The Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University presents Lines of Inquiry: Learning from Rembrandt’s Etchings, on view from September 23 to December 17, 2017. Jointly organized by the Johnson with the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College, the exhibition was cocurated by Andrew C. Weislogel, Seymour R. Askin, Jr. ’47 Curator of Earlier European and American Art at the Johnson, and Andaleeb Badiee Banta, curator of European and American art at the Allen. The exhibition will be on view at Oberlin February 6 to May 13, 2018. “The show highlights a unique collaboration,” said Stephanie Wiles, the Richard J. Schwartz Director of the Johnson Museum. “Both of our museums have strong holdings of Rembrandt etchings. We saw an opportunity to bring them together with works of the highest quality in multiple states, mainly from other academic collections, to consider them as inspiring tools for rese

A 1,000-year-old bowl from China’s Song Dynasty sold for US$37.7 million in Hong Kong on Tuesday, breaking the record for Chinese ceramics, auction house Sotheby’s said. The small piece — which dates from 960-1127 — stole the previous record of $36.05 million set in 2014 for a Ming Dynasty wine cup which was snapped up by a Shanghai tycoon famous for making eye-watering bids. The person behind Tuesday’s winning offer wished to remain anonymous, Sotheby’s said, with the auction house declining to say whether the buyer hailed from the Chinese mainland or not. “It’s a totally new benchmark for Chinese ceramics and we’ve made history with this piece today,” Nicolas Chow, deputy chairman of Sotheby’s Asia, told reporters. Bidding started at around US$10.2 million with the suspense-filled auction lasting some 20 minutes as a handful of phone bidders and one person in the room itself competed with each other. The winning offer eventually came from one of the phone bidders and was received b

This autumn, one of the most celebrated paintings in the National Gallery, Jan van Eyck’s The Arnolfini Portrait, is being exhibited for the first time alongside works by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and its successors. Focusing on the profound influence this 15th-century masterpiece had on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Reflections sheds light on the different ways these young British artists of the 19th century responded to the painting and one of its most distinctive features, the convex mirror. Featuring key loans from Tate’s Pre-Raphaelite collection, including Sir John Everett Millais’s ‘Mariana’ (1851), Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s ‘The Girlhood of Mary Virgin’ (1848–9), William Holman Hunt’s ‘The Awakening Conscience’ (1853), and William Morris’s ‘La Belle Iseult’ (1858), the only completed easel painting he produced, this landmark exhibition provides a

Together with Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, Raphael completes the triumvirate of Italian Renaissance artists. Moreover, the world-famous drawings of this prematurely deceased master (1483–1520) make him one of art history’s great draftsmen. The Albertina Museum is now paying tribute to Raphael with a major exhibition of 150 paintings and drawings. Starting from the Albertina Museum’s own significant holdings and rounded out by the most beautiful and important drawings from prominent museums such as the Uffizi, the Royal Collection of the British Royal Family, the British Museum, the Louvre, the Vatican Museums, and the Ashmolean Museum, this monographic presentation places Raphael’s thinking and conceptual process front and center: featured works range from initial spontaneous artist’s impressions to virtuosic detail studies, compositional studies, and the completed paintings themselves.