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.

According to new research, published in the journal Antiquity, microscopic residue on the surface of the tools is ancient gold, revealing these stone-and-copper-alloy items were used as hammers and anvils, and to smooth the objects being crafted.

“This is a really exciting finding for our project,” said Rachel Crellin, lead author and archaeologist at the University of Leicester, in a statement. “What our work has revealed is the humble stone toolkit that was used to make gold objects thousands of years ago.”

Originally excavated in 1801, the toolkit was found in the Upton Lovell G2a burial which is thought to date to the Bronze Age, around 1850–1700 BCE. Marked by an earthen mound near Stonehenge, initial investigations revealed two individuals and a wide assortment of grave goods.

One figure was placed sitting upright, with her head close to the top of the barrow, and buried with a fine shale arm ring and a necklace of polished shale beads. The other figure was wearing a ceremonial cloak, with pierced bone points as a necklace, thought to be a specialized costume.

Early speculation referred to the cloaked figure as a ‘Shaman’ who had special ritual significance, or an important and skilled craftsman. Now, researchers have discovered that the toolkit was used to make objects in which a core material—like jet, shale, amber, wood, or copper—was covered and decorated with a layer of gold sheet.

Processes in which the objects are thought to have been used involve making rib-and-furrow decorations, producing perforations, fitting the core object with the sheet-gold, and smoothing and polishing the finished objects. Some of the tools were already ancient, making them thousands of years old by the time they were reused. There was even a complete battle axe, which was repurposed for metalworking.

“Such battle axes were far from the only smooth stones that could have been selected for these purposes,” the paper explains. “In intentionally repurposing these objects, their histories rubbed off on the materials they worked.”

Researchers used a scanning electron microscope as well as an energy dispersive spectrometer to confirm their findings. The gold residue is present on five artifacts, where they found gold flecks on the surface as well as characteristic wear traces from the goldworking process. The team additionally suggest that the bone points from the ‘shaman’s costume’ could have been used for goldworking.

“By exploring the use of materials through a technique called microwear analysis, that determines microscopic marks on objects, [we can] better understand how they were made and used,” said Oliver Harris, coauthor and University of Leicester archaeologist, in an email to ARTnews. “We have shown how central stone is to the process of making gold, and how stones with certain properties and histories were preferentially selected to be part of this practice.”

According to the paper, “there is far more complexity here, in relations, histories, gestures and processes, than could ever be captured under the label ‘shaman’, ‘metalworker’ or ‘goldsmith’ … [our] analysis suggests that goldworking may be different from other forms of metal production and may not, from a Bronze Age perspective, have been considered to be a metal at all, but rather something with its own relational properties that were quite different from those that entwined copper and tin.”

The toolkit and associated finds are currently on view at the Wiltshire Museum in Devizes.

The Guardian reports that, contrary to theories posed by some experts, the pits are not natural. At the very least, given their uniform size (30 feet across and 16 feet deep), they appear to have had some distinct purpose.

“We’ve now looked at nearly half of them and they’re all the same,” Vincent Gaffney, an archaeologist at Bradford University who headed the new research, told the Guardian. “So effectively this really does say this is one enormous structure. It may have evolved from a natural feature, but we haven’t located that. So it’s the largest prehistoric structure found in Britain.”

In 2020, Gaffney’s team also revealed that they had discovered something new during their research: a mile-wide ring beneath the earth that surrounds Stonehenge and the pits. Using technology that could track where the ground had been disturbed across the centuries, he and his researchers surmised that the ring may have actually been part of an informal engineering system. Using this geological ring, the builders could count their paces to determine the uniform shape of the pits.

What these pits may have signified remains an open question. A common theory is that Stonehenge was believed to be imbued with cosmological significance for the people who built it, though it’s not clear if the pits in any way aided in that. One archaeologist last year simply labeled them “blobs in the ground.” For now, the pits remain another odd find at a strange site.

