Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to take down two paintings by Emil Nolde from her office walls has touched off a heated German debate as an exhibition on the Expressionist painter and his links to the Nazis opened in Berlin. Organisers of the show “Emil Nolde, a German Legend: The Artist During National Socialism,” had asked Merkel for one of two paintings on loan to her. But she decided to send both — a 1915 painting of flowers in a garden and the 1936 work “Breakers”, her spokesman Steffen Seibert said. No explanation was given for the decision. Neither was an official reason offered as to why Merkel would not want them back when the exhibition closes in September. But the move was quickly interpreted by German media as a belated rejection by Merkel of the artist over his anti-Sem

Organized by the McNay Art Museum and drawn from the renowned Tobin Collection of Theatre Arts, America on Stage celebrates the vision of the nation’s 20th- and 21st-century master designers on stages across the U.S. and around the world. From the windswept plains of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! to densely packed apartments in New York City’s Washington Heights featured in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights, our country’s growing diversity remains a continuous source of inspiration for landmark musicals, plays, ballets, and operas. America on Stage offers bursts of awe, wonder, and nostalgia at every turn. The artistry of designing for the stage is reflected in innovative ballet and opera productions, musicals, dance, film, video, drawings, and paintings. Interactive opportunities throughout the exhibition invite visitors to take center stage in a recreated stage set—and even tap dance.

This April, the British Museum will present a major new exhibition on the work of Norwegian artist Edvard Munch (1863-1944). Edvard Munch: love and angst will focus on Munch’s remarkable and experimental prints – an art form which made his name and at which he excelled throughout his life – and will examine his unparalleled ability to depict raw human emotion. It will be the largest exhibition of Munch’s prints in the UK for 45 years. The exhibition is a collaboration with Norway’s Munch Museum, and includes nearly 50 prints from their collection, one of the biggest loans of prints the Oslo-based Museum has given internationally. Displayed alongside important Munch works from the British Museum collection and other loans from the UK and Europe, the 83 artworks on show will together demonstrate the artist’s skill and creativity in expressing the feelings and experiences of the human condition –

A German museum handed over the remains of an Aboriginal ancestral king to Australia on Tuesday in the first of three such ceremonies across Germany this month, which Canberra called a record return. The Australian ambassador to Germany, Lynette Wood, and elder Gudju Gudju Fourmile of the Yidinji people received the skeletal remains at Munich’s Five Continents museum where they have been stored since 1889. “His journey now will be to be taken back home to Yidinji country,” Fourmile said. Yidinji representatives draped a black, yellow and red Aboriginal flag over the box containing the remains. Skulls and bones from Australia’s native peoples were removed by scientists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and taken to museums, universities and collections in Australia and around the world. There they were subjected to “research” purporting to explain human biological variety. In a statement, Austra