There was a little orchestrated flurry of drama here at the Prado a few sweltering days ago when the museum staged a news conference to announce what was hardly news: that “Colossus,” the famous, much reproduced Goya painting of a giant terrifying a landscape, may not be a Goya after all. Experts had been questioning [...]

Works by Francis Bacon have been big sellers at auction recently, and Christie’s sale of postwar and contemporary art here on Monday was no different. Four tenacious bidders vied for his “Three Studies for Self-Portrait” from 1975 in what became the evening’s longest bidding war, with two would-be buyers on the phone still running up [...]