The painting, View of the Sea from Haut Cagnes (ca. 1910), was originally owned by Jakob Goldschmidt, one of the most influential bankers in Weimar Germany and a major collector of Old Masters and Impressionist art in the 1920s. He was also a major patron of Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie. Nazi persecution forced Goldschmidt to flee in 1933 to Switzerland, before emigrating to the United States, where he died in 1955.

Some of Goldschmidt’s art collection stayed behind in Berlin, however, as collateral for a loan. In 1941, the Nazis seized the collection, which included the Renoir painting. The work was sold at the Berlin auction house Hans W. Lange later that year. It came up for sale again in 1960 at Galerie Nathan in Zurich. It was later purchased by Fritz Berg, the first president of the BDI association of German industry; after the passing of Berg’s widow, in 1989, their collection went to the Osthaus Museum in Hagen, where it has remained.

The city restituted the painting to the banker’s heirs and then repurchased it so it can remain on view at the Osthaus Museum. The painting will be displayed with information about Goldschmidt.

“The heirs of Jakob Goldschmidt are happy to have reached a satisfactory agreement for both sides in this matter after more than 15 years of intensive discussions,” their lawyer Sabine Rudolph said in a statement. “The restitution of the painting is a recognition of the fact that their grandfather suffered great wrongs under the Nazi regime, including huge financial losses.”

The repurchase was funded by the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, the German culture ministry, and the Cultural Foundation of the States.

The Nazca lines are UNESCO-protected geoglyphs dating from between 100 BCE and 300 CE that depict humans, camelids, birds, orcas, felines, and snakes. There are a range of theories surrounding their purpose, including that the Nazca geoglyphs depict deities, are a form of irrigation, or are a calendar with astrological alignments, though it remains unclear.

Discovered about 100 years ago with the advancement of aerial technology, the geoglyphs are nearly impossible to decipher from the ground.

Researchers at Yamagata University in Japan developed and trained the AI-driven deep learning technology to spot the lines from satellite images.

DL, as the researchers explain, “is a particular kind of machine learning that achieves great power and flexibility in pattern analysis of images, speech, language, and more. In archaeology, DL is used in the analysis of the iconography, text, and writing of excavated objects.”

While the variability in design and limited subset posed a challenge with training the AI program, researchers were able to develop a new approach to detecting geoglyphs based on similarities to other known designs.

Four new geoglyphs were identified during this process. Of the four, they depict a human-like figure holding a club, a pair of legs or hands stretching more than 250 feet, a fish, and a bird. The new designs were subsequently verified during on-site visits.

“We could identify new geoglyph’s candidates approximately 21 times faster than with the naked eye alone,” said researchers. “The approach would be beneficial for the future of archaeology in a new paradigm of combining field survey and AI.”

Late last year, the team discovered 168 new geoglyphs using aerial photography and drone images.

Designed by Brutalist architect Marcel Breuer and completed in 1966, the landmark building was conceived as the third home for the Whitney Museum. (The museum ultimately outgrew the building and relocated downtown to a new Renzo Piano–designed one in the Meatpacking District in 2015. )

The Metropolitan Museum of Art occupied the building for a brief stint, from 2015 to 2020, and called it the Met Breuer (not to be confused with its Fifth Avenue home, just a few blocks north). The Frick Collection took up residence in the building in 2021 to display its collection, while its iconic mansion undergoes renovations; it currently holds a lease there through August 2024.

Sotheby’s will take over the Breuer in September 2024, before ultimately relocating in 2025. The auction house plans to “sensitively review the internal spaces and maintain key elements such as the building’s striking lobby,” as the new space will boast updated galleries, exhibition space, and a reimagined auction room. The galleries will be free and open to the public.

Sotheby’s will retain ownership of its current headquarters in New York’s Lenox Hill neighborhood, where it has been since 1980, for the time being.

“We are honored to acquire and write the next chapter of such an iconic and well-known New York architectural landmark,” Sotheby’s CEO Charles Stewart said in a statement. “We often refer to the provenance of artwork, and in the case of The Breuer, there is no history richer than the museum which has housed the Whitney, Metropolitan and Frick collections. The acquisition will further distinguish us as we continue to transform and innovate for our clients.”

