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The European Fine Art Fair is still the gold standard for art fairs. “With seven- and eight-figure prices quoted wherever I inquired, I tried to make a mantra of John Russell’s deathless line ‘No amount of money is worth a great work of art.’ But the big artistic thrills often came in modest — though not modestly priced — form, such as the Fragonard drawings shown by Agnew’s of London and New York, two rare Charles Rennie Mackintosh watercolors offered by London’s Fine Art Society…”

The Detroit Institute of Arts and the Toledo Museum are in court to settle ownership issues surrounding a van Gogh and a Gauguin. “At stake is whether the pictures will remain in the museums’ collections or whether the museums must return the works to the heirs or pay restitution. The paintings are worth an estimated $10 million to $15 million apiece in today’s art market, based on auction records.”

The British Museum has a big new Michelangelo show. But only three of the drawings in the show are universally accepted as his. This forces the viewer to see the show in an entirely different way. “Why has the museum accepted 50-year-old attributions, asks Richard Dorment.”

“Rembrandt would be remembered as an extraordinary self-portraitist if he had died young at, say, forty-five. But he lived much longer and it is the work of his old age that one most admires: that intimate, unflinching scrutiny of his own sagging, lined, and bloated features, with the light shining from the potato nose and the thick paint: the face of a master, the face of a failure and a bankrupt. Life, and his own mismanagement of life, has bashed him but no one could say it has beaten him.”