The tenth edition of Master Drawings in New York January 24 – February 1, 2015 promises to be the best ever. More than thirty of the world’s leading dealers are coming to New York City to offer for sale master art works in pencil, pen and ink, chalk and charcoal, as well as oil on paper sketches and watercolors, created by iconic artists working in the 16th to 21st centuries. Each exhibition is hosted by an expert specialist and many works on offer are newly discovered or have not been seen on the market in decades, if at all.

In addition, Margot Gordon and Crispian Riley-Smith, co-founders of Master Drawings in New York, announced that John Marciari, the new head of the Department of Drawings and Prints at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York, will provide the introduction for the 2015 Master Drawings in New York brochure.

The distinguished San Francisco Fall Antiques Show (SFFAS) will kick off its 33rd iteration with a preview gala on Wednesday, October 22. The event will give collectors, enthusiasts, and SFFAS supporters exclusive access to the show’s remarkable offerings before it opens to the public for its four-day run on Thursday, October 23. Proceeds from the gala will benefit Enterprise for High School Students, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that helps Bay Area youths develop life skills vital to the successful transition from high school to college and the world of work.

Held in the Fort Mason Center’s Festival Pavilion in the upscale Marina District, the SFFAS will bring together approximately sixty preeminent dealers from across the United States and Europe.

Sotheby’s  “Magnificent Jewels and Noble Jewels” in Geneva will offer jewels with sought-after royal provenance along with other impressive gems such as a Kashmir sapphire weighing 27.54 carats (Est. $3.0-6.0 million) and the 8.62-carat “Graff Ruby” (Est. $6.8‑9.0 million), as well as exquisite vintage pieces by Cartier and Bulgari.

In total, the 470 assembled lots of the November 12 sale are expected to bring in excess of $62 million.

A painting of the French king Henri III (1551-89) that disappeared from the Louvre during the Second World War turned up at a Paris auction last week. The work was found by a curator at the Château de Blois thanks to an internet search alert, and will soon return to the Louvre.

The small portrait depicting Henri III at prayer, estimated at €400-€600, was due to be sold on Friday, 17 October, in an auction of antique paintings, furniture and art objects held by Ader-Nordmann at the Hôtel Drouot.

Though he died at age 27 in 1988, artist Jean-Michel Basquiat remains among the brightest of American art stars. For a short time, he was a street artist in New York's burgeoning 1970s graffiti scene. His tag, SAMO, became a graffiti icon.

Not long after, Basquiat climbed to the highest rungs of the rarified Manhattan art world, eventually even collaborating on paintings with pop legend Andy Warhol. His celebrity was almost unparalleled among visual artists. His expressionist paintings now hang in museums across the globe and sell for tens of millions. Reebok recently released a line of athletic shoes decorated with Basquiat images.

The Smithsonian Institution said on Monday that it planned to raise $1.5 billion by 2017 in its first institution-wide fundraising campaign and had already raised more than $1 billion of that sum from private individuals, foundations, corporations and other donors.

In an era of tighter federal funding the Smithsonian is increasing its private fundraising efforts to pay for its stepped-up ambitions at its sprawling network of museums and galleries, the National Zoological Park and research centers, one of the largest collections of museum and research centers in the world.

In photographic wanderings around New York City, Paul Strand sometimes used a fake lens so his subjects wouldn’t know their pictures were being taken.

Partly by this means, he brought greater spontaneity and realism into the photographer’s worldview circa World War I, leading an art form that had recently imitated painting into the modern age on its own terms.

Until his death in 1976, Strand, whom the Philadelphia Museum of Art regards as “one of the greatest photographers in the history of the medium,” produced work infused with left-of-center social views and curiosity about people and localities all over the globe.

In Blair’s defence, his Victorian guru was so prolific in so many fields, it’s near-impossible to keep track of all he did. Morris is perhaps best known nowadays for his densely-patterned, curly-leaf wallpaper, so popular in middle class homes in the Seventies.

Nothing could be more tranquil than the woman in a shimmering painting by Claude Monet, forecast to set a new record for a portrait by the artist.

He captured Alice Hoschedé relaxing in a shady corner of his sunny French garden – but appearances were deceptive: in 1881 storm clouds were about to burst around the household.

The painting, "Alice Hoschedé au jardin," will be auctioned at Sotheby’s in New York in November, estimated at up to $35m (£22m).

A Renaissance silver-gilt and enamel salt cellar, bequeathed by collector Michael Wellby to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, has been identified as Nazi loot. It will thus be returned to the descendants of its pre-WWII owner.

The intricate piece is one of the 500 silverware items—believed to be worth in excess of £10 million—donated to the museum in 2012 by Wellby, a former friend of Professor Timothy Wilson, the museum's Keeper of Western Art.