Adam Weinberg, the Whitney’s outgoing director, added, “The iconic Breuer Building will always be a beloved part of the Whitney’s rich history. We are pleased that it will continue to serve an artistic and cultural purpose through the display of artworks and artifacts. Most importantly this architectural masterpiece—thanks to its status in a landmark district—will be preserved.”

The building’s acquisition is part of Sotheby’s ongoing plan to expand its global footprint. The auction house is slated to open new flagship salesrooms in Hong Kong and Paris in 2024. This year, Sotheby’s will open Gantry Point, a 240,000 square-foot building with state-of-the-art facilities in Long Island City.

Purdue, founded and owned by the Sacklers, created and sold the highly addictive painkiller OxyContin beginning in the 1990s. Purdue and the family have been accused of knowingly misleading consumers about the drug’s addictive properties, thereby directly contributing to the opioid crisis, which saw the loss of more than 564,000 people in the United States between 1999 and 2020 according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In 2019, the company sought bankruptcy protection as lawsuits linked to Oxycontin piled up. In 2021, Purdue reached a deal that saw the Sacklers give up ownership of the company, which was to be restructured so that its profits would go toward fighting the opioid crisis. The Sacklers additionally would pay $4.5 billion to those efforts and, in exchange, would recieve protection from current and future civil lawsuits. That deal was eventually rejected by a U.S. district judge in December 2021 after objections from eight US states and others to the deal.

That 2021 ruling was appealed, leading to Tuesday’s landmark ruling. However, the current deal only applies to the 2nd Circuit Region of New York, Connecticut, and Vermont. There is still no national resolution.

As part of the current settlement, Purdue will be restructured into Knoa Pharma, which will be overseen by a public board and manufacture medications for addiction reversal and treatment, as well as continue to produce drugs including OxyContin. The company’s profits will still go towards fighting the opioid crisis. The Sacklers are also required to pay $5.5 to $6 billion from the sale of their international drug companies.

Additionally, any organization or institution in the United States can remove the Sackler name from buildings, programs, and scholarships as long as the family is notified and not publicly disparaged.

“Our focus going forward is to deliver billions of dollars of value for victim compensation, opioid crisis abatement, and overdose rescue medicines,” the company said in a statement. “Our creditors understand the plan is the best option to help those who need it most, the most fair and expeditious way to resolve the litigation, and the only way to deliver billions of dollars in value specifically to fund opioid crisis abatement efforts.” 

Members of the Sackler family have been major funders of some of the world’s largest and most prestigious art institutions. Most recently, Oxford University cut ties with the family among a number of others over the last few years.

Photographer and activist Nan Goldin, who became addicted to the drug, has been at the forefront of protesting against the Sacklers.

Private construction work on a lot in the area drew the attention of Israel Antiquities Authority inspectors, who found that bulldozers had completely destroyed an ancient burial cave, leaving only a burial mound. They also discovered several suspicious piles of earth. Removing them revealed an ancient rock-hewn Roman burial cave with nine niches that the construction had badly damaged.

They retrieved three fully decorated stone ossuaries, along with ossuary fragments. The small rectangular burial chests were carved in soft limestone and topped with flat lids. Incised on the side of one of the ossuaries was a burial structure with a mausoleum in Greek or a “nefesh” in Hebrew. Another depicted a circular wreath with holes, which some believe symbolize victory over death.

The ossuaries would have been used for a secondary burial of human bones collected after the flesh rotted away. This practice was customary among the Jewish community in Galilee from roughly the first century BCE through the second century CE.

These ossuaries, however, were found empty and had been moved from their original placement, suggesting that the cave had been looted.

Construction work at the site was stopped while Israel Antiquities Authority inspectors documented the site and collected the finds to prevent further looting, and police questioned several people.

“The original details of the destroyed cave cannot be reconstructed, and almost two-thousand-year-old cultural assets are lost forever. Thanks to the vigilance and determination of the Kafr Kanna Police, and the successful cooperation with the Israel Antiquities Authority, one of the caves was mostly saved,” said Amir Ganor, director of the Theft Prevention Unit at the Israel Antiquities Authority.

While one cave sustained serious damage, the other was looted. Damaging or failing to report finding antiquities is a criminal offense in Israel, punishable by law with up to five years of imprisonment, though most judges hand down monetary fines.

