This fall, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, presents "Goya: Order and Disorder," a landmark exhibition dedicated to Spanish master Francisco Goya (1746–1828). The largest retrospective of the artist to take place in America in 25 years features 170 paintings, prints and drawings—offering the rare opportunity to examine Goya’s powers of observation and invention across the full range of his work. The MFA welcomes many loans from Europe and the US, including 21 works from the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid, along with loans from the Musée du Louvre, the Galleria degli Uffizi, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art (Washington) and private collections. "Goya: Order and Disorder" includes some 60 works from the MFA’s collection of Goya’s works on paper, one of the most important in the world. Many of these prints and drawings have not been on view in Boston in 25 years. Employed as a court painter by four successive rulers of Spain, Goya managed to explore an extraordinarily wide range of subjects, genres and formats. From the striking portrait "Duchess of Alba" (1797) from the Hispanic Society of America, to the tour de force of Goya’s "Seated Giant" (by 1818) in the MFA’s collection, to his drawings of lunacy, the works on view demonstrate the artist’s fluency across media.

After two years of fundraising, Oxford’s Bodleian Libraries have finally secured the £2.25 million (approx. $3.6 million) necessary to buy the personal archive of early photography pioneer William Henry Fox Talbot. Although Daguerre is often credited with the invention of photography, Fox Talbot’s book “Pencil of Nature” was an early development for paper-based processes and the first photographically-illustrated book. The archive includes objects photographed in the book, documents relating to both his work and his personal life, and many other items. The Bodleian Libraries have several plans in the works for the archive including a 2017 exhibition, a catalogue raisonné of his work, and an online archive for scholarly research.

The Swiss art gallery named as the sole heir of reclusive German art collector Cornelius Gurlitt is to accept his bequest of masterpieces which include works looted by the Nazis from Jews, a Swiss paper reported on Sunday.

Gurlitt, who died in May aged 81, had secretly stored hundreds of works by the likes of Chagall and Picasso at his Munich apartment and a house in nearby Salzburg, Austria.

The collection, worth an estimated 1 billion euros (0.78 billion pounds), contains an as yet undetermined number of works taken by the Nazis from their Jewish owners during World War Two.

Last month, Colby College Museum of Art put on a view a 1968 painting by Joan Mitchell that museum director Sharon Corwin believes is the best example of abstract expressionism in Maine. Next month, the Portland Museum of Art will unveil an 8-foot-tall steel “Seven” sculpture by Robert Indiana, once rejected by the Prince of Monaco, in the pedestrian plaza out front.

The two works share few similarities, but they represent the latest high-profile acquisitions by two leading museums in Maine and highlight the challenges facing curators and museum directors as they shape collections across the state.

In both instances, the museums acquired the art because benefactors took personal interest in bringing it to Maine.

Archaeologists unearthing a huge ancient burial site at Amphipolis in northern Greece have uncovered a large floor mosaic. The mosaic - 3m (10ft) wide and 4.5m (15ft) long - depicts a man with a laurel wreath driving a chariot drawn by horses and led by the god Hermes.

The burial site is said to be the largest ever found in Greece. It dates from the late 4th Century BC, spurring speculation that it is linked to Alexander the Great of Macedon.

At its recent meeting, the Stanford University Board of Trustees took an early evening stroll among the modern and contemporary American paintings and sculptures in the new Anderson Collection at Stanford University.

Their visit followed an in-depth presentation by Alexander Nemerov, a Stanford scholar of American art, on Jackson Pollock's "Lucifer," one of its most important works, and a talk by Jason Linetzky, the inaugural director of the Anderson Collection at Stanford University, on the history of the collection, which includes more than 100 works of art.

An art collection amassed by the late movie star Lauren Bacall, including eight sculptures by Henry Moore, will go under the hammer next year in New York, Bonhams auction house said on Friday.

Bacall, the husky voiced actress who was married to and appeared with Humphrey Bogart in films such as "The Big Sleep" and "Key Largo," died in August in New York at the age of 89.

The Bacall Collection, estimated to be worth $3 million, will be sold at Bonhams in March 2015.

  Willem de Kooning, a pioneer of Abstract Expressionism, is best known for his moody, gestural paintings that flutter between figuration and abstraction. It wasn’t until he was 65 and already a celebrated artist that he began experimenting with sculpture, the least-known aspect of his oeuvre. While in Rome in 1969, de Kooning began making small clay sculptures, soon moving on to produce large-scale bronze works. Made by building-up layers of wet clay on wood and metal armatures, these sculptures echoed the dynamic energy that pervaded de Kooning’s painted figures.

Between 1969 and 1974, de Kooning created twenty-five sculptures, including “Clamdigger,” which will be offered at Christie’s next month.

The New York Studio School’s Whitney Studio in Greenwich Village has been designated a “National Treasure” by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, according to an announcement from the organization today. The building was constructed in 1877 as a carriage house but was converted by art patron Getrude Vanderbilt Whitney in 1907 into a studio and salon.

The Whitney Studio’s ornate interior was designed by Robert Winthrop Chanler, whom Whitney commissioned in 1918. Today, the structure and its decorative elements are badly in need of repair and restoration, with the New York Studio School estimating the cost of the project at $2.2 million.

