An 18th-century Chinese vase forgotten for decades in a shoe box in a French attic sold for 16.2 million euros ($19 million) at Sotheby’s in Paris on Tuesday — more than 30 times the estimate. Experts at the auction house said the exquisite porcelain vessel was made for the Qing dynasty Emperor Qianlong and had set a guide price of a much more modest 500,000 euros. “This is a major work of art, it is as if we had just discovered a Caravaggio,” Olivier Valmier, the Asian arts expert at the auction house, told reporters before the sale. The vase, which was in perfect condition, “is the only known example in the world bearing such detail,” he added. Rare porcelain from the Qian period has been going for astronomical prices recently. A bowl made for Qianlong’s grandfather sold last April by Sotheby’s in Hong Kong went for $30.4 million dollars.

In The Music of Color, the Kunstmuseum Basel mounts the American artist Sam Gilliam’s (b. 1933) first institutional solo exhibition in Europe. The international team of curators has chosen to focus on the years between 1967 and 1973, the period of greatest creative radicalism in Gilliam’s oeuvre; in 1972, he was the first African-American to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale. A focused selection of forty-five works from international private and public collections introduces visitors to the unique art of an influential painter who is still largely unknown to European audiences. The exhibition also opens up fresh perspectives on the history of abstract painting in the 1960s and 1970s. Often monumental and colorfully expressive, Sam Gilliam’s works mount a creative challenge to the traditional boundaries between painting, sculpture, and architecture and prompt a fruitful artistic and theoretical

Infrared imaging technology has helped peel back the layers of a Pablo Picasso painting on display in Japan, and revealed a page from a 1902 newspaper and another composition below. US and Japanese researchers scanned the piece “Mother and Child by the Sea”, owned by the Pola Museum of Art in Hakone, west of Tokyo, and uncovered a page of the French newspaper Le Journal from January 18, 1902. “While the reason for the presence of newsprint in the paint layers in a mystery, the discovery is significant for Picasso scholars due to the proximity of the date to the artist’s move from Paris to Barcelona,” said the Washington-based National Gallery of Art, whose researcher John Delaney led the project in Japan. Picasso is thought to have moved to the Spanish city in early January 1902, bringing a few canvasses with him, and the newspaper article revealed in the painting suggests the work was completed some time after his move.