The Headlines

THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL DISCOVERIES ARE COMING FAST IN ENGLAND. A new section of Hadrian’s Wall has been discovered during work on a water main in Newcastle, England, CNN reports. Northumbrian Water has tapped Archaeological Research Services to keep the find intact. Meanwhile, a new paper reveals that Stonehenge has survived so long because its sandstone boulders contain interlocking quartz crystals, making it rocks “nearly indestructible,” Insider reports. The findings were made by studying a 3-foot piece of the ancient structure that was given to a man after he did repair work on the structure in the 1950s. His family recently repatriated it. (Current law prohibits researchers from grabbing fresh hunks of the stone.) Despite its apparent durability, the long-surviving wonder is not without adversaries: “potentially rabbits might burrow under the stones and undermine them from below, making them fall over onto their sides,” David Nash, a co-author of the report, told the publication.

TODAY IS THE IDES OF AUGUST, the heart of the art world’s summer holiday, but one of the year’s biggest shows in the United States is opening today at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. “Titian: Women, Myth & Power” unites all six of the prized paintings that the artist painted for King Philip II based on the stories of the Roman poet Ovid. They are scattered throughout various museums (the Gardner owns The Rape of Europa, 1560–62), and in the New York Times, critic Holland Cotter writes that these are pieces “you will never have seen together before and will almost certainly never see together again.” WBUR has a look at how the show came together, and the museum’s registrar, Amanda Venezia, put it like this: “It’s like bringing a bunch of kings and queens back from their journey, the logistics involved.”

The Digest

Everyone seems to be thinking about Tiziano Vecelli! Smithsonian Magazine checked in with the great Photorealist painter Audrey Flack, who’s donating her papers to the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and she said, “Titian made art into his late 80s and I’m now past that. I always wanted to paint like an old master, or rather an old mistress.” [Smithsonian Magazine]

The frequently controversial sculptor Igael Tumarkin, who represented Israel at the biennials of Venice, São Paolo, and Tokyo during the 1960s, has died at 87. [Haaretz]

For its “Overlooked” series, the New York Times ran an obituary for the African-American model Hettie Anderson (1873–1938), who posed for artists like Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Anders Zorn, and Daniel Chester French, but who “was mostly forgotten by the world at large” by her death. [The New York Times]

There’s a mural boom in Western New York, fueled by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, New York’s Bortolami Gallery, and many more, Mark Byrnes reports. “The only place I’ve been that has more murals is São Paulo,” said artist Cecily Brown, who’s made one in Buffalo. [Bloomberg CityLab]

In a pivotal scene in Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite (2019), some of the main characters hide under a table made by the Korean artist and designer Bahk Jong-sun. That instantly iconic piece will go on view at Milan Design Week 2021 early next month. [The Korea Times]

David Hill has a deep dive on the new $150 million restoration of Gio Ponti’s Denver Art Museum tower—the only building that the Italian architect ever built in the United States. It’s a reliably controversial structure that art critic Grace Glueck once termed “an Italian castle wrapped in aluminum foil.” [Architect Magazine]

Artist Hubert Bush is listing the Manhattan home where he lived with his late husband, the television pioneer and art collector Douglas S. Cramer. The price: $4.85 million. [New York Post]

The Kicker

‘ART IS FOOD! YOU CAN’T EAT IT BUT IT FEEDS YOU.’ So begins a magnificent manifesto by Elka Schumann, who ran the vaunted Bread & Puppet Theater with her husband, Peter, in Vermont. She has died at 85, the New York Times reports. For nearly 60 years, their theater has offered up left-wing vanguard puppeteering and sourdough bread, all with inimitable wit. Schumann’s manifesto, “Why Cheap Art,” is worth reading in full. It goes on: “Art has to be cheap and available to everybody. It needs to be everywhere because it is the inside of the world.” [The New York Times]

Thank you for reading. We’ll see you on Monday.

Correction, 8/17/21, 1:26 p.m.: A previous version of this article misstated that a stone from Stonehenge was stolen by a Florida man. The stone was a gift.

The original plan by Highways England was devised to reduce congestion along the A303, a 64-mile highway that runs past Stonehenge, by digging a new road and an underground tunnel. Campaigners from Save Stonehenge World Heritage Site (SSWHS), who hoped to see the project stopped, crowdfunded the nearly $70,000 needed to bring about a judicial review on the matter. 

