Monday, August 03, 2026

Dresden museums mark 500 years since the birth of Elector Augustus of Saxony

Game piece with the portrait of Elector Augustus of Saxony, Heinrich Rappusch the Elder, Berlin before 1591 © Armoury, Dresden State Art Collections, Photo: Jürgen Lösel.
DRESDEN.— The Dresden State Art Collections are marking the 500th anniversary of the birth of Elector Augustus of Saxony with a year-long program examining the ruler whose passion for art, science and collecting helped lay the foundations of one of Europe’s most important museum networks.

New Zimbabwean dinosaur species named by museum scientist reveals Africa's hidden history

LONDON.— A newly discovered dinosaur is shining a light on an important moment in the evolution of dinosaurs. Discovered on the shore of Lake Kariba in Zimbabwe, Musango matusadonaensis opens a window into the Late Triassic around 210 million years ago. This was the time dinosaurs were beginning to spread around the planet as they moved towards becoming Earth’s dominant animals. Understanding how dinosaurs moved from being a relatively small part of life in the Triassic to a major part of the Jurassic and Cretaceous ecosystems that followed is still a major area of research. Fossils from Africa may hold the answer, as they have historically been understudied compared to sites in Europe and North America. A team of British, South African and Zimbabwean scientists have been working to change this as part of research in Zimbabwe. The team previously named Musankwa sanyatiensis as just the fourth dinosaur ever described from the country in 2024, with Musango now the fifth.
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Spencer Finch opens first Los Angeles exhibition at Lisson Gallery

LOS ANGELES, CA.— Lisson is presenting Balboa of House and Garden, Spencer Finch’s first exhibition in Los Angeles and his inaugural presentation with the gallery in the United States. Comprised entirely of new work, the exhibition brings together over fifty unique works on paper, a site-specific skylight installation, and a monumental outdoor sculpture, extending Finch’s longstanding exploration of light, perception, memory, and the emotional resonance embedded within ordinary experience. The presentation at Lisson also coincides with the unveiling of Finch’s site-specific commission at the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago this summer. At the center of the Los Angeles exhibition are Finch’s Gorgeous Nothings, a new series of works on paper inspired by Emily Dickinson’s practice of composing poems on discarded envelopes. Finch meticulously recreates envelopes collected from the street, his personal correspondence, and the junk mail delivered to the studio by hand on archival
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Raoul Dufy retrospective opens in Deauville with 100 works from the Centre Pompidou

DEAUVILLE.— A major retrospective devoted to Raoul Dufy has opened at Les Franciscaines in Deauville, bringing together approximately 100 works that reveal an artist whose instantly recognizable paintings represented only one part of a remarkably varied career. On view through September 20, 2026, “Raoul Dufy: The Melody of Happiness” is the first exhibition produced through a new partnership between Les Franciscaines and the Centre Pompidou. Drawing extensively from the holdings of the Musée national d’art moderne, the exhibition includes around 60 paintings alongside drawings, prints, ceramics and textile works. Born in Le Havre in 1877, Dufy became one of the most popular French artists of the first half of the 20th century. His luminous colors, calligraphic lines and images of concerts, regattas, fashionable gatherings and racecourses helped establish
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Louvre's Galerie d'Apollon reopens

PARIS.— Closed since it was robbed on 19 October 2025, the Galerie d'Apollon has reopened its doors to the public on 22 July 2026. The collection of precious objects it held was removed, letting visitors lend their full attention to the painted and sculpted décor. The gallery, itself designed as an artwork in the 17th century, thus returns to its ceremonial function. It also becomes a place to wander and contemplate freely at the heart of the museum, linking the Rotonde d'Apollon to the Salon Carré, opening onto the Grande Galerie. A royal gallery decorated by the greatest French artists (Charles Le Brun, François Girardon, Jean-Jacques Lagrenée, Eugène Delacroix…), the Galerie d'Apollon was a model for the Château de Versailles's Hall of Mirrors. Designed as a reception gallery for Louis XIV, it features exceptional decoration. Some 61.34 metres long, with a ceiling 15 metres high, for a total surface of 600 square metres, it was built over 350 years ago and decorated
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British Library appoints Senior Director of Development

LONDON.— The British Library announced the appointment of Rachel Calderón as Senior Director of Development. She will lead the Library’s philanthropy team and help drive support for one of the world’s leading cultural and research institutions. Rachel joins the Library from Blood Cancer UK where she was Associate Director of Fundraising. Prior to joining Blood Cancer UK, Rachel spent ten years at King’s College London, where she held a range of senior fundraising roles and was part of the team that successfully delivered the £500 million World questions | King’s answers campaign, securing major philanthropic investment in research, education and innovation. Rachel Calderón, Senior Director of Development at the British Library, said: ‘I am very excited to join the British Library at this pivotal moment as it seeks reimagine what it means to be a national library in the 21st century and transform its spaces in London and Yorkshire. I look forward to
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Centre Pompidou adds 3,060 works as collection grows during historic transition

