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The New York Jewish Museum's exhibition: Afterlives: Recovering the Lost Stories of Looted Art traces the fascinating timelines of individual objects as they passed through hands and sites before, during, and after World War II, bringing forward their myriad stories. During World War II, untold numbers of artworks and pieces of cultural property were stolen by Nazi forces. After the war, an estimated one million artworks and 2.5 million books were recovered. Many more were destroyed. This exhibition chronicles the layered stories of the objects that survived, exploring the circumstances of their theft, their post-war rescue, and their afterlives in museums and private collections.
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Over the course of his iconic career, the artist known as Christo has navigated extraordinary logistics in order to wrap buildings and bridges in his signature colorful fabric. He and his wife Jeanne-Claude have battled Colorado ranchers, New York mayors, and the elements. But Paris’s famed war memorial, the Arc de Triomphe, proved another matter entirely. Before opening “L’Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped” on Sept. 18, Christo had to deal with delays spurred by birds nesting in the monument and a global pandemic. Then, the artist himself died in May. The artist’s team said they felt compelled to push on.
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Neanderthals may have been closer to our species of prehistoric modern human than previously believed after cave paintings found in Ardales, Spain proved they had a fondness for creating art, one of the authors of a new scientific report explained. Red ochre pigment discovered on stalagmites in the Caves of Ardales, near Malaga in southern Spain, were created by Neanderthals about 65,000 years ago, making them possibly the first artists on earth, according to the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) journal. Modern humans were not inhabiting the world at the time the cave images were made.
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A new museum houses the works of the renowned kinetic artist born in 1928 in what is now Israel’s fourth-largest city. A museum dedicated to the colorful works of world-renowned kinetic artist Yaacov Agam opened its doors in 2018 in Rishon LeZion, the birthplace of the 89-year-old artist whose career has spanned 65 years. The 3,200-square-meter Yaacov Agam Museum of Art (YAMA), surrounded by a sculpture garden, was designed by architect David Nofar and built by the Menorah Group.
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Shahab-ud-din Muhammad Khurram (January 5, 1592 - July 31, 1658) was born in Lahore, in modern-day Pakistan, and was the third son of Prince Salim (later known as 'Jahangir'). His mother was a Rajput princess from Marwar called Princess Jagat Gosaini. The name "Khurram" (joyous) was chosen for the young prince by his grandfather, Emperor Akbar, with whom the young prince shared a close relationship Evidence from the reign of Shah Jahan states that in 1648 the army consisted of 911,400 infantry, musketeers, and artillery men, and 185,000 Sowars commanded by princes and nobles. His cultural and political initial steps have been described as a type of the Timurid Renaissance, in which he built historical and political bonds with his Timurid heritage mainly via his numerous unsuccessful military campaigns on his ancestral region of Balkh. In various forms, Shah Jahan appropriated his Timurid background and grafted it onto his imperial legacy.
