An exhibition of art inspired by Michael Jackson opened Tuesday in Helsinki with organisers insisting it was not a “celebration” of the singer, still dogged by abuse allegations a decade after his death. “Michael Jackson: On the Wall” brings together old and new works depicting the iconic pop star and his impact on popular culture, by artists including Andy Warhol, American photographer David LaChapelle and British potter Grayson Perry. The show of 90 works first hung in London’s National Portrait Gallery in 2018 to widespread critical acclaim. It then toured in Paris and Bonn before coming to Helsinki. The German and Finnish shows come after a new raft of allegations that Jackson groomed and sexually assaulted children, detailed in the 2018 documentary “Finding Neverland”. The exhibition will nevertheless run in the Finnish capital “as planned”, organisers said, with a text at the entrance acknowledging that “current conversations may have changed the way the exhibition is interprete

The Dallas Museum of Art’s Second Floor European art galleries re-opened to the public on August 17 after closing earlier this summer for a total reinstallation. Visitors can look forward to a fresh interpretation of the Museum’s European collection, featuring works from the collection rarely previously shown that have been restored for exhibition, a new presentation of Old Master paintings and sculpture, and Impressionist and Modern masterworks gifted by Margaret and Eugene McDermott to benefit the DMA. The final bequest of 32 nineteenth- and early twentieth-century artworks to the Museum following Mrs. McDermott’s death last May prompted the reinstallation of the European art collection to integrate the McDermotts’ magnificent gift. Strengths of the McDermott Collection, such as works by Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Edvard Munch, Pablo Picasso, and Georges Braque, amongst many othe

The fossilised remains of a huge penguin almost the size of an adult human have been found in New Zealand’s South Island, scientists announced Wednesday. The giant waddling sea bird stood 1.6 metres (63 inches) high and weighed 80 kilograms, about four times heavier and 40cm taller than the modern Emperor penguin, researchers said. Named “crossvallia waiparensis”, it hunted off New Zealand’s coast in the Paleocene era, 66-56 million years ago. An amateur fossil hunter found leg bones belonging to the bird last year and it was confirmed as a new species in research published this week in “Alcheringa: An Australasian Journal of Palaeontology”.

After holding an exhibition devoted to Marc Chagall, the Hôtel de Caumont Art Centre is presenting masterpieces from the Justin K. Thannhauser Collection, bequeathed in 1963 to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in New York. For the first time, around fifty major works from this prestigious collection are being presented in Europe in an itinerant exhibition that began in the Guggenheim Bilbao Museum: paintings and sculptures by the masters of Impressionism and post- Impressionism, as well as the major figures of modern art, from Manet to Picasso, and Degas, Gauguin, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Braque, and Matisse. Justin K. Thannhauser (1892–1976), a leading figure in the dissemination of European modern art, was the sponsor, friend, and promoter of innovative artists who transformed Western art at the end of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. In his youth, he helped his father, Heinrich Th