News and Writing on Art and Art History | 27th April Katrina Grant The reading habits of medieval people have been studied by Dr Kathryn Rudy, of St Andrews University, by looking at the dirt marks on pages. Fancy a touch of art history trainspotting? Bendor Grosvenor is asking his readers spot identifiable ‘unknown portraits’ in the collections posted online as part of the BBC Your Paintings project. Conservation scientists at the Van Gogh museum investigate why his yellow hues are darkening. Many fragments of the rare Egyptian Book of the Dead have been discovered by an Egyptologist in Queensland Museum. National Gallery of Art in Washington extends its hours to allow for crowds coming to see not its latest blockbuster exhibition but a small exhibition on 18th century Japanese painting. The newly refurbished Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney reaches 100,000 visitors three…

Read more →

Recent News and Writing about Art and Art History Katrina Grant Photos in colour from early twentieth-century Russia by photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii who took thousands of vividly coloured photographs of the last days of the Russian Empire. In a move that is both bizarre and a sign of the times in particular for galleries the US the San Francisco Museum of Art buys a new Edward Hopper painting – ‘Intermission’ – using funds raised by selling off their old Hopper – ‘Bridle Path’. Wondering what a synchotron can do for art historians? Well a collaboration between scientists and art historians  has uncovered a portrait of Sir Arthur Streeton. Greek police have recovered an ancient Greek kore statue that was hidden in a goat pen near Athens. The Guardian reports that Rembrandt’s painting The Old Rabbi, housed at Woburn Abbey…

Read more →