Yes, but isn't this at least a funny riff on the hackneyed motif? and one that, as a caricature itself of the good-looking-girl-pretending-to-hang-a-painting, refers cleverly to subject of the exhibition, the Rowlandson cartoon caricatures?  The "gratuitous girl"'s magnified teeth even resemble one of the ways Rowlandson caricatured his targets.... So this particular photo isn't really "gratuitous" at all, is it?

BTW, a question from ignorance: if white gloves aren't worn any more, why not? is something else worn, or don't paintings need the supposed protection?

most print rooms do insist on white gloves when handling mounted drawings, because it avoids sweaty hands staining the mounts at no risk to the drawing itself. Counterintuitively - but sensibly - gloves are not used when handling unmounted material.

[...] it is no longer possible to guarantee that the roof of the building housing the exhibition The Heritage of Rogier van der Weyden  is watertight. In order to prevent any eventual problems and as a precaution, the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium in Brussels have decided to close the exhibition permanently.

Please rest assured that this difficult and painful decision for our institution is dictated by concern with the preventative conservation of this exceptional cultural heritage, and that our team will make every effort to ensure optimal management of the situation.

I am shocked to read about the museum in Brussels having to close the Heritage of Rogier van der Weyden exhibition. I visited the exhibition on Tuesday when it reopened after having closed down for the previous week, apparently due to leaking water. I had booked my ticket well in advance and took a day trip on Eurostar. It was an excellent exhibition, really well displayed in the spacious basement galleries, with numerous works of art by anonymous Brussels painters gathered together from as far away as Australia and plenty of interesting new research. I was very lucky and it's a shame for all those who will be disappointed.

This majestic work of art is about to go back on permanent public view when Kenwood House in north London reopens its doors on 28 November. It has been closed for repairs and restoration by English Heritage, and if you have been missing it, or have never been, an artistic feast awaits. Kenwood has a staggering art collection, including Gainsborough's Countess Howe and Turner's Iveagh Sea-Piece.

But the Rembrandt is something else. You don't have to take my word for it: when Kenwood was closed, this painting was excitedly borrowed by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which showed it as one of Rembrandt's ultimate achievements alongside its own masterpieces by him.

Rembrandt, at the age of about 59, looks at us from the depth of his years, and with the authority of his craft. He has portrayed himself holding his brushes, maulstick and palette, in front of two circles drawn on a wall. Why the circles? Do they represent a sketch for a map of the world? Or is Rembrandt alluding, with this drawing on a brown surface, to stories that say the first picture was a drawing made with a stick in sand?

His eyes contain so much knowledge and melancholy that even looking at this painting on a computer screen, I get the eerie feeling that Rembrandt is looking back and weighing up my failures. You can deduce the power of the original.

The Dutch masterpiece hasn’t been on public display since 1795. But on Friday, the National Gallery of Art will announce that it acquired “The Concert,” by Gerrit van Honthorst. The six-foot-wide work, painted in 1623, will go on display in a special installation at the National Gallery of Art’s West Building on Friday morning. It is the gallery’s first painting by Honthorst, one of the preeminent painters of the Dutch Golden Age and part of the Utrecht “Caravaggisti,” or early-17th-century painters who were influenced by Italian baroque painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. The National Gallery acquired the painting from a family’s private collection in France.

Arthur Wheelock, the National Gallery’s curator of northern baroque paintings, visited art dealer Adam Williams’s gallery in New York to view the piece. Wheelock recalls how Williams pulled back a curtain to show an unfamiliar dynamic work, portraying several musicians gathered around a table playing instruments. He didn’t know who painted it at first, having never seen an image of “The Concert.”

The dynamic gesture, with which he painted the black and white passages as equally important, spoke to the energy of action painting.

