The ancient slice of decorative oak, which was carved 2,000 years before Stonehenge and more than 4,000 years before the Romans set foot on the British Isles, is believed to be the oldest piece of carved wood in Britain.

The wood, which measures just about three-feet-long, one-and-a-half feet wide, and half-an-inch thick, was found snuggly underground in a thick layer of peat, which impeccably preserved the wood. 

Since its discovery, the Mesolithic piece of wood has undergone scientific analysis by experts at Historic England in partnership with scientists from the Nottingham tree-ring dating laboratory, and the Centre for Isotope Research at the university of Groningen. 

Radiocarbon and tree ring dating on the slab give a 95% chance probability that the wood was carved between 4,640 BC and 4,605 BC, at the tail end of the Middle Stone Age when inhabitants of England roamed in hunter-gatherer communities and began using stone tools. 

While the meaning behind the carvings on the wood remain a mystery, experts say they are similar to the decorations on the Shigir Idol – a 12,500-year-old wooden sculpture that was discovered in the Ural Mountains of Russia and is thought to be the oldest example of carved wood in the world.

Derek Fawcett, the owner of the land where the carved wood was found, will donate the artifact to the to the West Berkshire Museum in Newbury once scientific analysis is complete, Historic England said in a press release. The donation coincides with England’s Museum Week which this year runs from June 5-11.

“This is a really brilliant find…and a tangible link to humans who lived in this area long before any towns and villages had been created,” Janine Fox, curator at West Berkshire Museum, told Historic England.

Sorokin hired Audrey Thomas in 2020, after a string of fraud charges against Sorokin led to a conviction for grand larceny and theft of services. According to the complaint, while Sorokin paid Thomas a retainer for appealing her conviction and overstaying her visa, for which she faced possible deportation to Germany, she still owes Thomas more than $152,000 in legal fees.

Thomas also claims that Sorokin has tried to get out of paying the hefty sum by filing her own lawsuit, which alleges that the attorney has been withholding audio recordings of her deportation hearings from her new lawyer and hoarding some of Sorokin’s personal belongings. Sorokin fired Thomas in April 2022 for “lack of progress in her criminal and immigration cases due to Thomas’ lax work habits,” according to the New York Post.

Thomas was disbarred this past November for alleged financial crimes of her own. Court documents claim that Thomas used $630,000 in cash that was held in escrow from the sale of a client’s apartment in order to promote herself as a radio show host and the author of the book Ego Has No Place in the Law. 

In 2019 Sorokin was sentenced to between 4 and 12 years in prison and was released on parole in February 2021. Just over a month later, she was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. She is currently under house arrest in Manhattan’s East Village after being granted a $10,000 bond; she is awaiting the court’s decision on whether she should be deported for overstaying her visa.

In an interview with The Messenger Wednesday, Sorokin said she was “trying to make the best” out of life despite the fact that being under house arrest is “pretty limiting.” 

“Hopefully people will let me grow up and move on,” Sorokin told The Messenger. “I am just trying to focus on what I am interested in these days. I see this as a great opportunity to dive into new people, somebody that I would not know so much about.”

Last year, Sorokin held an art show of works she made while in prison, many of which featured her wearing designer clothes. She reportedly made around $340,000 from the mostly pencil and paper drawings, the proceeds of which helped secure the bond and pay for her Manhattan apartment, which costs $4,250 a month.

Gagosian will be showing a selection of these prints at Art Basel next week, with an exhibition on the artist’s work planned for next spring in New York. Woodman’s estate was previously represented jointly by Marian Goodman Gallery and Victoria Miro Gallery.

The representation comes in partnership with the Woodman Family Foundation, which recently received the totality of Woodman’s oeuvre, much of which was closely guarded by her family and has not yet been seen publicly. The collection includes all the artist’s prints and books, as well as private letters, journals, and notebooks.

“Upon receiving the complete holdings of Francesca Woodman’s work,” Lissa McClure, the foundation’s executive director said in a statement, “the Board of Directors has determined that a different approach and global reach is needed to carry out its goals, for which Gagosian Gallery is uniquely suited.… We remain extremely grateful for the many contributions and accomplishments on Francesca Woodman’s behalf by Marian Goodman Gallery and Victoria Miro Gallery.”

Woodman, who died in 1981, began making pictures at a young age. Born and raised in Colorado, she grew up surrounded by the arts: her mother was the ceramicist Betty Woodman, and her father, George Woodman, was a painter. The majority of her work was made between 1975 and 1978, during her studies at the Rhode Island School of Design and in Rome, Italy, in the school’s honor program.

