On Friday, November 8 Rago brings to auction a significant collection of over 100 paintings, sculptures, mixed-media, and works on paper from the estate of art dealer and pioneering supporter of Abstract Expressionism, Allan Stone. Over the course of 50 years, Allan Stone amassed a vast art collection of exceptional depth and diversity. A self-proclaimed ‘art-junkie’, Stone was driven by passion and by an unerring eye. He acquired works that spoke to him regardless of trends or differing opinions. The Allan Stone Gallery, founded in 1960, was famous for welcoming artists into its fold whom other dealers had turned away, including Wayne Thiebaud and Richard Estes. A proponent of young talent, Stone is credited with giving many emerging artists their start. He was instrumental in the early careers of Eva Hesse, Jack Whitten, James Grashow and Lorraine Shemesh, among many others

Sofonisba Anguissola and Lavinia Fontana trained in Cremona and Bologna respectively; two geographically close artistic centres but ones characterised by their particular artistic, social and cultural traditions. They came from different types of families and had different lives although in both cases the role of their fathers had a fundamental influence on their careers. Both were able to overcome the stereotypes that society assigned to women in relation to artistic practice and the deep-rooted scepticism regarding their creative and artistic powers. As a result, they made use of painting to achieve a significant position in the society in which they lived. One of six daughters, Sofonisba Anguissola was born into a family of the minor nobility in Cremona. Painting offered her the chance to achieve a social position appropriate to her family, the Anguissola-Ponzonis. Her abilities and personality combined with her father’s promotional skills led her to become a celebrated woman a

To judge by the marketing hullabaloo, the Leonardo da Vinci retrospective that opens here Thursday at the Louvre should be the visual equivalent of a 21-gun salute and a trumpet-and-trombone choir. Blockbuster’s plastered all over it, and rightly so. Timed-ticket sales for its one-stop run are moving right along. But the marvelous show you actually see, honoring the 500th anniversary of Leonardo’s death, is, tonally, some other thing: quieter, slower, better. It’s a succession of major painterly melodies set among ink-drawn pre-echoes and reverbs. It’s a confluence of presences and absences — art that’s there and some that’s not — both equally potent. And it’s a biographical vapor trail of a talent who has been used as a romantic model of what a great artist should be — large-gestured, face-to-the-sunrise — but who largely departed from that ideal, who identified himself above all as a science wonk, who spent as much time writing a

Some 66 million years ago, mammals caught their lucky break. An asteroid crashed into what is now Chicxulub, Mexico, and set off a catastrophic chain of events that led to the annihilation of nonavian dinosaurs. That day began their furry ascension to the top of a brave new world, the one from which our species would one day emerge. But little is known about the time period directly after the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction, or K-Pg event, because the fossil record is lacking. Now, a team of paleontologists has uncovered a trove of thousands of fossils in Colorado that provides an in-depth look at the first 1 million years following the K-Pg mass extinction event. The finding provides insight into the interactions between animals, plants and climate that occurred in the earliest days of the age of mammals, and that allowed them to grow from the size of large rodents into diverse wildlife we might begin to recognize today. “We provide the most vivid picture of recovery of an ecosys