Hayward Touring invites proposals for an exhibition of contemporary art to be shown in four UK galleries in 2014/15. You don’t have to be a professional curator or exhibition-maker to submit an idea. We welcome suggestions for innovative projects from artists, writers and imaginative thinkers in all walks of life, as well as from people working in galleries and museums. Your proposal might be for an exhibition that re-invents the way we think about art; it might be a new and surprising take on a well-worn subject; there may be a theme or tendency in contemporary art and visual culture that you think deserves to be explored in new ways; or a theme that you have always thought would make a great exhibition.

Where next for Tate Britain? Curtis does not rule out an extension, but she says that it is a virtue that the building is “not too big”. That said, she thinks that the basement could yield more display space. “The upper floor could then be devoted to the collection, with temporary exhibitions on the lower level,” she says. 

The Nazis sold thousands of the confiscated works on the open art market to fill wartime coffers. Repeal or reform of the 1938 law could unravel an intricate web of art deals involving such works that have been negotiated around the world in the decades since, something that even many museum curators like Mr. Büche are loath to consider.

Despite the lengths Germany has gone to to repair the moral and material damage done during World War II, for decades the restitution of confiscated art was not a topic of discussion or action here, and no German government has sought to repeal the Nazi law.

Your post questions why the law has not been repealed; and, on the surface, it is a reasonable question.  Framing the issue in that way of course obscures a veritable plethora of considerations and ramifications that would flow from repeal of a law, that you have noted, has served as the root of good title to the works upon which many subsequent transactions have undoubtedly been based.  The sheer effluxion of time since the works were taken will mean that many of those works are now in the possession, and have been through the hands, of many people and institutions whose conduct could not be reasonably impugned, and who have acted only in good faith and almost certainly without notice of what may, upon repeal of the 1938 law, become a defect in the title to the works.  Repeal of the 1938 might well satisfy a moral need but the consequence will almost inevitably be the visiting of considerable harm of other people and institutions who are on any any view blameless.  It is for this reason that many common law jurisdictions will ordinarily protect the position of a bona fide purchaser for value without notice.

Nothing that I have written is intended to suggest that restitution cannot or should not be made where the circumstances reasonably permit it.  I write only to observe that the failure to repeal the 1938 law may not be so much a moral failure as a recognition of the extraordinary consequences that may flow and the almost impossible balancing of the many interests that would be affected.  That in itself is not a reason to stay restitution, however it must also be acknowledged that the intergeneration unravelling of so many transactions will not be without ramification or consequence, and the results could well be incredibly harsh for some people who could only be properly described as innocent.  Many legal scholars will tell you that difficult cases tend to make bad law, and these circumstances may become a stark demonstration of the truth of that adage.

Art has become an efficient instrument for hiding cash. Swiss banks are no longer a very private place. But a warehouse in Switzerland — or, for that matter, New Jersey — is nicely confidential.

And art is a way to clean up your dirty wealth. Say you sell, well, drugs. You might buy a painting for $7 million, paying $2 million in cash (helping the seller to avoid taxes), so the transaction is listed as $5 million. You put it in a warehouse for two years, let it predictably appreciate, and then sell it for $9 million. You've not only made $2 million, but you've cleaned another $2 million. Nobody the wiser.

Art, too, is a market that can be handily manipulated in a way that is likely more beautiful than art itself to financial fixers. If you own, for instance, five Warhols, you might put one up for auction, participate yourself in bidding up the price — you might even buy it yourself at a high price — thereby increasing the value of your other four paintings (which, now you can borrow against at their higher valuation).

A notable anomaly in the market is that old masters, with their limited supply, are now in less demand and are often priced more modestly than new artists, with unlimited supply. That defies economic logic — yet can be explained. Living artists print money. If you are a big buyer who helps set prices, you might be offered work at a goodly increase over an artist's last price point: $2 million, where the last sale was at $1 million. For that, you get one thrown in free, hence the deal has cost you nothing, but doubled the value for everybody else who holds the works, including the artist — leaving everybody happy.

Perhaps we need an FSA or SEC for the art market now that it has become a financial asset stored in Swiss vaults.

At least the market indicates to an economist like me that Old Masters are still valued more as art than as financial vehicles often for dodgy buyers.

