Five Francis Bacon Paintings Have Been Stolen From a Madrid Home
Five paintings by British artist Francis Bacon worth an estimated €30m have been stolen from the Madrid home of their owner, according to Spanish media. Sources close to the investigation told El Pais on Sunday the theft appeared to have been a highly professional operation which took place while the owner was away, with the perpetrators disabling the alarm system. Click here to continue reading.

BP and Tate Museums End 26-Year Partnership
BP has decided to end its twenty-six-year sponsorship of the Tate group of art museums, one of Britain’s most high-profile cultural institutions, the energy giant and Tate said last Friday. The sponsorship has been the target of protesters for years, including after the Gulf of Mexico oil spill in 2010. Click here to continue reading.

Van Gogh Museum Hopes to Restore Sunflowers
One of Vincent van Gogh's vibrant Sunflowers paintings may take on renewed life, thanks to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. The Art Newspaper reports that the painting is being examined in a conservation studio "to keep it in better condition for future generations," according to a statement from the institution. They are scheduled to return to public view on March 24. Click here to continue reading.

A 10-Carat Blue Diamond Heads to Auction with a $35-Million Estimate
The largest oval fancy vivid blue diamond ever to appear at auction will cross the block at Sotheby’s Hong Kong on April 5. Headlining the auction house’s Magnificent Jewels and Jadeite Spring Sale, the rare stone weighs 10.10 carats, is internally flawless, and is estimated to fetch between HK$235 million and HK$280 million (or US$30 million to US$35 million). Click here to continue reading.

Drouot Auction House Staff Goes to Court Over Stolen Artworks
Forty art handlers and six auctioneers are in court in a theft case that has rocked Paris' Drouot auction house. The group is accused of stealing artworks and other treasures that were headed to the auction block, and then selling them at the very same auction house. Click here to continue reading.

Authorities Seize Indian Artifacts at Christie’s
US federal agents seized two Indian sandstone sculptures that are linked to the dealer Subhash Kapoor from Christie’s auction house in New York on March 11. Both works were due to be included in the March 15 sale of the Lahiri Collection of Indian and Himalayan art. Christie’s says that it had no knowledge that the works were stolen, The New York Times reports. Click here to continue reading.

A Fire Ravages Manchester’s Historic Wythenshawe Hall
The city of Manchester almost lost the historic Wythenshawe Hall this Tuesday to a fire that raged for hours. The blaze has since been extinguished. Dozens of firefighters from the Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Service were called to the site to contain the fire a little after 3:30 a.m., according to the UK's Independent Television News. Click here to continue reading.

A Look at the Frick's Van Dyck Exhibition
The synchronization of art, talent, money and power is a constant that was especially clear-cut in the 17th and 18th centuries, when kings were still considered semi-divine and the camera was not yet invented. This gave skilled portrait painters a signal importance. They produced likenesses—generally flattering—that affirmed the status of rulers and nobles for one another, their constituencies and posterity. Click here to continue reading.

The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Acquires 40 Works, Including a Major Hudson River School Painting
The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts has acquired more than forty works, including an enormous 1870 oil by the Hudson River School painter David Johnson, and a marble sculpture, white as a puffball, by Harriet Hosmer, considered the preeminent American female Neoclassical sculptor of the 19th century. Click here to continue reading.

Seattle Art Museum to Host Major Andrew Wyeth Retrospective in October
One of America’s best-known artists and some of the art world’s best-known landscapes have places on the list of exhibitions coming to the Seattle Art Museum in the next year, as well as civil-rights-era photography, 600 years of prints and drawings and textiles from around the globe. The schedule was announced last Friday at SAM’s annual preview luncheon downtown. Click here to continue reading.

The Forbidden City’s 18th-Century Garden to Open to the Public in 2020
I visited the Forbidden City in Beijing this past November, and it felt endless. Courtyard after courtyard led to one stunning peaked structure after the next, with decorative rock formations and quiet corridors running along the sides of the walled complex. It was also mobbed with people. Click here to continue reading.

A Battle Brews Between France and Britain Over Joan of Arc’s Ring
A dispute may be about to blow up between France and Britain over a ring that once belonged to the Medieval French heroine, Joan of Arc. The ring sold for nearly £300,000 at the London/Harwich-based TimeLine Auctions last month, but questions have arisen over the legality of its export. Click here to continue reading.

13 Arrested in Connection to Old Master Heist
Italian police have arrested thirteen suspects in connection to the stunning November heist of seventeen Old Master paintings worth €15 million ($16 million) from Verona's Castelvecchio Museum, reports the Association for Research into Crimes Against Art (ARCA). The suspects, who include eleven Moldovans and two Italians, were identified thanks to a joint investigation. Click here to continue reading.