On July 30, U.K. courts declared that the tunnel was unlawful on two counts, overturning transport secretary Grant Shapps’s approval of the project. Justice David Holgate, who oversaw the review, found that the government had failed to take into account the impact on the site. Additionally, Holgate said, Highways England had not considered alternative plans, as is required by law and UNESCO’s World Heritage Convention, which seeks to protect cultural property.

UNESCO previously listed Stonehenge as being in danger of losing its World Heritage site status. UNESCO has fully stripped just four other sites of the designation. (The most recent to be removed from the World Heritage list, the British city of Liverpool, lost the designation in July.) Various officials had recommended that the highway plan be abandoned to keep Stonehenge from being taken off UNESCO’s list.

A representative from Highways England told ARTnews that it expects that the government will appeal the court decision within three weeks.

Campaigners from SSWHS had been arguing against the tunnel project since it was first proposed in 2014. Protestors and experts pointed out that Stonehenge only represents the most visible of heritage treasures in the surrounding area. Around—and possibly beneath—Stonehenge, there are many important archaeological sites as well. Activists also claimed that the highway would not have done little to decrease congestion on local roads.

When the project was initially approved in 2020, Highways England denied that the roadway would be inefficient, saying that it would bring “much needed relief to local communities and boosting the economy in the south west.”

Tom Holland, a BBC radio host and a member of SSWHS, tweeted, “Wonderful news. Congratulations to everyone who has fought the fight for so long. Hoping the Government will accept this ruling, & save the £2 billion of taxpayers’ money they were planning to blow on a shameful act of desecration.”

The Headlines

THE ARCHAEOLOGY BEAT IS BUZZING. Let’s dive right in. A U.K. judge has nixed the government’s approval of a controversial plan to build a highway tunnel near Stonehenge, saying it failed to consider both the possible harm of the project and possible alternatives, the Art Newspaper reports. “We are disappointed in the judgment and are considering it carefully before deciding how to proceed,” a Department for Transport rep told the BBC. Off the coast of Egypt, in the sunken city of Thonis-Heracleion, fruit-filled baskets and bronze artifacts have been found, according to the Guardian. Also underwater: an ancient Roman shipwreck that was just discovered off of Sicily, as Smithsonian Magazine details. And 13 Aztec artifacts, dating as early as the 12th century and allegedly being smuggled from Mexico, were seized by the U.S. They are said to have been headed to a residence in South Carolina.

ANOTHER PLUM MUSEUM JOB IS OPENING UP. Timothy Rub said he will retire as director and CEO of the Philadelphia Museum of Art at the end of next January (before his 70th birthday in March), the Philadelphia Inquirer reports. Rub took the position in 2009, and oversaw an expansion project started by his predecessor, Anne d’Harnoncourt, who died of a heart attack in 2008. His tenure came under scrutiny last year, the New York Times notes, as misconduct allegations against two former managers came to light and employees raised equity issues. The Times says the museum’s board has already begun a search for a new leader. It is a heady time for the curatorial class: the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and MASS MoCA are among the other major-league institutions on the hunt for directors.

The Digest

A fire destroyed part of a warehouse owned by Brazil’s film institute, the Cinemateca Brasileira. Employees had warned of the possibility of such a disaster, accusing the nation’s government of neglect. In 2018, the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro was also devastated in a blaze. [AFP/France 24]

Lee Joon, a pioneering painter of geometric abstractions in Korea whose work addressed events like the Korean War and the partition of the country, has died at the age of 101. [The Korea Times]

Artist Suzanne Brennan Firstenberg has helped create an installation of more than 600,000 white flags—one for each American who has died of the coronavirus—that will appear on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., in September. “People will come and they will be astounded by the visual immensity,” Firstenberg said. [Associated Press]

More movement on the museum-unionization front: Curators, editors, and other employees at the Guggenheim Museum in New York are aiming to form a union. If established, it will cover some 160 employees. [The New York Times]

