-celebrated return of 26 treasures from the Kingdom of Dahomey has culminated in a month-long celebration of heritage and art at the Museum of the Marina in Cotonou, Benin, attracting large crowds.
“For other museum-goers, it’s a part of our ancestors’ souls that has returned. They don’t take photos,” he tells Africa Calling podcast.
“There are also some visitors who are totally angry when they realize these treasures have been stolen and kept for more than a century by people, to whom they did not belong,” he says referring to the return of the artifacts by the French.
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No amount of urging will get Daisy Wang Yuyou, deputy director of the new Hong Kong Palace Museum, to reveal anything about the 900 artworks and antiques coming from the Palace Museum, in Beijing’s Forbidden City.
Wang is one of only a few who know what the exhibits are going to be, when they will arrive, where they are now and how the museum in Hong Kong’s West Kowloon Cultural District can install everything in time for its planned July opening.
We have been told that next month, when the press are taken around the finished building with Rocco Yim Sen-kee, they will only see empty display cases. Yim is the architect behind the building beside Victoria Harbour, whose design is said to invoke the architectural and cultural essence of its Beijing namesake.
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APalestinian farmer working his land in Gaza has uncovered the head of a 4,500-year-old statue of Canaanite goddess Anat.
The head, which was unveiled to the public Tuesday, was found in Sheikh Hamouda in Khan Younis, Jamal Abu Rida, director of Gaza’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, said at a press conference.
“At first, I hoped to sell it to someone to make some money,” Nidal Abu Eid, the farmer, told The New Arab, “but an archaeologist told me that it was of great archaeological value.”
Staff at the ministry concluded that the head belonged to a statue of Anat, the goddess of love, beauty and war in Canaanite mythology, Rida said.
The Canaanites were an ancient pagan people whom the Bible says inhabited Jerusalem and other parts of the Middle East before the advent of monotheism.
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From prehistoric Bhimbetka cave paintings to works by contemporary art stars like Atul Dodiya and Shilpa Gupta, India has a rich cultural heritage dating back over 10,000 years.
So, it came as a surprise to one of the country’s leading collectors, the businessman and philanthropist Abhishek Poddar, that there was no single source of authoritative information on the subcontinent’s art history.
“I didn’t even realize that India didn’t have an encyclopedia for art. And it was quite shocking that, being one of the oldest cultures in the world, nobody had thought of doing it,” he said over the phone, adding: “Every kid knows about (Michelangelo’s) ‘David,’ the ‘Mona Lisa’ and Botticelli, but there are Indian masterpieces that even 1% of India doesn’t know about.”
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The Golden Horde, also known as the Ulus of Jochi, got its name from the color system for the cardinal directions (north, south, east, and west). North is associated with black, east with blue, south with red, west with white, and gold with center. After Genghis Khan’s death in 1227, the Mongol Empire was split into 4 regions, the Golden Horde being the western region. It was led my his oldest son, Juchi, and was succeeded by his son, Batu. Batu expanded the Golden Horde’s borders to the Carpathian Mountains, Siberia, the Black Sea, and the Caucasus Mountains. He also established its capital in the city of Sarai near the Volga River.
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The Museum of Fine Arts has announced plans to double the size of its space for Islamic art, with new galleries opening in early 2023. The expansion of the exhibition space is the result of a 15-year-long initiative carried out by the museum to increase its Islamic art holdings.

The new exhibition spaces, spanning 6,000 square feet, will be located in the museum’s Caroline Wiess Law Building. An outdoor space inspired by Islamic gardens will also be opened as part of the plan. The galleries will bring to display works spanning various mediums, from paintings, manuscripts, and ceramics to textiles and metalwork. The objects derive from regions throughout Europe, the Middle East, and Africa; their origins span 1,000 years.
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Joy Paul, 25, loves art. He loves history even more.

His fondness for sculptures, coins and deities was “effortless”, he says, though he suspects that Assassin’s Creed – a video game whose swashbuckling story lines revolve around pivotal moments in history – may have played a part.

So when he got accepted at Delhi College of Art – one of India’s most prestigious art schools – he had high hopes.

But the curriculum turned out to be a “blitzkrieg through centuries of art history with few introductions and half-hearted explanations”.

He was also upset with how dry his textbooks and reference materials were: “The writing was so archaic and unnecessarily complicated that it was hard even for a history geek like me.”

India has one of the world’s richest art histories, spanning centuries and a mélange of forms, styles and inspirations.
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In May, 2018, the Nigerian artist Jelili Atiku shouted for help in the lobby of the Musée d’Aquitaine, in Bordeaux. “I want to go home,” he cried. “Benin. Edo . . . Take me back home!” Dressed as a bronze warrior, with limbs bound and a British flag trailing at his heels, he mimed the desperation of an artifact trapped in the museum—which he fled stripped to the waist, revealing metallically painted skin. The performance dramatized Nigeria’s long-frustrated efforts to recover the Benin Bronzes, a collection of several thousand sculptures seized, in 1897, during the British sack of Benin City. Today, they’re dispersed among more than a hundred collections, with the greatest number kept at the British Museum.
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An Andy Warhol portrait of artist Jean-Michel Basquiat that’s expected to fetch more than $20 million at auction next month will be shown off by Christie’s at two Nets home games.

The 1982 Warhol work will hang in Brooklyn’s Barclays Center for two days during the Nets season opening games at a new VIP venue inside the arena called the Crown Club, on October 24th and 25th.

It’ll be the first time the portrait will be on view in New York since it was featured in the Whitney Museum’s Warhol retrospective “From A to B and Back Again” in 2019.
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Brooklyn-born and world-renowned artist Jean-Michel Basquiat is being remembered for his genius by those who knew him best–his family.

Opening Saturday, the “Jean-Michel Basquiat: King Pleasure” exhibition will span more than 15,000 square feet in Manhattan’s Starrett-Lehigh building and includes re-creations of Basquiat’s New York City studio, a nightclub, and rooms of his childhood home to give a glimpse of his life through the eyes of his friends and family.

With Haitian and Puerto Rican roots, his lived experiences fueled the creativity behind his works that mirrored social and cultural touch points in a striking and profound style that was and remains completely his own.
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Modern artists admired African sculpture for its formal qualities, but a new exhibition aims to recapture its moral and spiritual meaning.
For Pablo Picasso and other 20th-century European masters, African art was a revelation—innovative, sophisticated and to their eyes strikingly modern. They insisted that the continent’s creative output be regarded not as mere ethnographic material, but as art in its own right. That understanding of African art, based almost entirely on its formal qualities, is still current in much of the art world today. But modernist criteria don’t take into account the cultures that made these works, or how the people who used them assessed beauty and utility.
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