Bronze Statue Removed from Cambridge University After Students Suggest It Be Returned to Nigeria
A bronze cockerel has been removed from display at Cambridge University after students complained it had been looted in a "punitive" British raid on what is now Nigeria. The Benin bronze, known as an "okukor," was bequeathed to Jesus College in 1930 by a former British Army officer. Click here to continue reading.

Dealers Speak Out Against 1stdibs' New Commissions Guidelines
On Tuesday evening, a sign was placed in the window of Lost City Arts, a high-end vintage design store in Lower Manhattan, saying the shop was closing early. Inside, thirty of the city’s top antiques dealers had gathered for a tense, hastily arranged meeting. Other dealers dialed in from Texas and California to hear the proceedings. The topic: the online antiques marketplace 1stdibs and its new approach for enforcing commissions. Click here to continue reading.

The Torlonia Family’s Storied Collection of Ancient Marble Sculptures Will Go on Public Display
The Torlonia family’s collection of ancient marble sculptures has long been the stuff of legend for art historians and archaeologists.Hidden away in three large rooms in one of the aristocratic family’s many Roman properties, the collection of over 600 marble, bronze and alabaster statues and reliefs has not been seen by outsiders for decades. Click here to continue reading.

Scientists Classify Fungi Dotting Famed Da Vinci Self-Portrait
A red chalk sketch from around 1512 CE, long believed to be a self-portrait by Leonardo da Vinci, has a glowering, bearded man’s face emerging from a swarm of brown spots. Kept safely in the vaults of the Biblioteca Reale in Turin, the portrait’s power, despite the imperfections, has even gained rumors of supposedly magical powers. Click here to continue reading.

Venice Tops List of Europe’s Most Endangered Heritage Sites
Venice—the city of labyrinthian canals, grand Palazzos, and the stage of what's arguably the most important contemporary art event in the world—has been declared the most endangered heritage site in Europe. The foreboding announcement was made in Venice by the heritage organization Europa Nostra, the Art Newspaper reports. Click here to continue reading.

San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum Receives Major Gift of Japanese Works on Paper
The Asian Art Museum is on a roll as it celebrates its 50th anniversary this year, with the recent unveiling of plans for a new temporary exhibition pavilion and, now, the announcement of a major gift of art. George Gund III, who died in 2013 at age 75, has left the museum a collection of 140 Japanese works in ink on paper, primarily from the Edo period (1615-1868). Click here to continue reading.

The Tastemakers: A Conversation with Better Homes & Gardens’ East Coast Editor, Eddie Ross
Eddie Ross’ career trajectory has been just as exciting and unexpected as his singular style. A trained chef from the Culinary Institute of America, Ross worked as a design, decorating and food editor for an array of well-respected publications, including House Beautiful, Martha Stewart Living and Food Network, before stepping into his role as Better Homes & Gardens’ East Coast Editor in 2013. Click here to continue reading.

Christie’s Ordered to Pay Insurance Company Over $700,000 for Art Destroyed in Hurricane Sandy
Christie’s Fine Art Storage Services will have to refund an insurance company for more than $700,000 it doled out to a gallery client after an entire art collection stored at their facility was decimated by Hurricane Sandy, an appeals court decided Thursday. Click here to continue reading.

The National Academy Museum is Selling Two of Its Fifth Avenue Buildings
Say goodbye to one of Museum Mile's underrated gems: After more than sixty years on Fifth Avenue, the National Academy Museum will sell the two buildings that make up its Upper East Side headquarters. The New York Times reports that the museum's board has decided to offload the two buildings, located at 1083 Fifth Avenue and 5 East 89th Street, because they had become too expensive. Click here to continue reading.

Designer Viktor Schreckengost’s Personal Collection Heads to Auction
The industrial designer and artist Viktor Schreckengost, who died in 2008 at 101, left behind a multitude of artifacts and documents related to his seven-decade career in Cleveland. Plans were announced for a museum in Cleveland devoted to his works, but the project stalled. Click here to continue reading.

Secret Chambers May Have Been Discovered in King Tut’s Tomb
For at least 3,339 years, nobody has seen what lies behind the west and north walls of the burial chamber of Tutankhamun.  But this secret of three millennia might not last much longer. On Thursday, Mamdouh Eldamaty, the Egyptian antiquities minister, held a press conference in Cairo to announce a tantalizing new piece of evidence. Click here to continue reading.

A German Museum Hopes to Buy Back Looted Kirchner Painting
The Wilhelm-Hack-Museum in Ludwigshafen, Germany, is seeking to raise funds to purchase back an Ernst Ludwig Kirchner painting after reaching a settlement with the heir of Alfred Hess, a Jewish shoe-manufacturer whose family was persecuted by the Nazis. The painting, The Judgement of Paris (1913), is a key Kirchner work and “a jewel in the collection” of the Wilhelm-Hack-Museum, says a statement from the museum. Click here to continue reading.