2018 will begin at the National Galleries of Scotland, as it does every year, with a wonderful tradition: the opening of Turner in January, an exhibition of the outstanding collection of Turner watercolours bequeathed in 1900 by Henry Vaughan (1809-1899) and supported by players of People’s Postcode Lottery for the sixth year. The son of a London Quaker hat manufacturer, Vaughan inherited a fortune in 1828 and devoted his life to travel, philanthropy and amassing a rich and varied collection of fine and decorative art. His interests ranged from sculpture, Spanish clocks, ivories and bronzes to medieval stained glass, Old Master drawings and Rembrandt etchings, but he is best known as a collector of nineteenth-century British art, particularly Turner and Constable. Vaughan owned Constable’s The Hay-Wain for twenty years, which he presented to the National Gallery in London in 1886, and fifteen oil sketches by Cons

It’s the largest property crime in US history: the three-decade-old theft of Rembrandt and Vermeer masterpieces from a Boston museum by thieves disguised as police officers in the dead of night. But as the clock ticks toward midnight on New Year’s Eve, one detective sits patiently by the telephone and computer screen: could the next call or email finally lead to their recovery and the payout of a $10 million reward? “It’s hard to be confident. I’m very hopeful,” said Anthony Amore, director of security at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, who worked previously for Homeland Security and likens his role to that of a private detective. “One hundred percent of our focus is following up on leads we have received.” In May, the museum temporarily doubled to $10 million a long-standing reward for information leading to the recovery of all 13 works in good condition, hoping that a deadline of midnight on December 31, 2017 would concentrate minds.

Chagall—The Breakthrough Years, 1911–1919 brings Marc Chagall’s early oeuvre into focus. The exhibition was designed around the extraordinary ensemble of outstanding paintings by the French artist in the collections of the Kunstmuseum Basel and the Im Obersteg Foundation. Marc Chagall (1887–1985) found his way as an artist as his life was torn between two different worlds: his hometown of Vitebsk in Belorussia and Paris, where he lived between 1911 and 1914. The paintings he created during this period combine recollections of Russian provincial life with iconic fragments of the cosmopolitan French capital, incorporating reminiscences of Russian folk art as well as the most recent stylistic experiments he was exposed to through his acquaintance with many of the most progressive artists, including Pablo Picasso, Robert and Sonia Delaunay, and Jacques Lipchitz. Key works from the Paris years on display in the exhibition include

Two researchers in the Netherlands have raised doubts about a rare watercolour painting signed by Adolf Hitler, saying it appears more likely to be the work of a forger, a Dutch newspaper reported Wednesday. “It is very probably a fake Hitler” painting, Bart Droog and Jaap van den Born, both specialists in tracking imitations of Hitler’s artwork, told the daily De Volkskrant. The aquarelle — a technique of painting with thin transparent watercolours — depicting a tower in Vienna had been donated this year to the Amsterdam-based NIOD wartime institute by a woman whose identity was not revealed. The woman’s father originally bought the painting at a stamp and coin market for 75 cents and only realised when he got home that it was signed by “A. Hitler”, media reported in November when news of the donation became known. “After months of following an authentication process the… conclusion is: it’s an original from the hand of Adolf Hitler,” the NIOD said in a statement at the time, putt

The Guggenheim Museum is presenting Josef Albers in Mexico, an exhibition illuminating the relationship between the forms and design of pre-Columbian monuments and the art of Josef Albers (b. 1888, Bottrop, Germany; d. 1976, New Haven). The presentation features a selection of rarely shown early paintings, iconic canvases from Albers’s Homage to the Square and Variant/Adobe series, and works on paper. The exhibition also includes a rich selection of photographs and photocollages, many of which have never before been on view and were created by Albers in response to frequent visits to Mexican archaeological sites beginning in the 1930s. With letters, studies, and unseen personal photographs alongside works drawn from the collections of the Guggenheim Museum and the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Josef Albers in Mexico presents an opportunity to learn about the least known aspect of his practice, photography, offering a new