PARIS.— The Centre Pompidou added 3,060 works by 230 artists to the collection of the Musée national d’art moderne in 2025, continuing an ambitious acquisitions program even as its historic Paris building entered a period of major renovation. The acquisitions range from landmark works of postwar European art to experimental film, photography, design, comics, street art and projects involving artificial intelligence. Together, they show an institution attempting to broaden the conventional story of modernism while preparing for the enormous practical challenge of caring for a collection that now approaches 150,000 works. When the Centre Pompidou opened in 1977, the Musée national d’art moderne held approximately 17,000 objects. Nearly half a century later, the museum describes its holdings as the largest collection of modern and contemporary art in Europe. The scale of the 2025 intake is striking, although the figure is partly explained by
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"Follow the Thread!" opens in Toulon with a century of textile innovation

TOULON.— Textiles move from the margins of decoration to the center of modern design in a new exhibition at the Hôtel des Arts TPM in Toulon, where approximately 100 works trace how fibers, fabrics and woven structures have reshaped furniture, architecture and the objects of everyday life. Now open and continuing through October 31, 2026, “Follow the Thread! Design & Textiles” brings together the work of approximately 40 designers from France’s national collections. The exhibition spans the modern avant-garde through contemporary experiments with digital manufacturing, recycled fibers and environmentally responsible production. Organized with the Centre Pompidou, the Toulon Provence Méditerranée metropolitan authority, the Manufactures nationales, Sèvres & Mobilier national, the Centre national des arts plastiques and the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, the exhibition argues that textiles have
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Berlin exhibition explores Tyrol between Alpine tradition and climate crisis

BERLIN.— The Museum of European Cultures is turning its attention to Tyrol this summer with an exhibition and a month-long program examining the Austrian region beyond the familiar image of pristine peaks, picturesque villages and Alpine customs. Opening at the museum’s Berlin-Dahlem location, “The Mountains of Tyrol” brings together historical objects, contemporary art, interviews and interactive displays to explore the Alps as a cultural, ecological and social landscape. The exhibition runs from July 29, 2026, through April 25, 2027, while the accompanying European Cultural Days: Tyrol take place from July 26 through August 23, 2026. Rather than presenting the mountains as an untouched wilderness, the exhibition looks at a landscape shaped over centuries by farming, trade, transportation, tourism and human settlement. It also considers the growing
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Vasarely Foundation marks 50 years with exhibition on art, architecture and a planned visual revolution

AIX-EN-PROVENCE.— Fifty years after Victor Vasarely opened his extraordinary Architectonic Center in Aix-en-Provence, a new exhibition examines the building not simply as a museum for his optical art but as the physical center of a much more ambitious project: a revolution in the production, ownership and social function of art. Now open through November 1, 2026, “Project for a Revolution: Vasarely and Architecture” is jointly organized by the Vasarely Foundation and the Centre Pompidou. The exhibition brings together architectural drawings, models, construction documents, photographs, films, publications, artworks and unrealized urban projects to reconstruct the ideas behind one of the most unusual artist-designed buildings of the 20th century. The exhibition coincides with the 50th anniversary of the Foundation’s inauguration in 1976. Vasarely called the building the Centre architectonique, or Architectonic Center, emphasizing that it was intended to be more than a conventional museum.
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Japan House London presents first photography exhibition with Kyotographie

LONDON.— Japan House London’s first photography exhibition, Kyotographie: Kawada Kikuji x Iwane Ai (previously announced as Invisible), presents two major Japanese photographers: Kawada Kikuji (b. 1933) and Iwane Ai (b.1975), and opens on 3 June 2026. Kawada’s diverse and prolific output is often interpreted as an ever-evolving view of Japan’s identity, starting in the years of national reconstruction following World War II. He came to prominence in the 1960s, when he founded the VIVO collective, a groundbreaking group of emerging photographers, and was exhibited at MoMA, New York in 1974. In 2011, he received a lifetime achievement award from the Photographic Society of Japan. Iwane hails from Tokyo and attended high school in the United States. Much of her work is transnational in nature, such as her series Kipuka (2018), exploring the lives of Japanese immigrants in Hawaii. Originally
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Musée d'Orsay and Orangerie announce ambitious season spanning Mary Cassatt, Monet and the Statue of Liberty