Like her contemporary Cindy Sherman, Woodman was often the subject of her own work. Symbolism and allegory characterized her work, which often utilized decaying exteriors and reflections from glass display cases or mirrors to introduce a narrative element.

She produced one book, Some Disordered Interior Geometries, before her death. This June London-based publishing house MACK will release Francesca Woodman: The Artist’s Books, which will reproduce her eight existing artist’s books, two of which have never been seen before.

In 1476, Galicia was embroiled in the Irmandiño revolts, during which peasants tried to assert their freedom from the state’s nobility. Roughly 130 castles and forts were destroyed during the conflict, among them the Tower of Meira, where the phallic whetstone was found.

Phallic symbols and penis shapes recur in artifacts from ancient civilizations, such as the Roman Empire and the Celts. These artifacts were rarely sexual but were instead symbols of power. They were believed to protect people from “potential evils and dangers,” according to Arbore. 

However, phallic symbols and tools are rarely seen during the Medieval period, which the archaeologists say speaks to the “symbolic association between masculinity, violence, and weapons…in different cultures,” both in the past and today. 

The excavation began three years ago, according to Darío Peña, one of the archaeologists on the Arbore team. During the first year, Arbore excavated and restored the tower. Last year, the focus was on the structure’s surrounding wall, and this year, the team excavated the main building, where, on May 19, the stone penis was found. 

Further excavation depends on the owners of the land and the municipality of Moaña, where the site is located. 

The RSF, a paramilitary group led by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, better known as Hemeti, has been in an armed conflict with General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) since 2019, when the government of Sudan’s long-time dictator, Omar al-Bashir, was toppled.

After the revolution, the government was been led by a council overseen by Burhan, with Hemeti serving at his right hand. However, since April, the two military leaders have been grappling over who would control the capital.

The museum’s deputy director Ikhlas Abdellatif begged the RSF, which took control of the museum on last Friday, to protect the countless artifacts and items of cultural heritage that are kept safe in the museum, the report said. Staff have not had access to the museum since the conflict began. 

In the days following the museum’s occupation, the RSF released a video claiming they have not harmed any of the artifacts in the museum, which includes statues, pottery, ancient murals, and some of the oldest mummies in the world, and invited those who believe the artifacts are in danger to come check. However, a French archaeological team working in Sudan that has been monitoring the site claims to have seen signs of damage at the museum via satellite.

Despite calls for peace and a cease fire that ran through Saturday, residents of Khartoum say they are under siege as the SAF fire shells and send fighter planes into urban areas and the RSF take to the streets. 

In the six weeks since the conflict began, roughly 1,000 people have been killed and more than 300,000 have fled Sudan fearing a full-blown civil war.

Now, according to a report by Reuters Friday, the 2000-year-old statues, after months of cleaning and restoration, will go on view in Rome’s Quirinale Palace starting June 22. When they were first discovered, experts called the trove of ancient figures the “biggest collection of ancient bronze statues ever found in Italy” and claimed they would “rewrite history.”

The statues were found in the Tuscan village of San Casciano dei Bagni in the Siena province, about 100 miles from Rome. Since 2019 archaeologists had been surveying the village’s public baths, which date back to the Renaissance, but found little trace of the ancient ruins they believed to be there.

Then, Stefano Petrini, an amateur historian and retired neighborhood garbage man, remembered he had once seen traces of ancient Roman columns, years before, while standing in a garden that belonged to his friend, the local grocer. The columns Petrini saw were only visible from that garden, which was opposite to where the archaeologists had been digging.

Buried deep beneath the mud were the ancient statues, which appeared to be offerings to the gods in return for good health, sculptures of body parts including ears and feet, well as eggshells, pinecones, and surgical tools. 

The highlight of this discovery, according to the report, was a 35-inch statue of a sickly boy who seemed to have suffered from some manner of bone disease, inscribed with the name “Marcius Grabillo.”

“[The discovery] opens a window into how Romans and Etruscans experienced the nexus between health, religion and spirituality,” Ada Salvi, a culture ministry archaeologist for the Tuscan provinces of Siena, Grosseto and Arezzo told Reuters. “There’s a whole world of meaning that has to be understood and studied.”

Emanuele Mariotti, head of the San Casciano project, is certain that more will be uncovered as the site continues to be excavated. “We’ve only just lifted the lid,” he told Reuters.

