When he was just a teenager, Tintoretto was sent to Italian Renaissance painter Titian’s studio, only to be kicked out within days because the older master got jealous. Or so goes the legend. What is clear from the first major Tintoretto retrospective outside of Europe, opening Sunday at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, is that the “impetuous genius” critics reviled for his free, “unfinished” style was a bold innovator whose impact can still be felt today. The exhibition, a debut for the museum’s first woman director Kaywin Feldman, comes on the heels of city-wide celebrations and shows for the artist’s 500th birthday in his hometown of Venice. Jean-Paul Sartre called Tintoretto the “first film director,” a theatricality seen in paintings like “The Conversion of Saint Paul” (circa 1544). The eponymous scene happens in one corner of a canvas otherwise dominated by extravagant, zigzagging brushstrokes deliberately left clearly visible — then a groundbreaking innovation — to d

A new exhibition has uncovered a hoard of art looted from a Jewish family almost wiped out by the Nazis in the Louvre and other leading French museums. The show about the booming art market in occupied Paris, when more than two million objects went under the hammer in a frenzy of forced sales and looting, has turned up works by Delacroix and Forain taken from the family by the collaborationist French Vichy authorities. Curator Emmanuelle Polack discovered that the Louvre bought a dozen works seized from the Dorvilles while researching a new book on how Jewish families and some of the most important dealers in modern art were plundered. The paintings are still in the French national collection, with three loaned to the Shoah Memorial museum in Paris for the show. Three more works taken from the family — most of whom perished in Auschwitz — have turned up in the Gurlitt hoard of 1,500 Old Masters, Impressionist and Cubist works found in a Munich apartment in 2011.

After nearly 30 years of doubt, the Wadsworth Atheneum’s painting, Vase with Poppies, by Vincent Van Gogh, has now been fully authenticated by specialists at the Van Gogh Museum. While the painting came to the Wadsworth in a bequest from the writer and French Impressionist collector Anne Parrish Titzell in 1957 along with works by Renoir, Monet, and Redon, Vase with Poppies has been difficult to confidently attribute since questions about Van Gogh’s practice remained unresolved. Experts in Amsterdam following scientific and art-historical inquiry have determined that the painting technically and stylistically concurs with Van Gogh’s documented work in 1886. This new finding means that the Wadsworth is home to two Van Gogh’s, Vase with Poppies will join Self Portrait, both painted during his Paris period 1886-1887 atop earlier paintings. Vase with Poppies fits stylistically with a group of works the artist made shortly after a