One of Lucian Freud’s last great nudes, Portrait on a White Cover sold hours ago in Sotheby’s London’s saleroom for £22.5million / $29.8 million, making it the most valuable painting by the artist ever sold in London. The previous highest price for a London auction of the artist’s work was £16.1 million set by Pregnant Girl at Sotheby’s in February 2016. A late masterpiece, Portrait on a White Cover, painted when the artist was 80 years old, represents the culmination of Freud’s lifelong engagement with the reclining nude. Alongside the self-portrait, the reclining nude was the defining leitmotif of Freud’s career. Across sixty years of painting, innumerable mutations of painterly style, and a multitude of sitters, he returned to this challenging subject time and again. Portrait on a White Cover sits at the pinnacle of this endeavour. Portrait on a White Cover depicts Sophie Lawrence, who worked fo

A Berlin museum Monday said it had formally restituted a 15th century religious wooden sculpture to the heirs of former owners, a Jewish couple who fled the Nazi regime. The heirs in turn agreed to sell back the medieval artifact, “Three Angels with the Christ Child”, at an undisclosed price to the Bode Museum, which will keep it in its collection. The agreement meant “righting an injustice”, said the head of Berlin’s public museums, Michael Eissenhauer, who thanked the heirs for the “grand gesture” that will keep the priceless piece on public display. The delicately carved 25 centimetre (10 inch) tall sculpture from around 1430 shows three floating angels in the clouds holding a cloth on which lies the sleeping infant Jesus. It once belonged to the private collection of Ernst Saulmann, a Jewish industrialist, and his wife Agathe, an architect’s daugh

The Giacometti Foundation, Paris opened a new permanent space dedicated to exhibitions, as well as art history research and pedagogy. Directed by Catherine Grenier, director of the Giacometti Foundation since 2014, the Giacometti Institute aims to provide new perspectives on the artist’s work and on the creative period in which it emerged. With nearly 350 sculptures, 90 paintings, over 2 000 drawings and an equally significant collection of etchings, as well as decorative art objects, the Giacometti Foundation possesses the most richly diverse collection of Alberto Giacometti’s works in the world: a collection which it is responsible for preserving, restoring, and enhancing. The Foundation also has a remarkable archive and photography collection at its disposal, along with a reference library on modern art. This invaluable heritage has remained partly inaccessible to the public since the artist’s death