The Fine Art Society – established in 1876 – will on Friday open a show paying tribute to one of the most influential artists of all time, Marcel Duchamp.

The exhibition features 50 artists showing works under the title "What Marcel Duchamp Taught Me." Kate Bryan, the society’s director of contemporary art, said art historians and critics always talked about the legacy of Duchamp, but far less was heard from artists.

“To be honest, the more you study Duchamp, the less you know – he was so full of contradictions – so I thought the best thing to do was ask the artists.”

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is organizing a major exhibition on the Seljuks, whose medieval Islamic empire expanded from central Asia into much of modern Anatolia in Turkey, without loans from Turkey, "The Art Newspaper" has learned. Experts fear that loans from any collections in Iran or Russia will also be missing in the Met’s show.

The Met’s problem securing Turkish loans echoes those surrounding the British Museum’s exhibition on the Hajj, which went ahead in London in 2012 without Turkish artifacts after tangled disputes over an inscribed stele with a relief of Herakles, which have yet to be resolved.

The Historic Districts Council, which can influence the city’s decisions but has no official role, has come out in opposition to the Frick Collection’s planned expansion, the council announced on Wednesday.

The council’s public review committee — which examines proposals for work on landmark buildings that are to come before the Landmarks Preservation Commission — said in a statement that the proposed expansion “will destroy the design intent of Thomas Hastings’ residential composition and John Russell Pope’s graceful museum transformation.”

After seven years in New York, Pinta, the Modern & Contemporary Latin American Art Show, is relocating to Miami to set up shop during Art Basel from December 3 to 7.  The Related Group, a South Florida real estate development firm founded by Jorge Perez (of Perez Art Museum Miami fame), will present the fair.

It will be housed in a tent on the undeveloped future site of the Hyde Midtown Miami (a Related Group development project).

Cardi Gallery, the Milan-based modern and contemporary art gallery, presents "Louise Nevelson: 55-70," an exhibition of over thirty important collages and sculptures created between 1955 and 1970 that reveal the formalist achievements of Louise Nevelson (1899-1988), an icon of the Feminist art movement and one of the most significant American sculptors of the 20th century. "Louise Nevelson: 55-70," is on view through December 20, 2014.

"Louise Nevelson: 55-70" features works created between 1955 and 1970, a period when the artist’s signature modernist style emerged, with labyrinthine wooden assemblages and monochrome surfaces, and evolved, as Nevelson incorporated industrial materials such as Plexiglas, aluminum and steel in the 1960s and 1970s.

A string of blockbuster shows at  London’s world-renowned museums helped to attract record numbers of tourists to the capital in the first half of this year, according to figures released today.

Tate Modern’s "Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs" exhibition pushed  the number of visits to the gallery to almost 700,000 in the first six months of 2014 — up from 425,000 for the same period last year.

Official figures released today put the capital on course for its most successful tourism year. International tourists made 8.459 million trips to London between January and July, a 7.6 per cent increase on 2013.

Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art opened in 2011 in Wal-Mart's hometown, Bentonville, Arkansas, with a respectable collection of work by famous artists from Norman Rockwell's "Rosie the Riveter" to a George Washington portrait by Gilbert Stuart.

But the museum has just opened a massive exhibition of contemporary art called "State of the Art" that could be a game-changer. The museum is sometimes mocked by critics from outside the region for its location and Wal-Mart connections — its permanent collection was funded by Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton — but the new show represents a serious effort to introduce contemporary art to a mainstream audience far from the rarefied galleries of hipster neighborhoods and urban centers.

The Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) in New York is celebrating the legacy of its founder Aileen Osborn Webb with the exhibition “What Would Mrs. Webb Do? A Founder’s Vision.” Featuring a variety of objects created over the past sixty years, the show highlights Webb’s advocacy of American craft and explores how she championed the skilled maker as integral to America’s future.

A patron and philanthropist, Webb pioneered an understanding of craftsmanship and the handmade as a creative driving force behind art and design. In addition to founding MAD (originally the Museum of Contemporary Crafts) in 1956, Webb helped launch a number of crafts-related institutions, including the American Craft Council, the School of American Craftsmen, and the World Crafts Council.

Are there suddenly dozens more genuine Rembrandts in the world?

There are if art authorities accept the findings of Ernst van de Wetering, the Dutch art historian and longtime head of the Netherlands-based Rembrandt Research Project. In its sixth and final volume, published Wednesday, Mr. van de Wetering reattributes 70 paintings—often discounted by previous scholars as well as the institutions that own them—to the Dutch master. They include four at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Of those, Mr. van de Wetering is quick to emphasize “Portrait of a Man,” also known as “The Auctioneer,” dated 1658 by the researcher.

Thirty-eight paintings by Sir Winston Churchill are being offered to the nation, following the death of the politician's youngest daughter in May. Most of the pictures are currently on loan to the family home, Chartwell.

In her will, Lady Mary Soames expressed the wish that the paintings remain there. They have been on display since the home in Kent opened to the public in 1966, a year after the wartime prime minister died. The art historian David Coombs described the paintings as "a national treasure of major historical and artistic importance".