PARIS.— The Musée d’Orsay and Musée de l’Orangerie have unveiled an exhibition program for autumn 2026 through summer 2027 that moves between major historical reassessments, contemporary interventions and new experiments in virtual reality and museum outreach. The season’s leading projects include France’s first major national-museum exhibition devoted to Mary Cassatt, an exploration of Auguste Bartholdi’s creation of the Statue of Liberty, a centenary program around Claude Monet and the Water Lilies, and a new installation by American artist Jenny Holzer. Together, the exhibitions reveal an institution seeking to reconsider familiar figures through current questions of independence,
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"The Sea Is Your Mirror" opens at Saint-Germain Abbey with works from the Centre Pompidou

AUXERRE.— The sea becomes a mirror for desire, imagination and environmental unease in a new exhibition at Saint-Germain Abbey in Auxerre, where works by Peter Doig, Man Ray, Robert Delaunay, Jean Painlevé and a younger generation of international artists explore humanity’s enduring fascination with the marine world. Now open through November 1, 2026, “The Sea Is Your Mirror” brings selections from the Centre Pompidou’s modern and contemporary art collection into one of Auxerre’s most historically layered sites. The exhibition is the fifth developed through a partnership established in 2022 between the City of Auxerre and the Centre Pompidou. It also forms part of the museum’s Constellation program, created to extend its
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One is never satisfied with the portrait of a person one knows.
Goethe

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Marc Padeu explores time, nature, and faith in new London exhibition

Larkin Durey is presenting Memento Vivere, the artist’s sixth solo exhibition at the gallery. Marc Padeu works with the tradition of narrative painting, employing the language and stories of the Old Masters and Christianity to depict contemporary Cameroon and the continuing legacy of colonialism. This new suite of paintings explores the multiplicity of time and the human tendency to behave as if we have the means to control it. Returning to the communities he knows who live and work on the cocoa plantations, Padeu situates his characters within the cycles and seasons of the natural world. Days follow one another, harvests come round again and yet, despite this ebb and flow of life, his figures are caught outside of time, slipping between past, present and future. Drawing upon Seneca’s writings and the principles of Stoicism, which emphasise

New exhibition explores the surprising animal muses behind some of the world's greatest artist performers

The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts opened Unleashed: Pets of the Performing Arts, a new exhibition that pulls from the Library’s archival material to tell the stories of the profound ways pets shaped the lives of some of the world’s most consequential performers. The exhibition features artists like Josephine Baker, Anna Pavlova, and Lou Reed, and their beloved pets. It relies on the Library for the Performing Arts’s collections including images snapped by photographers such as Martha Swope and William P. Gottlieb; also audio and video recordings, personal letters, and other rare historical documents to bring these unique human-and-animal relationships to life. Unleashed is the result of collaboration across the Library for the Performing Arts’s three research divisions, the Music and Recorded Sound Division, the Billy

Sarah Addezio named Programme Delivery Director for UK collections digitisation

Sarah Addezio has been appointed as Programme Delivery Director for DiSSCo UK at the Natural History Museum bringing experience of leading complex, multi-partner programmes to support delivery of this ambitious national initiative · DiSSCo UK is a £155 million, 10-year programme to digitise the UK’s natural science collections · DiSSCo UK is led by the UKRI Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Natural History Museum and involves partners from across the UK, with hubs in Scotland, Wales and the West, and central England · Digitised specimens are being used to model species’ responses to climate change, food security, preventing zoonotic diseases in humans, and to measure the impact of deep sea mining · Artificial intelligence will unlock new ways of learning from collections data · UK natural science collections

Tolarno Galleries presents Danie Mellor's new mixed-media exhibition

Tolarno Galleries is presenting Danie Mellor’s new exhibition of mixed-media works, Awake (in the Dream). On display across both gallery spaces, this commanding new series is a recent pivot in Mellor’s approach to his imagery, combining painting and photography in each of the works. “The images are both painterly and photographic,” Mellor says of the unique works. “Each piece combines mediums that are important in my research and practice, so they almost transcend categorisation.’ The layered pictorial elements in this body of work are composed of photographs by Mellor and historical images, including portraits and postcards taken in the late 19th and early 20thCenturies by photographers such as Alfred Atkinson and Dr Walter Roth, the protector of Aboriginals in Queensland. Mellor creates a visual archaeology of old and ne

Yancey Richardson presents exhibition tracing American landscape photography

Yancey Richardson is presenting Manifest and Sublime, an exhibition that considers the ever-evolving relationship between photography and the American landscape. To explore how photography has represented the landscape in ways that have changed as dramatically as the country itself, the exhibition brings together works that span the medium’s history, from mammoth plate albumen prints made by Carleton Watkins in Yosemite National Park to contemporary daguerreotypes made by Binh Danh in the very same place. Whether surveying the immensity of nature or lamenting the scale of change being inflicted upon it, the images in Manifest and Sublime return time and again to a landscape no less beautiful for the way it has been remade by human intervention. Featuring work by Ansel Adams, Robert Adams, Diane Arbus, Binh Danh,

