Gray Foy: the name may not be familiar today, but Foy was a gifted midcentury artist, tastemaker, and beloved fixture of New York cultural life. Six years after his death at 90, and over 40 years since he stopped creating art, Gray Foy (1922–2012) is the subject of a landmark exhibition and publication. These bring to light his prodigious talent as an artist and draftsman, one whose works may be found in major American museum collections including the Art Institute of Chicago; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others, and in numerous private collections. From the 1950s to the mid-1970s, Foy’s drawings were featured in gallery and museum exhibitions and his illustrations appeared in magazines and on book jackets and classical record album covers. This fall, Foy’s work is presented in Gray Foy: Drawings 1941–1975, a lavish book published on September 1, 2018, b

The private apartments of 18th-century Emperor Qianlong, one of the most renowned rulers in Chinese history, went on display in Athens Friday in a rare exhibition, organisers said. The exhibition at the Acropolis Museum showcases over 150 works of art, ceremonial robes and furniture from the Qing emperor’s private apartments in the Palace of Many Splendors at Beijing’s Forbidden City, where he spent his youth as a prince, and wrote poetry. These include Qianlong’s heated bed, his study, ritual dress, poetic texts, thrones, and theatrical costumes from private performances at the palace. “It is the largest Chinese exhibition ever hosted in Greece,” Acropolis museum director Dimitris Pantermalis said this week, adding that Qianlong’s rooms have never been displayed outside China.

A futuristic museum designed by Tokyo Olympic Stadium architect Kengo Kuma and featuring exterior concrete slabs in a hull shape was unveiled in Scotland on Wednesday. The £80 million (90 million euros, $104 million) Victoria & Albert Dundee sits on the banks of the River Tay. The original V&A in London, named after Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, is the world’s largest museum of decorative arts and design. The museum is the centrepiece of a £1 billion regeneration of Scotland’s fourth largest city, which has suffered years of economic decline. City leaders hope the museum will create a similar economic boost as the Guggenheim Bilbao, which opened in 1997 and took the Basque city from a tourist backwater to a major draw for aroun

It may be a symbol of the internet age but scientists in South Africa have found an ancient hashtag scrawled on a piece of rock that they believe is the world’s oldest “pencil” drawing. The design, which archaeologists say was created around 73,000 years ago, pre-dates previously identified abstract drawings from Africa, Europe and Southeast Asia by at least 30,000 years. It was found by researchers inside the Blombos Cave, around 300 kilometres (185 miles) east of Cape Town, a site that contains evidence of some of the earliest instances of what humans today would call culture. Previous expeditions to the cave found shell beads, engraved pieces of ochre and even tools manufactured from a rudimentary cement-like substance. Among the artefacts was a small flake of silicate rock, onto which a three-by-six line cross-hatched pattern had