Artist Anish Kapoor’s foundation is renovating an 18th-century palazzo in Venice to create a studio, gallery, and space for his work. Construction will continue until at least 2023, but Kapoor lovers in Venice next April can take in a show by the artist at the Accademia. [The Art Newspaper]

Early on Saturday morning, a thief broke into the Sacramento History Museum in California and made off with gold artifacts. It could have been worse: The museum said the burglar only managed to open one of the three display cases they tried. [The Sacramento Bee]

A sealed box of Pokémon cards went for $384,000 at Heritage Auctions in Dallas, the second-highest amount ever spent on a Pokémon lot. (The top mark, for the record, is $408,000, which was spent on a box back in January.) [Press Release/ArtDaily]

The Kicker

THE SOOTHING TELEVISION PAINTER BOB ROSS IS DEAD, but his intellectual property lives on, and the Washington Post is the latest publication to delve into how it is being managed, following reports in the Daily Beast and the New York Times . Ross’s programs are being streamed vigorously, Mountain Dew licensed his image for an ad, and not everyone believes he would be pleased with this state of affairs, but his posthumous appearances are emblematic of the way culture operates now, according to branding experts. “It used to be when you thought of something fond from your childhood you’d call a friend, talk about it for a minute and move on,” one told the Post. “Now all that thinking can become a very profitable business.” [The Washington Post]

Thank you for reading. We’ll see you tomorrow.

The UNESCO report was issued ahead of UNESCO’s 45th annual conference in 2022, where final decisions around the recommendations will be made.

Among the most fiercely debated cases addressed in the report is Stonehenge because of an ongoing plan to build a tunnel underneath the prehistoric site for infrastructure purposes. The organization recommended that the Neolithic site in Wiltshire location be added to the endangered list if the U.K. government’s controversial plan is not adjusted.

The warning comes days before a judicial review of the planned tunnel is scheduled to take place in a London court beginning on June 23. The hearing will address issues surrounding the government’s £1.7 billion ($2.25 billion) road redevelopment plan in the surrounding area, which would require the construction of a 2 mile-long tunnel under the site. The plan was approved by the U.K.’s transportation secretary Grant Shapps last November.

The UNESCO report also said that an adjustment to the proposed length of the new tunnel “is required in order to avoid highly adverse and irreversible impact on [the site’s Outstanding Universal Value], particularly on the integrity of the property.” (OUV refers to a Unesco standardized metric for assesing a site’s cultural significance and thus, its World Heritage list eligibility.) The World Heritage committee has requested the U.K. government provide a modified plan for the route upgrade scheme by February 2022, ahead of next year’s annual conference in June.

Proponents of the project to move the main road leading to Stonehenge underground argue that the tunnel could solve issues around traffic congestion and noise that have long plagued the surrounding area, as well as boost the local economy. Yet, some archaeologists have objected to the project, claiming it could potentially damage a vast portion of the site’s ancient artifacts that remain unearthed and yet to be recorded by historians.

Another site in the U.K. mentioned in the UNESCO report is Liverpool’s waterfront, which the organization said should to be removed from its list of World Heritage sites because of the ongoing development in the area that was first announced in 2012.

The city of Venice is another area under dire threat, according to UNESCO. One of the most pressing issue there is ongoing damage to the lagoon’s ecosystem and surrounding infrastructure, which have been made vulnerable from the effects of climate change. The negative impact is now being exacerbated by the presence of commercial cruise ships. The report added that “complex impacts of mass tourism, the constant decrease of population and the basic deficiencies in governance and cooperated management which have led to a significant loss of historical authenticity within Venice,” are causes for concern.

In March, the Italian government issued a request to ban large commercial vessels from the city’s lagoon. The country’s culture minister Dario Franceschini, a vocal critic of cruise ship tourism in Venice, said on Twitter, “The risk of seeing Venice inscribed on the Heritage in Danger list requires us to take a further step, immediately prohibiting large ships from the Giudecca Canal.”