The five painters have been chosen by no less than three curators (1.666 artists each?), whose ramblings in the catalogue are a disgrace to the English language and an insult to the few poor souls wandering through Tate Britain on the day I visited. No wonder there was hardly anyone there. Why should anyone visit an institution so insensitive to the needs of communication that its catalogues contain sentences that proceed “As painting is no longer in a position of autonomy — alone and apart — this also entails a move away from an idea of medium specificity, defining a practice as ‘painting’ or ‘film’, and towards a post-medium age, what a recent conference at Harvard examined as the ‘medium under the condition of its de-specification’ ”?

It's interesting that the Tate is showing five contemporary painters with such a fanfare. Ten years ago painters were meant to be extinct and even five years ago they were an oddity. Now painting is everywhere and it's the installations that look old hat.

I wondered if you could thank Damien Hirst for this, for overdosing everyone on rotting animals and chemist's shops and for hard-pedalling painting again.

“What kind of a state is it that confiscates my private property?” the Spiegel quoted Gurlitt as saying. The magazine said Gurlitt, 80, who has until now shied away from journalists, agreed to spend several days with a reporter.

“They must be returned to me,” Spiegel quoted Gurlitt as saying. “They are putting all this in a false light. I won’t speak to them and I won’t give anything back -- no, no, no.”

"Without this, we would be in trouble,” Tobias Meyer says. It’s a warm October morning in New York City, and the head of contemporary art at Sotheby’s is standing in front of a huge canvas depicting a horrific car crash, the vehicle gruesomely crumpled against a tree. The label reads, “Andy Warhol. Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster) 1963. Estimate upon request.” The huge (8-foot-by-13-foot) canvas is, by all accounts, a masterpiece; part of Warhol’s disaster series – his reflections on mortality. Nearby are other rare treasures consigned for Sotheby’s all-important November auctions: paintings from the collection of Steven Cohen – the notorious billionaire hedge fund manager; a $40 million Picasso; a 56.9 carat pink diamond. Yet Meyer cannot stop thinking about that Warhol.

Few people will ever know how hard he fought for this painting – or understand how much he has riding on it. Twenty-three blocks south, in midtown, Meyer’s archrival at Christie’s has amassed the largest cache of art ever to come to auction – more than a half-billion dollars’ worth. In an all-out battle over the summer, Christie’s beat Sotheby’s on consignment after consignment, snaring major trophies of the contemporary art world by superstar artists such as Francis Bacon, Jeffrey Koons, Christopher Wool, Willem de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock. By early fall, the roster for the Christie’s November 12 auction was expected to sell for between $500 million to $700 million.

Just weeks before the sales were to start, Meyer had nothing that could compete with the caliber of art Christie’s was bringing to market. That Warhol was his last shot at a major consignment, and as its owner wavered throughout September, Meyer flew to Switzerland to plead his case. When that didn’t clinch the deal, he invited the collector to spend the weekend at his country house in Connecticut. The pressure on Meyer was enormous and mounting. And it wasn’t just Christie’s colossal sale weighing on him; Sotheby’s largest shareholder, hedge fund manager Dan Loeb, was growing increasingly disgusted by the company’s lagging performance. In an open letter, he castigated the company’s management and demanded that Meyer’s boss, CEO Bill Ruprecht, be fired.

“You know, I talk about the near-death experience,” Meyer says, recalling his hectic summer. He tells the story of how he put his heart and soul into winning the picture; how finally – right before the print deadline for the auction catalogue – he got word that the consignment was his. Meyer pauses for a moment, mid-tale, as though to add drama to his victory. Then, suddenly, something strange happens: His chest caves deeply, as though a huge weight has been dropped on him. He holds out his hand, as if reaching for support. His voice trembles into a deep, raw sob. “Let’s go somewhere else,” he finally says in a hoarse whisper. Meyer – renowned in the art world for his poise on the auction block – steps behind a wall and into a side gallery where privately, quietly, he wipes a few tears from his cheeks.