Royal Academy of Arts hosts first major Richard Dadd retrospective in over 50 years

The Royal Academy of Arts presents a survey of the Victorian artist Richard Dadd (1817–1886). The exhibition is the first major retrospective devoted to Dadd in over 50 years, bringing together around 100 oil paintings, watercolours and drawings. Organised according to the key phases of the artist’s life, it explores his early years in London as a student at the Royal Academy Schools, his travels, and the final 42 years of his life as a patient in Bethlem and Broadmoor Hospitals. Best known for his fairy scenes drawn from Shakespearean subjects, Dadd’s paintings are distinguished by their extraordinary intricacy and imaginative intensity. Recognised early for his remarkable skill at rendering detail, he was invited in 1842 on an ambitious tour across the Eastern Mediterranean that would shape the course of his life and work. The experience

Film Forum to host US theatrical premiere of Kent Jones' Late Fame

Film Forum will present the U.S. theatrical premiere of Kent Jones’ Late Fame on Friday, August 7. Willem Dafoe is Ed Saxberger, a postal worker whose former life as a downtown poet in late-70s New York is rediscovered by a young admirer (Edmund Donovan) and his “Enthusiasm Society,” a group of 20-somethings with a comically romanticized sense of the past. In the company of his new friends, including the mysterious and mercurial Gloria (Lee of Past Lives), Ed has the uncanny feeling of merging with his younger self. Directed by Kent Jones from a witty, razor-sharp script by Samy Burch (May December), Late Fame  is a funny, lively, poignant, and occasionally haunting New York story. Late Fame had its world premiere at the 2025 Venice Film Festival, and went on to screen at the 2025 New York Film Festival, Viennale,

Nicola Vassell Gallery celebrates fifth anniversary with group exhibition Follow Through

On the occasion of its fifth anniversary, Nicola Vassell Gallery presents Follow Through, a group exhibition that reaffirms the gallery’s founding commitment to artistic practices grounded in inquiry, dialogue, and expanded historical awareness. Bringing together new and recent works by Alvaro Barrington, Julia Chiang, Adebunmi Gbadebo, Pam Glick, Alteronce Gumby, Na Kim, Che Lovelace, Eva Robarts, George Rouy, Elizabeth Schwaiger, Ming Smith, Uman and Alberta Whittle, the exhibition highlights artists who have helped shape—and will continue to define—the gallery’s evolving program. Since its founding in 2021, Nicola Vassell Gallery has cultivated a program attentive to the ways artistic inquiry can reframe inherited narratives and imagine alternative futures. Central to this vision is an ongoing engagement with artists whose practices

October Gallery pairs new works by Xanthe Somers and Yacout Hamdouch

October Gallery continues its season of Contemporary African Art, with a stimulating exhibition that pairs new works by Zimbabwean ceramicist, Xanthe Somers, with colourful paintings by Moroccan artist Yacout Hamdouch, who is exhibiting at the gallery for the first time. In our second gallery space, a Spotlight on selected photographic works by internationally renowned photographer, James Barnor, complements this vital and energetic exhibition. Informed by postcolonial insights, Somers introduces a new series, Carer, Cleaner, Mother, Maker, as she continues to explore her underlying themes: the work of women, the exploitation of cheap labour and the impact of eco-racist practices throughout the Global South. Her practice is situated within the political and historical context of an area in Zimbabwe deeply affected by the colonial construction

Tish Murtha retrospectives paired with new work by Kuba Ryniewicz at Baltic

Close to Home is a landmark exhibition curated by Baltic that brings together four major series by celebrated documentary photographer Tish Murtha, alongside a newly commissioned body of work by Newcastle-based artist Kuba Ryniewicz. Born in South Shields in 1956, Murtha returned to Newcastle after university to document life in her community of Elswick. Her photographs capture the social impact of industrial decline with honesty, empathy and urgency, offering a powerful account of working-class life in the North East during the late twentieth century. Developed in close collaboration with Murtha’s daughter, Ella Murtha, the exhibition honours Tish’s vision and the ongoing stewardship of her archive. Her work remains a vital record of lived experience and a compelling reminder of the inequalities that continue to shape communities
Flashback: On a day like today, French designer Louis Vuitton was born
Louis Vuitton (4 August 1821 - 27 February 1892), was the founder of the world-famous Louis Vuitton brand of leather goods now owned by LVMH. Prior to this, he had been appointed as trunk-maker to Empress Eugénie de Montijo, wife of Napoleon. In this image: In the courtyard of the Asnières workshops, around 1888, Louis, Georges and Gaston L. Vuitton (sitting on a Bed trunk) © LOUIS VUITTON ARCHIVES.

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