NB! · Architecture · Moscow · Museums · Heritage
Lenin's study at the Lenin Museum-Estate at Gorki. The handsomeness of the furnishings owes everything to the fact that they survive from the estate's pre-revolutionary mistress, Zinaida Morozova, with the exception of the clothed office desk delivered specially for Ilyich
Archaeology · Architecture · Faith · The East · Art · Moscow · Museums · Heritage · Science · Paris · Nature · Saint Petersburg
Fet begged to “drive the living boat off with a single push”, to catch the fleeting before it vanishes. The monthly digest has a more modest task, though the same one: to hold on to what matters before the flood of news washes it away. Here is the main news
Art · Heritage · New York · Society
A couple of weeks ago the court ordered the present owner of the disputed painting, the art dealer David Nahmad, to return it to Stettiner's heirs. Now it has further ruled that the heirs are entitled to interest for the period preceding the judgment in the case of
Art · Museums · Observations · Heritage · Society
The vandals who tried to attach a propaganda photograph to Picasso's 1901 "Motherhood" and poured paint on the floor of the National Gallery have been found guilty of criminal damage. Sentence will be passed in the autumn. It is all, of course, very stupid and dreadful,
Archaeology · Architecture · Faith · The East · Heritage
Speaking of the Syro-Hittite Iron Age temple of Ain Dara in Syria, it is famous first and foremost not as the closest known architectural parallel to the biblical Temple of Solomon, though that is a fact, but for the gigantic footprints in its stone. The prints are a little
Archaeology · The East · Heritage · Society
Traditionally, looting at these places means pits dug by hand. But they are also plundered with bulldozers, destroyed by the building of dugouts and fortifications on their territory and, finally, by camps, including refugee tents, pitched directly on archaeological sites. Mechanised looting is considered the worst form of damage, and
Art · Museums · Heritage
Marc Chagall's 1924 etching L'Acrobate au violon spent twenty years in a French customs warehouse and has now been handed over to the Museum of Fine Arts and Archaeology in Besançon. In 2006 the French authorities stopped a lorry that was taking works of art out
Museums · Heritage · Paris
The robbed Galerie d'Apollon at the Louvre has reopened to the public. But since the robbery the hall has stood empty. The museum's new director, Christophe Leribault, has decided that whatever survived the robbery must be hidden away in a high-security vault. Well, not quite
Architecture · Art · Heritage · Society
Julio Escámez's mural "Beginning and End" was commissioned in 1969 for the ceremonial hall of the municipal building and took two years to complete. Its theme will be familiar to our own readers: the life of workers and peasants, oppression by the ruling classes, and the
Museums · Heritage · Society
An Italian national cross-sector trade union has declared an industrial dispute over the fact that working in Venice's museums has become dangerous. The apparent temperature outside reaches 40 degrees, while inside certain museums it has hovered around 30 for weeks on end. At the National Archaeological Museum,
Archaeology · Museums · Heritage · New York · Society
Art-crime specialist Erin Thompson has explained why dozens of American museums still hold antiquities bought from Ali Aboutaam, the Geneva dealer convicted of trafficking in cultural property. Aboutaam built a scheme of shell companies and forged provenances: a restorer scrubbed freshly excavated objects with a toothbrush in an old
Archaeology · The East · Heritage · Society
The vote will begin in Busan, South Korea, this Friday. The List of World Heritage in Danger is a separate status within the World Heritage register, to which are added sites threatened with destruction by war, natural disaster, development or neglect. The Director of the World Heritage Centre, Lazare Eloundou