Archaeology · The East · Observations · Science · Society · Humour
By right of the first. When political regimes justify their claims to some territory by length of tenure, one can always object that somebody other than them was there first. And somebody other than those first ones. And than them, too. If one is so inclined, one may go all
Architecture · Heritage · Saint Petersburg
At Saint Petersburg's House of Radio, the restoration of the grand antechamber has been completed. The method chosen here is rather unusual: not a return to a single era, but a combination of different historical layers: pre-revolutionary, Soviet, perestroika-era and contemporary. Coffered ceilings, Pompeian-style murals,
Art · Moscow · Observations · Society Pages
Shift Gallery has opened a new space at 5c1 Petrovsky Boulevard. In a season when the news pours out nothing but closures, it is pleasant to see that the young and bold are, for a change, opening things and reopening them. The first exhibition is called "Under Observation"
Coming Up · Art · Museums · New York
MoMA announces "Mondrian Boogie Woogie", running from 21 March to 31 July 2027 and the first survey of Piet Mondrian's New York works. A Dutchman, one of the pioneers of abstraction and co-founder of De Stijl, the international association for non-representational art, Mondrian fled
Art · Cinema · Heritage · New York · Society
Gustav Klimt painted "Portrait of Fräulein Lieser" in 1917 and had not finished it when he died in 1918. The commission came from the wealthy Viennese Jewish Lieser family. For nearly a century the picture was known only from a black-and-white photograph of 1925: it vanished
Archaeology · Museums · Heritage
In January 2025 three robbers blew open a door of the Drents Museum in Assen in the Netherlands and made off with the golden helmet of Coțofenești and three bracelets. All the objects had been lent to the museum by Romania for the exhibition “Dacia: Empire of Gold and Silver”
Archive · Observations · Science
Saw this photograph of the stallion Belyi from the 1880s and became curious about the "salted paper" or "salt paper" technique in which it was made. Salted paper is the earliest method of positive photographic printing on paper, invented by William Henry Fox Talbot at the
London · Museums · Heritage · Society
Historically, the tapestry (in essence a piece of linen embroidery almost 70 metres long) has been kept in the Norman town of Bayeux as a monument to the Norman conquest of England. The other day a French court permitted the temporary transportation of this fragile relic to Great Britain, despite
Listings · Moscow · Coming Up · Faith · Art · Museums
The Annunciation is the earliest good news in European culture, a message that came true in the flesh. This week, five exhibitions on a promise and its fate: an image made flesh, sketches for a church that was never built, a colossus shown through the most fragile of materials, and
Art · Society · Paris
The Paris police judged the nudes displayed in the window indecent and closed the show. That is to say, the exhibition was quite literally shut down on account of this very painting. Sotheby's is offering it with an estimate of around 60 million dollars
Art · Moscow · Museums
In 1920 Marc Chagall painted the auditorium of the State Jewish Chamber Theatre, the future GOSET. The central canvas, "Introduction to the Jewish Theatre" (canvas, tempera, gouache, 284 by 787 cm), occupied the main wall. Beside it came "Love on the Stage", the frieze "The
Archive · Art · Books · Museums · Science
After Leonardo da Vinci's death, his manuscripts first passed to his last pupil, Francesco Melzi. But years later Melzi's children decided to sell the da Vinci archives, and they were acquired by the Tuscan sculptor Pompeo Leoni. Leoni reassembled part of the notebooks, unstitched the quires,