For the project, Walker is planning a large-scale installation responding to the gallery’s glass enclosure. The piece will also address historical preservation techniques. SFMOMA curator of contemporary art Eungie Joo is organizing the showing, which will be open to the public with free admission in July 2024.

“Informed by the fear and loss experienced as a global society during the COVID-19 pandemic, Walker’s new commission helps us consider the memorialization of trauma and the objectives of technology. Facing Howard Street and the world, her striking installation will allow us to move towards wonder and healing,” Joo said in a statement.

This is the first time an artist has made a site-specific installation in the space, which boasts floor-to-ceiling windows on two sides. The gallery has previously featured installations by such artists as Richard Serra, Diego Rivera, and JR.

Walker, who examines histories of anti-Black racism and misogyny, sometimes in controversial ways, has shown at the museum over the last 25 years.

“The commission is part of our vision to present work that is at once formally innovative and inextricably connected to topics of meaning in our daily lives. At the same time, we are working to increase the spectrum of arts experiences available in our free spaces, to ensure that SFMOMA is welcoming and accessible to as many people as possible. We look forward to sharing this compelling new work with our community,” SFMOMA director Christopher Bedford said in a statement.

These “extremely precise depictions” of Stone Age hunting traps, called kites because of their shape, were engraved on stone slabs. These structures would have been used to lure wild animals into enclosed herds, where they would have then been slaughtered.

Massive converging walls measuring from a few hundred feet to more than three-miles-long were constructed to drive animals toward a large corral surrounded by a number of pits up to more than 13-feet deep each.

Across the Middle East and Asia, more than 6,000 of these kinds of structures have been found. They are most numerous in present-day Saudi Arabia, southern Syria, and eastern Jordan. Though they were first spotted among the desert landscape by aircraft pilots in the 1920s, there have been few studies published on the hunting traps.

Archaeologists discovered two engraved slabs in Saudi Arabia and Jordan in 2015. A former settlement near Jibal al-Khashabiyeh in Jordan is home to eight previously identified hunting kites. The markings appear on a two-and-a-half foot long stone believed to be approximately 7,000 years old. In Saudi Arabia, the larger engraved stone was found in the Jebel az-Zilliyat region at almost 13 feet long. The slab shows two different kites only 394 feet apart and is estimated to be 8,000 years old.

The study found that the shape, layout, and proportions of the engravings are consistent with the remains of the kites. While the kite in Jordan was 425 times larger than the plan, the kite in Saudi Arabia is 175 times larger on a 1:175 scale. Additionally, the drawings maintain cardinal directions.

“The engravings are surprisingly realistic and accurate, and are moreover to scale,” the study reported.

The representation of the deep pits, however, were not dug to scale in the drawings, appearing as mere circles on the stones.

Ultimately, these kites were among the largest structures in human history at the time of their construction. The drawings suggest that the people who built and used the kites had a keen sense of spatial awareness. The construction of these massive kites would likely have been a collective effort by local communities to hunt a large number of animals at once.

Alexander Nevsky was a 13th-century Russian war hero who was canonized in 1549. Nevsky was chosen by Peter the Great as the patron saint of the capital city and he commissioned the cathedral in Nevsky’s honor. The monument was housed there for more than two centuries until the Soviet’s embraced atheism and began removing religious objects from the public eye.

The Hermitage museum saved the monument from destruction four times over the last 100 years. In 1922, for example, it was moved to the museum for an exhibition aimed at protecting the destruction of church silver.

The Baroque monument, commissioned by the Empress Elizabeth in 1743 and designed by court portrait painter Georg Christoph Groot, has a pyramid-like structure. At the bottom of the monument, sits the sarcophagus which has high relief battle scenes along the side and is topped with a crown and broken sword on its lid. Two pedestals on each side support arms and banners and two large candelabras flank the sides of the monument. At 16-feet tall, angels with inscribed shields sit at the top.

“The Hermitage is proceeding from an understanding that, at the present geopolitical moment, the reunification of relics with the tomb on the territory of the monastery has acquired a particular relevance for the fate of the country and of social peace within it. Today, the artifact’s religious significance is more important than its artistic value. For decades, the situation was the opposite,” said the Hermitage director Mikhail Piotrovsky.