For the art market, succession plans at major galleries are a hot topic, and where the mega-galleries are concerned, the question tends to hinge on heirs: David Zwirner, Pace’s Arne Glimcher, and William Acquavella all have family to pass their galleries on to. Hauser & Wirth too is a family affair. Gagosian gallery’s situation is compelling precisely because Larry Gagosian does not have heirs—hence all those rumors last fall about Gagosian’s being acquired by LVMH. When Paul Kasmin died in 2020 at age 60, he had two daughters, Olivia and Charlotte, who weren’t heavily involved in the business, so the way he planned his succession—not to mention the story of his gallery since his death—is instructive. 

Kasmin died in late March 2020, just as New York was going into Covid lockdown. The loss of an irreplaceable founder might have left the business in disarray. But Kasmin, by all accounts a singular and charismatic figure, had cultivated a gallery culture that could outlive him. The Kasmin Gallery was and is structured like a collaborative creative space, with directors empowered to pursue their own interests and passions. Meanwhile, Kasmin had spent years preparing Olney, who joined the gallery in 2007 after six years at Berggruen Gallery in San Francisco, to take over, long before he was diagnosed with cancer in 2018. 

Kasmin worked to the end, even with the weight loss and weakness that accompanied his declining health. As the rest of the art world moved to a Covid-era appointment model, Kasmin worked from his Upstate home in Millbrook as he received hospice care. There was much to do: construction was finishing on a new suite of offices, the gallery had just opened William N. Copley: The New York Years in Chelsea, a new exhibition; Matisse in Black and White, was due in the fall; and Ali Banisadr was at work on his first solo show, These Specks of Dust, which would open in 2021, long after Kasmin’s death.

“I don’t think Paul would have ever retired, he was too passionate,” Olney told ARTnews.

Still, according to Olney, Kasmin had long before tapped him to take over the gallery as president. Olney had been the gallery’s managing director since 2016, and was the longest tenured staff member there; perhaps most crucially, he had the trust and respect of Kasmin’s directors. Olney and Kasmin also shared an intellectual curiosity outside of art, what Olney described as an “intuitive connection.” And because of Olney’s time working with John Berggruen, who like Kasmin was a second-generation gallerist, they thought similarly about the business of dealing in art. 

“I think for me, having worked with two galleries that were connected to this ‘older way’ of doing things very much informs how I approach the gallery today,” Olney said. “Traditional things like building relationships, talking to people in person, seeing things very candidly, the handshake deal.”

Today, the Kasmin Gallery continues the program Kasmin made his signature, one that embraces art history—particularly Surrealism—while also growing a roster of contemporary talent. On the former front, even before the Metropolitan Museum of Art had its big Surrealism show in 2021, Kasmin was planning its Dorothea Tanning show last year. On the latter, the gallery held a solo show this past September of ambitious sculptures and installations by vanessa german titled Sad Rapper and, earlier this month, announced they would begin representing Nigerian artist Nengi Omuku, who first showed there last year in a group show curated by Katy Hessel. And plans that Kasmin had for living artists like Diana Al-Hadid and estates like that of George Rickey have since come to fruition. In this particular succession, success looks, more than anything else, like stability.

“It’s tough to think of the change in leadership as a seismic shift,” Eric Gleason, who along with Edith Dicconson and Mariska Nietzman, has been a senior director at the gallery for a decade, told ARTnews. “We didn’t lose any artists, and we’ve always been halfway between the 20th and 21st century. Paul cultivated an environment in which we all trust each other and where the best idea wins, regardless of whose idea it is, and we continue to operate that way and trust each other in that way under Nick.” 

Not that there hasn’t been some gearshifting to suit the times. Gallery partnerships have become important, something Kasmin did not make a priority in his time, when galleries played things close to the vest, but they have helped the gallery expand to meet his aspirations. Kasmin and Blum & Poe together represent Alma Allen, for example, and the gallery now shares multiple artists with Galerie Max Hetzler in Europe.

One thing that can’t be replaced is Kasmin’s unique vision, what Billy Copley, son of William Copley, the artist whose show opened on the cusp of the pandemic, called his “secret sauce.” But, to Copley, Olney has his own idiosyncratic eye.

“[Kasmin and Olney] are different people, but they have many similar qualities,” Copley told ARTnews. “Nick may be a bit more understated than Paul was, but Paul was never showy. He was engaged and he was passionate. Nick is the same. And most importantly they both did what’s right for their artists, which is always what’s best for the gallery.”

For a founder, perhaps the key to a smooth succession is knowing how to step back.

“To me, what really happened after Paul died, is that we all turned up the volume,” Dicconson told ARTnews. “When he became really sick, he stepped back a bit and let us rise to the occasion. He knew it would be different, but the spirit is the same, perhaps even more collaborative.”