A painting from Cy Twombly’s celebrated “blackboard” series could set a record for the artist at auction. “Untitled” (1970) is expected to fetch between $35 million and $55 million on November 12 at Christie’s in New York. Before being offered to buyers at the auction house’s Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Sale, the work will be exhibited in London and San Francisco.

Twombly, who is best known for his calligraphic, graffiti-like paintings, executed his “blackboard” series  between 1966 and 1971. Using contrasting lines against a light or dark background, these rhythmic works feature geometric shapes, words, letters, and numbers, calling to mind a classroom blackboard or a pupil’s notebook. With its swirling landscape of loops drawn in white crayon against a dark gray background, “Untitled” is hypnotic, entrancing the viewer with its formulaic loops.

When Christie's auctioned off Edgar Degas' “Danseuses” for nearly $11 million in 2009, the catalog noted that the masterpiece was being sold as part of a restitution agreement with the “heirs of Ludwig and Margret Kainer,” German Jews whose vast art collection was seized by the Nazis in the years leading up to World War II.

But now a dozen relatives of the Kainers are stepping forward to object. Not only did they fail to benefit from that sale, they say they were never even told about it, or any other auctions of works once owned by the couple, including pieces by Monet and Renoir.

In mid-september the German casino conglomerate Westspiel announced their plan to sell "Triple Elvis"(1963) and "Four Marlons" (1966) at Christie’s, New York in November. The paintings are expected to fetch over €100 million or £80 million. A petition has since been sent by twenty-six museum directors in Germany’s North Rhine-Westphalia to the regional government, demanding it prevent the auction of two works by Andy Warhol, reports "Die Welt."

In the petition, the directors claim that the sale “contravenes international conventions” whose ultimate goal is to “protect public cultural heritage.” They fear the sale could set a very dangerous precedent that could become a “controversial political issue with considerable ripple effect.”

A window on the private world of China’s Ming and Qing emperors opens october 18, when some 200 works — portraits, costumes, and palace furnishings such as bronzes, lacquerware, and jade—drawn from the holdings of the Palace Museum in Beijing go on view at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. The exhibition surveys the seminal role of imperial rituals and religion in the Forbidden City, along with hidden aspects of court life from the mid 14th through early 19th centuries.

It keeps no permanent collection, and its exhibition focus is on new artwork. But the past is ever-present at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.

In fact, an old hand-drawn map of the site, dating to when this sprawling campus of 26 buildings was home to Arnold Print Works, serves just fine as a visual aid for museum director Joseph C. Thompson as he stands in a conference room and points out spots on the museum campus that are targeted for an ambitious expansion plan.

Buildings that now showcase art are marked on the old map as blacksmith shops and coal sheds.

Transcendence comes cheap and easy at "Matisse and Friends," the new exhibit at the Denver Art Museum, and, for most of us, that's a terrific help. We're all busy, no?

The show has just 14 paintings, and you can tour through, meaningfully, in less than time than it takes to watch a rerun of "Law & Order." See it on your lunch hour, or while the kids are at ballet class. Make it a date and get to the romance without having to be all that charming in the buildup.

Philippe Vergne, the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, has started talking to Frank Gehry about the possibility of renovating the museum’s Geffen Contemporary branch downtown. The US architect oversaw the initial conversion of warehouses in the early 1980s. The space, which measures 55,000 sq. ft, has proved popular with artists but does not have adequate climate controls for many art loans.

Gehry told "The Art Newspaper" during a fuller interview about a range of museum projects: “Philippe asked me to help him. I don’t think they have a lot of money at this point. He asked about an upgrade of the entrance and some work on the inside. I guess they’re going to try to [install] mechanical systems.”

An early portrait by Pablo Picasso recently rediscovered in Sweden will go up for auction at Stockholms Auktionsverk this week. "Portrait d’homme, Dionís Renart" was painted in 1899 when the artist was just 18 years old. It depicts his good friend at the time, fellow-artist Dionís Renart i Garcia with whom he reveled in bohemian Barcelona’s cafe Els Quatre Gats. The painting is signed with his early moniker P. Ruiz P.

The identification of the portrait’s subject is a recent feat, perhaps first recorded in the small catalogue produced to accompany the portrait’s sale in Stockholm on October 22nd.

A man was arrested early Sunday at the Whitney Museum of American Art after he spray-painted graffiti on a blank wall at the Jeff Koons retrospective during a 36-hour event to close the popular exhibit.

The man, Christopher Johnson, 33, of Manhattan, was arrested on charges of criminal mischief, making graffiti, possession of a graffiti instrument and criminal nuisance, the police said. He was taken into custody by police after he struggled with the museum’s security guards.