A painting of heightened psychological intensity, Pablo Picasso’s Femme au béret et à la robe quadrillée (Marie-Thérèse Walter) brings to a climax a turbulent and highly charged year. The great masterpiece of his career Guernica was created in 1937, and in the final month of that momentous year he painted this vivid, poignant and intense image of his golden muse Marie-Thérèse Walter. This defining work will be offered for the first time as a star lot of Sotheby’s Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale in London on 28 February 2018. Helena Newman, Global Co-Head of Sotheby’s Impressionist & Modern Art Department & Chairman of Sotheby’s Europe, said: ‘With such a strong appetite for Picasso’s work from across the globe, this defining portrait from a pivotal year in the oeuvre of the most globally recognised artist is the perfect piece to headline our first major season of 2018. It is all the more remarka

New York will keep its famed but controversial statue of Christopher Columbus following a review of “symbols of hate,” as the United States debates tributes to figures whose legacies are increasingly questioned. Democratic Party Mayor Bill de Blasio ordered the 90-day review after deadly violence at a neo-Nazi rally in Virginia last August built nationwide momentum to remove symbols of the pro-slavery Civil War South. The commission recommended that just one of four statues on public land — that of a gynecologist who experimented on enslaved black women without anesthesia — be relocated from Central Park to a Brooklyn cemetery. A plaque dedicated to Philippe Petain, a World War I hero who later collaborated with the Nazis and lead Vichy France, would remain in place, the commission

The ruins of two buildings used to supervise mines in ancient Egypt more than 4,400 years ago have been discovered in the south, the antiquities ministry said on Thursday. The find was made by a US-Egyptian mission in the Tal Edfu area north of the city of Aswan. One building was from the era of the pharaoh Djedkare Isesi of the fifth dynasty which ruled Egypt more than 4,400 years ago, the ministry said. The other was constructed during the sixth dynasty which ruled between 2,323 BC and 2,135 BC. “The complex consists of two massive buildings containing many rooms and it is yet to be fully examined,” the antiquities ministry’s Ayman Ashmawy told AFP. “These buildings were used as administrative buildings for the mining teams which would head to the eastern desert to search for gold, copper and precious stones.”

A Basquiat masterpiece, bought by a Japanese billionaire for a record $110.5 million, will make its museum debut this month, going on display in the artist’s home borough of Brooklyn. Jean-Michel Basquiat’s 1982 “Untitled” has been virtually unseen in public and never previously been exhibited in a museum. It depicts a skull-like head in oil-stick, acrylic and spray paint, and was bought at Sotheby’s last May by Yusaku Maezawa. The $110.5 million price tag set a new auction record for Basquiat and a record for the work of any US artist at auction. “My wish to share this masterpiece with as many people as possible begins in Basquiat’s home town of Brooklyn,” Maezawa wrote on his Instagram account Thursday.