Portugal has seized a trove of contemporary artwork, including paintings by Joan Miro and Piet Mondrian, from its debt-riddled owner, the government said on Tuesday. “There has been a court ruling to this effect,” a spokeswoman for the Culture Ministry said, confirming media reports. For months, three Portuguese banks had tried but failed to seize the art collection from Portuguese businessman Jose Berardo. The 75-year-old had offered the works as collateral for his debt which totalled nearly one billion euros ($1.1 billion). The lenders refused to comment on the case when contacted by AFP. The modern art collection of more than 900 works which includes, besides Miro and Mondrian, other famous artists such as Gerhard Richter and Francis Bacon, was valued in 2006 at 316 million euros. But the collection could have doubled in value since then given the growth in the art market. Bacon’s “Self-Portrait”, for example, sold for over 17 million euros when it was auctioned at Southeby’s last

Scientists have unearthed a huge two-metre (6.5-foot) dinosaur bone in a winegrowing village in southwestern France dubbed a “national treasure” for its prehistoric gems. The 140-million-year-old thigh bone, which weighs 400 kilogrammes (880 pounds), is the latest discovery at the vast Angeac-Charente palaeontological site near Bordeaux, where experts and volunteers have dug up thousands of bones over the past decade. But thanks to its remarkably good condition, the femur — which scientists say probably belonged to a gigantic sauropod — could help piece together an incomplete set of bones which the latest find resembles. “We were wondering how big it was. We kept saying, ‘Oh, there’s more!'” said Maxime Lasseron, the doctoral student who made the gigantic discovery. The largest land animals ever to roam the Earth, sauropods were massive plant-eating dinosaurs with a long neck and tail, towering up to 18 metres (59 feet) tall. “It cost me a bit of money, because

Carlos Cruz-Diez, one of the major figures in kinetic art, has died at the age of 95 in Paris, his family announced Sunday. “It is with deep sadness that we announce the death of our beloved father, grandfather and great-grandfather, Carlos Eduardo Cruz-Diez,” said a statement from the family posted on the artist’s website. “Your love, your joy, your teachings and your colours, will remain forever in our hearts.” The funeral would be held in private, the statement added. The Franco-Venezuelan artist was born August 17 in 1923, in Caracas, and as a young student at the School of Fine Art there financed his studies by drawing comic books. From 1960, he lived and worked in Paris. “I started by painting slums, misery,” he once said in an interview with French daily Le Figaro. “I thought artists should be a reporter