An Italian altarpiece has gone on display for the first time in more than 100 years, following a 7-year conservation treatment – one of the longest and most complex in the history of the National Gallery. The Virgin and Child with Saints is one of the major surviving painted altarpieces by the Italian Renaissance painter and sculptor, Giovanni Martini da Udine (c.1470–1535). Most of his career was spent in Friuli, north of Venice. The picture was painted on a wooden panel, which is very reactive to changes in humidity and climate. As a result, the altarpiece had already undergone several major structural changes before the Gallery acquired it in 1867.When it entered the Collection, the wood was conserved using a technique called cradling, which was the best practice at this time. Although this work was done with the best of intentions, it ultimately made the altarpiece even more fragile. In 2011, the National G

ARTIST ROOMS: Ed Ruscha, the latest in the series of annual free displays in the dedicated ARTIST ROOMS gallery in Tate Modern’s Blavatnik building, opens to the public on 26 July 2019 and will run until Spring 2020. It will feature works spanning the entirety of Ruscha’s six-decade career, including large text-based paintings and his iconic photographic series. Also featured is a comprehensive display of Ruscha’s artist’s books, including Various Small Fires 1964 and Every Building on the Sunset Strip 1966, as well as some 40 works on paper gifted to Tate for ARTIST ROOMS by the artist following his 2015 promise to donate all future prints he makes to the national collection. This builds on the spectacular generosity of Ruscha’s gift of his painting The Music from the Balconies 1984 to the ARTIST ROOMS collection in 2009. American artist Ed Ruscha (b.1937) is well known for his depiction of isolated words and phrases, often superimp

Berlin’s Lotte Laserstein (1898–1993) was one of the most sensitive portrait painters of the early Modernist period when tradition vied with innovation. Already at the age of 30 years she was a well-known and successful artist. We live in a period marked by rediscoveries of artists whose careers were cut short, often brutally, by the turmoil of the 20th century, the age of extremes. And realism is on the way back. For several decades it was quite rightly a valid response to reject grandiose feudal self-projections, old chestnuts about the meaning of beauty and realism in the classical vein. The art of a new society order called for experiments and exploring of new perspectives. Now the art world is finding that contrasts between form and formlessness, between the figurative and conceptual symbolism, can once again broaden and enrich perception. Lotte Laserstein had a talent for combining two universes. She played with quotes from art history but also with hallmarks of Post-Im

While connoisseurs for decades have recognized the importance of antique tribal rugs woven in the Caucasus Mountains, these carpets are increasingly being added to private collections as the art world in general has come to appreciate their unique portrayal of nature and the cosmos. Bordering Iran to the North, the Caucasus Mountains are among the most formidable landscapes in the world. Stretching 400 miles, they contain a dozen peaks higher than the highest in the Alps. Inhabited by approximately 350 tribes, linguists suggest that there may have been as many as over 150 distinct languages spoken in the region.