COURTESY THE ART NEWSPAPER
The country of Japan will be donating $1 million to the Freer Gallery of Art and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery at the Smithsonian Museums of Asian Art. [Artforum]
Kenya and Costa Rica have pulled their national pavilions out of the Venice Biennale with only a week to go before the fair’s opening. [The Art Newspaper]
Stefan Knapp’s steel, glass and enamel mural installed on a wall of an abandoned department store in Carlstadt, New Jersey, once thought to be the largest mural in the world, is now in danger of permanent removal. [The New York Times]
English aristocrats are selling off their Bellottos: the Earl of Derby is selling a pair of paintings by Bernardo Bellotto £20.5 million, and the Howard family (descendants of the Earl of Carlisle) has announced that they will be auctioning off a Bellotto of their own (estimated £2.5-£3.5 million) at Sotheby’s in July.[The Art Newspaper]
Max Mara’s patronage of the arts goes way, way back. [The Wall Street Journal]
Leonardo da Vinci’s portrait of La Belle Ferronnière has returned to Milan for a show at the Palazzo Reale to coincide with the Milan Expo 2015, but her identity remains a mystery. [The Art Newspaper]
The infamous Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum art heist will be the subject of an upcoming film. [Deadline]
Henning Bohl’s “Fatal, Fatal, Kadath Fatal” at Karin Guenther Gallery in Hamburg. [Contemporary Art Daily]
Medieval art historians from the Getty Museum in L.A. are obsessed with Game of Thrones. [The New Yorker]