The Hermitage is expected to give the monument to the cathedral for 49 years with the option to extend the loan. As part of the agreement, the church must regulate conditions in accordance with the tomb’s preservation. Currently the property of the Museum Fund of Russia, the ministry of culture and head of the Russian Orthodox Church Patriarch Kirill approved the transaction.

“The main criterion for the fate of cultural artefacts is not the physical location, but the preservation of the object within the sphere of the museum field or outside it,” Piotrovsky added.

Most people have a very specific relationship to mail, but it’s one they don’t think about a lot. Artist Jessica Vaughn isn’t one of those people.

For this year’s Frieze Artadia commission, Vaughn prods viewers to question the mundane by taking a closer look at the United States Postal Service and the organizational structures that undergird late-stage capitalism.

Vaughn’s new project, titled The Internet of Things (2020–23), involved sending mail through the USPS to historical and contemporary sites of leisure and commerce, as well as places where acts of violence have occurred. These included Disney World and Silicon Valley, along with the site where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, the famed arsenal that John Brown raided in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, and the spot where Trayvon Martin was killed in Sanford, Florida.

“The term ‘Internet of Things’ describes the physical processing of objects and how technology connects to those systems and data, et cetera, so it’s actually a term used specifically within the context of how the mail system sorts materials,” Vaughn told ARTnews. “It felt important to highlight the networking of these sites in respect to how they all communicate with one another within the legacies embedded in their history.”

She started work on the project during the pandemic, when health, wealth, and racial inequities were particularly pronounced. The sites she chose, she added, “all locate themselves around this contemporary present moment.”

When sending the letters, however, Vaughn made sure to tweak the addresses just enough so that they arrived at the location she intended. But, because they were technically incorrect, they were returned to sender, along with marks left on their envelopes by the people and systems that processed them. Vaughn then scanned and enlarged the envelopes to create fabric screenprints.

In this body of work, there’s a tension between manual and mechanized labor. The codes that appear on Vaughn’s letters once had to be memorized by postal workers. Now, they’re simply tracked using computers.

“Workers are always present within the context of machines—they sort of never leave. And all these systems carry the residual aftereffect of those histories,” she explains.

As many Americans struggle post-pandemic to find their footing after losing their loved ones and jobs, and as the threat of ever-developing technology looms large, Vaughn’s work questions where we fit into the current infrastructure.

There’s a “dependence on these structures that you don’t necessarily have immediate access to,” she says, that sometimes involves “working with what’s made available or within [a particular set of] constraints.”

Vaughn herself came up against those constraints. Though sending letters has historically been a way of connecting, the artist said she felt “the distancing that everyone is saying that they have experienced, or continue to experience.” It’s assumed that posting a letter is a personal gesture intended to reach someone far away. The irony, as the codes printed on these envelopes make clear, is that mail is handled impersonally, with minimal human involvement.

Ultimately, “the post office became this way of thinking about site in a very particular way,” Vaughn said. “I wanted to emphasize different sites coming together, where the body is marked through particular historical and contemporary moments.”

Jessica Vaughn‘s Internet of Things will be on view May 17 through 21 as part of Frieze New York at the Shed in New York. A survey of Vaughn’s work, titled “I <3 Customers,” is on view at Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen in Düsseldorf through June 4.

Found under a collapsed wall in the Casti Amanti, or House of the Chaste Lovers, which contains several dwellings and a bakery, the two skeletons are believed to be men at least 55 years or older. Experts have determined that the wall collapsed before volcanic lava covered the area, as it was probably still under construction when an earthquake shook the region a few days prior to the Vesuvius eruption.

“In recent years, we have realized there were violent, powerful seismic events that were happening at the time of the eruption,″ Gabriel Zuchtriegel, director of Pompeii Archaeological Park, explained.

New archaeological techniques and methodology, he added, “allow us to understand better the inferno that in two days completely destroyed the city of Pompeii, killing many inhabitants.″

More than 1,300 remains have been identified at the Southern Italian archaeological site, which has not been fully excavated, since its discovery more than 250 years ago.

Current restoration efforts focus on the Insula Occidentalis, a section of lavish villas that at one time overlooked the sea.