Beyond the U.K. and Europe, the report also noted that several dam projects scheduled to take place across Iraq, Turkey, and Iran could further increase water scarcity. The report called on governments in each region to “expedite their cooperation towards long-term sustainable water management measures that are informed by science and can guarantee the minimum (water) flow needed to preserve the [Outstanding Universal Value of the property].” 

Iraq’s ancient city of Ashur (Qal’at Sherqat), where there are several dam projects planned, is one site that UNESCO will specifically bring up for discussion at the 2022 conference. The site has been on the World Heritage in Danger list since 2003. The report cited renewed plans around the construction of the Makhool dam project in the northern Salahudin province, which pose a threat of flooding to the site, leading the agency to call for its relocation or cancellation. Iraq has pressed forward with the project citing concerns over severe water supply shortage in the region. The organization requests a full assessment of the damage to the sites and its artifacts, stating it “reiterates its concern over the continued high vulnerability of the three cultural component sites and the need for their conservation to prevent further irreversible erosion and collapse.”

It was previously understood that the stones in Stonehenge had come from the Preseli Hills in Wales, which is some 150 miles away from their location today, but the theory that some pieces previously made up a different monument could prove groundbreaking.

The site in Wales, called Waun Mawn, had been discounted as “doubtful and insignificant” by researchers in the past, but a team led by Mike Parker Pearson found holes that “were exactly the same diameter as the outer circle at Stonehenge” there, as the scientist Alice Roberts told the Independent.

“They decided that they were going to dig anyway and just see if they can find anything, and they found these ghosts of stone holes,” Roberts told the British newspaper, adding that this development is “the most exciting archaeology around Stonehenge that’s certainly happened during my lifetime.”

However, Roberts said that it remains an open question if the reason these stones were moved from Wales to their current location in England may ever be known.

“Of course there are questions about why these stones would have been brought from West Wales to Salisbury Plain…but ultimately it’s pre-history and we don’t know,” she told the Independent. “Very often in pre-history we’re left asking those questions and I don’t think we’ll ever know because we just don’t have any written record.”

The Headlines

SO MUCH HISTORY IS AWAITING REDISCOVERY, just underneath the earth’s surface or hiding in plain sight. Recent excavations at Stonehenge in England have revealed “burnt flint, grooved pottery, deer antlers, and burials,” the Art Newspaper reports. Digs have been occurring as part of a plan to build a new highway tunnel near the site, which has been opposed by some experts who fear it could damage the area. Officials maintain they are being careful. “There isn’t one option that would allow zero impact on archaeological remains; that’s true of every development you can think of,” one told the Guardian. In India, meanwhile, scientists recently spotted what could be a 550-million-year-old fossil among the cave paintings in the Bhimbetka Rock Shelters in Madhya Pradesh, the New York Times reports. And the archaeological field has lost a major figure, the Tehran Times reports, with the Iranian scholar Firouz Bagherzadeh dying at the age of 90. Curious about other recent archaeological developments? Claire Selvin asked experts for their picks of the greatest breakthroughs of the past decade in  ARTnews.

MWAZULU DIYABANZA, WHO HAS BEEN ARRESTED ON VARIOUS OCCASIONS for attempting to take African works now housed in European museums in order to repatriate them, spoke to the Guardian about his activities. “This restitution must be immediate and unconditional and carried out with dignity and respect—and it must happen everywhere in Europe,” he said. His future targets include the British Museum in London and the Vatican. A very different kind of politically motivated art theft is at the center of the new book, The Woman Who Stole Vermeer , which was written by Anthony Amore, the director of security at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. As Amore told WBUR, in 1974, Rose Dugdale stole 19 Old Masters, including a Vermeer, from Russborough House in Ireland with the aim of ransoming them for the relocation of two Irish Republican Army members imprisoned in England. Alas, Dugdale was caught and got six years. Amore thinks she was also involved in another Vermeer theft six weeks earlier. Also, for the record, he says that he is still hopeful that the bounty of paintings stolen in the notorious 1990 Gardner will be recovered.

