Israeli archaeologists on Tuesday unveiled what they said was a major pottery plant which produced wine storage jars continuously from Roman to Byzantine times. The Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) said that excavations near the town of Gedera, south of Tel Aviv, revealed the factory and an adjacent leisure complex of 20 bathing pools and a room used for board games. Excavation director Alla Nagorsky told journalists at the site that from the third century AD the plant produced vessels of a type known to historians as “Gaza” jars for an unbroken period of 600 years. “This kind of a place is not built in an instant,” she said. “An engineer worked on it. The site is very designed.” An IAA statement added that the jars’ main function was storage and shipment of wine, which was a flourishing local industry at the time, with large-scale exports. “The

This summer, Tate Modern will explore the art of the Weimar Republic (1919-33) in a year-long, free display, drawing upon the rich holdings of The George Economou Collection. This presentation of around seventy paintings and works on paper will address the complex paradoxes of the Weimar era, in which liberalisation and anti-militarism flourished in tandem with political and economic uncertainty. These loans offer a rare opportunity to view a range of artworks not ordinarily on public display – some of which have never been seen in the United Kingdom before – and to see a selection of key Tate works returned to the context in which they were originally created and exhibited nearly one hundred years ago. Although the term ‘magic realism’ is today commonly associated with the literature of Latin America, it was inherited from the artist and critic Franz Roh who invented it in 1925 to describe a shift from the anxio

When Tosya Gharibyan asked her husband to dig a basement under their house to store potatoes, she had little idea the underground labyrinth he would eventually produce would prove to be one of Armenia’s major tourist draws. Their one-storey house in the village of Arinj outside the capital Yerevan may not look like much but today it brings in visitors from all over the globe after a 23-year labour of love by Tosya’s late husband, Levon Arakelyan. They come to see a twisting network of subterranean caves and tunnels known as “Levon’s divine underground.” In the cold and quiet, Tosya leads tourists through corridors that connect seven chambers adorned with Romanesque columns and ornaments like those on the facades of mediaeval Armenian churches. “Once he started digging, it was impossible to stop him,” she said of the project that began in 1995. “I wrangled with him a lot, but he became obsessed with his plan.” A builder by training, Levon wou

The Neue Galerie New York is presenting “Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele: 1918 Centenary.” The exhibition marks the 100th anniversary of the passing of two of the greatest Austrian artists of the twentieth century. Although born nearly thirty years apart, Gustav Klimt (1862-1918) and Egon Schiele (1890-1918) both tragically died in 1918—the same year that the Austro-Hungarian Empire ceased to exist following its defeat in World War I. Over the intervening century, the works of Klimt and Schiele have come to define the fertile creativity that marked the so-called “joyous apocalypse,” a term used to connote the waning days of Habsburg rule. This show pays tribute to the groundbreaking achievements of Klimt and Schiele, two masterful artists who are key figures in the collection of the Neue Galerie New York. Among the masterworks by Klimt in the exhibition are Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907), Park at Kammer Castle