Japanese artist Takashi Murakami poses for a portrait at the Blum & Poe gallery in Los Angeles, during the exhibition. In his distinctive “Superflat” style, which employs highly refined classical Japanese painting techniques to depict a super-charged mix of Pop, animé and otaku content within a flattened representational picture-plane, Murakami moves freely within an ever-expanding [...]

Joaquín Sorolla, Female Nude. Oil on canvas, 106 x 186 cm. 1902. The Museo del Prado has broken a ten year old attendance record with its Sorolla exhibition. More than 450,000 persons visited the exhibition which closed last Sunday. The director of the Museo del Prado, Miguel Zugaza, made the informaion public today saying that [...]

An employee from Bonham’s holds the remarkable sketchbook containing over 80 stunning watercolours by Count Amadeo Preziosi. A remarkable sketchbook containing over 80 stunning watercolours by Count Amadeo Preziosi, who left Malta to spend his life in Constantinople (Istanbul), is one of the highlights of Bonhams next Travel and Exploration Sale on 16 September in [...]

Detail from Paul Cézanne’s The Boy in the Red Vest. The painting was stolen from the Bührle Collection in Zurich in 2008. The last thing Bond villains and shadowy Mr Bigs want to worry about when buying a piece of art is where it came from. But for consumers who want to be as discerning [...]

Frank Auerbach, Head of Jake, 2008-9, oil on canvas, 56.2 x 56.2 cm./22 1/8 x 22 1/8 in. Frank Auerbach’s paintings are the full results of tremendous application. They may appear sudden -instantaneous even- but they are feats of concentration. Studied yet impulsive, ranging from darkness to radiance and from the declamatory to the subdued, [...]

Before and after pictures of a Banksy artwork in Stoke Newington, London. Council officials have painted over a Banksy graffito sketch from which a reworked version was derived as the cover artwork for the 2003 single Crazy Beat by the band Blur. The artwork – a cartoon of the royal family waving from a balcony [...]

The Queen’s Elm in London, once a renowned pub, has been turned by a group of artists into a temporary gallery. Three months ago Simon Tarrant, a 44-year-old painter here who has never had gallery representation and has had only two solo shows in his 15-year career, decided to try something different. He approached the [...]