The Digest

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is considering selling some of its works to help pay for the care of its collection. “This is the time when we need to keep our options open,” Max Hollein, the Met’s director, said. The Met’s former director, Thomas P. Campbell, said that such deaccessioning risked becoming “like crack cocaine to the addict—a rapid hit, that becomes a dependency.” [The New York Times]

Detroit artist Charles McGee, who cofounded the Contemporary Art Institute of Detroit, has died at the age of 96. His influence on the city “looms as large as his towering downtown murals,” Rip Rapson, the CEO of the Kresge Foundation, said. [The Detroit News]

The Louvre is preparing to open a conservation center that can hold a third of its collection in the north of France. Here is a look inside. [Architectural Digest]

While works by the pioneering modernist artist Florine Stettheimer almost never come up for sale, her market has been more active recently. However, Stettheimer expert Barbara Bloemink has identified a few of the offered pieces as fakes. [The New York Times]

Sotheby’s has published excerpts from the late artist Christo’s appointment books, to promote its upcoming sale of the collection he amassed with his wife and collaborator, Jeanne-Claude. They include notes about meetings with Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol and a shopping list to make bolognese sauce. [The Guardian]

The New York residence of architect Annabelle Selldorf, who’s designed spaces for Zwirner, Gagosian, and Skarsted, includes works by Franz West, Joseph Beuys, and Donald Judd . . . [WSJ. Magazine]

. . . and the Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn home of Museum of Modern Art collection specialist Kayla Dalle Molle sports a Marcel Wanders Studio sofa and a Morgan Spaulding coffee table. [Clever/Architectural Digest]

The Nam June Paik Art Center in Yongin, South Korea, has unveiled an augmented-reality app. [The Korea Herald]

The new film Black Art: In the Absence of Light premieres on HBO on Tuesday. Read Maximilíano Durón’s review of the “powerful and important documentary.” [ARTnews]

The Kicker

A FRENCH COURT HAS ORDERED THAT BRITISH DEVELOPER PATRICK DITER tear down the roughly $70 million chateau that he constructed in Provence because he built it without the proper permits. The ruling came down in December, but the New York Post and the Daily Mail have recently done the important work of compiling a trove of photographs of this mansion , which includes—to quote the Post —“two helipads, a salt water swimming pool, a medieval cloister, a bell tower and a greenhouse, plus 17 acres of gardens, vineyards, olive groves and lily ponds.” It also appears to contain a framed copy of Leonardo’s The Last Supper. The battle over the estate has been going on for more than a decade, but Diter is not giving up just yet. “Even the idea of demolishing Château Diter, which is an architectural masterpiece, is unimaginable and foolish,” his lawyer told Air Mail. “We’re going to fight to avoid this.”

Thank you for reading. We’ll see you tomorrow.

Tom of Finland, Untitled, 1965.

COURTESY THE ARTIST

Here’s a profile of Okwui Enwezor, who is readying his Venice Biennale and who hints he may be retiring from the biennial game: “This is exhausting,” he says. “In any case, there’s a need for other people to do them, and what other biennial should I go and do?” [The Wall Street Journal]

Edward Rothstein takes a look at the $44 million renovation and restoration at Stonehenge. [The New York Times]

Bloomberg’s charity arm wants museums to beef up their apps: “Bloomberg Philanthropies is set to announce on Tuesday that it is expanding its grant funding for cultural institutions’ digital projects, with $17 million for museums in New York and around the world.” [The Wall Street Journal]

Finland’s homoerotic Tom of Finland stamps are an international success. [AFP]

Former California Governor Arnold Schwartzenegger has revealed his
official portrait, a larger-than-life affair by Austrian artist
Gottfried Helnwein. [Associated Press]

“The Smithsonian Institution’s monumental 1796 Lansdowne portrait of George Washington is scheduled to undergo an 18-month restoration including X-raying and the removal of a discoloring layer of varnish, the National Portrait Gallery said on Monday.”[Reuters]

“BAM Construction has been named as the preferred bidder to build the V&A Dundee museum despite a row over claims it took part in blacklisting.” [BBC]

“Silas Martí around the opening of the 31st Bienal de São Paulo.” [Artforum]