The painting, which was discovered in Japan in 2022, is among 600 works that have been repatriated to Poland since the war and accounts for only 0.9 percent of the roughly 660,000 works that were looted from Occupied Poland between 1939 and 1945. It was officially returned Wednesday at the Polish Embassy in Tokyo.

Polish culture minister Piotr Glinski told reporters that Turchi’s Madonna with Child was on a list of the 521 most valuable pieces of art in Poland, according to the AP.

It is unclear how the painting came to be in Japan, but it was sold at an auction house in New York in the late 1990s. Its provenance shows that it was once in the collection of 18th-century Polish aristocrat Stanislaw Kostka-Potocki. By 1823 it was in the collection of another aristocrat, Henryk Lubomirski of Przeworsk.

“More and more of the looted objects are appearing at auctions because the memory (of their past) has weakened and the persons [holding them] now do not have the full knowledge or are not aware of where the artwork is coming from,” Agata Modzelewska, head of the ministry’s department for restitution of culture items, told the Associated Press.

The painting was returned following negotiations with Japan, its owner, and the Mainichi Auction Inc., the report said.

The push for repatriation has become a global concern. Africa, India, China, Mexico, and Greece, are among the countries that, in recent years, have been actively seeking the return of looted artwork and artifacts.

According to ANSA, the publishing house superimposed the David’s image on a picture of a model “in an openly advertising key.” The court ruled that the image of Michelangelo’s David “must be authorized, all the more so if the use is for advertising purposes.”

The price for infringing on the image rights is steep and two-fold. Because the publishing house didn’t ask for permission and didn’t pay the Gallerie’s licensing fee, patrimonial damage will cost the company €20,000 (roughly the same in USD). Another €30,000 in damages are owed for the method in which David was portrayed. 

According to Finestra sull’Arte, the court ruled that the publishing house “insidiously and maliciously juxtaposed the image of Michelangelo’s David with that of a model, thus debasing, obfuscating, mortifying, and humiliating the high symbolic and identity value of the work of art and enslaving it for advertising and editorial promotion purposes.”

This is not the first time Gallerie dell’Accademia has sought legal action against companies who use images of works in its possession without permission, though public domain protections vary by country.

Earlier this month, the Gallerie stopped the German toy company Ravensburger from producing puzzles featuring Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man and fined the toymaker €1,500 per day from when the 1,000 piece puzzle began production in November of last year.

Similarly, Italy’s Uffizi Gallery last year sued the fashion designer Jean-Paul Gaultier for using Botticelli’s Birth of Venus on shirts, blouses, skirts, and t-shirts with damages expected to top €100,000.

In each case, the court’s decision was based on a correlation of two defining articles of the Italian constitution: article two, which “guarantees the inviolable rights of the person, both as an individual and in the social groups,” and article nine which “promotes the development of culture.” 

According to Italy 24, the court said that the superimposed image was “detrimental to the image of cultural heritage as an expression of the cultural identity of the nation” and therefore violated the “collective identity of citizens” of Italy.

David was recently at the center of another scandal after a Florida charter school principle included a full-body picture of the sculpture in a syllabus, leading some parents to complain that the work was “pornographic”; the principal ultimately resigned under pressure. However, she and her family were invited later by the mayor of Florence, Dario Nardella, on an all-expenses paid trip to view the statue.

The price hike is part of a €2 billion aid package announced by Italian culture minister Gennaro Sangiuliano which would run for a scant three months, only at state-run museums, from June 15 through September 15. Still, there is some controversy over how much good the meager price hike would actually do.

According to The Art Newspaper, “some cultural commentators [warn such a measure] could drive Italians away from museums” and, already, only around 20% of the Italian population visited a museum in 2022.

Critics say that the price hike will hurt those who already found museum admission fees too pricey.

“I don’t think that this policy is right, if only for an evident lack of social equality,” Giuliano Volpe, a professor of archaeology at the University of Bari and former advisor to Dario Franceschini, the former culture minister, told The Art Newspaper. “The country should be helping the young and unemployed.”

Some Italian government officials, like Vittorio Sgarbi, a culture ministry undersecretary, have been calling for free museum entrance and pushing back against the price hike. Meanwhile others believe a small price hike is exactly what the institutions need. “This contribution from all could really resolve a dramatic situation,” Giordano Bruno Guerri, president of the Fondazione Vittoriale, told the newspaper Il Fatto Quotidiano.

The floods have damaged at least 75 historic buildings, 6 archaeological sites, 12 libraries and archives, according to The Art Newspaper. On Thursday, the Italian government mobilized the illustrious Blue Helmets to help locate and save any historical works.