Artlyst

The Bayeux Tapestry has arrived at the British Museum and opens to the public this week for the first time on British soil, a genuine cultural event by any measure, drawing the sort of anticipation usually reserved for a blockbuster loan from somewhere considerably harder to reach than northern France. Nearly a thousand years old, the tapestry is coming home, at least temporarily, and London is bracing for crowds.

Clive Davis, who died earlier this year after roughly six decades spent identifying musical talent before anyone else quite saw it, applied the same instincts to buying art. That, at least, is the argument Christie’s is making ahead of a November sale devoted entirely to his personal collection, and having looked through what he actually bought, it is not a hard case to accept.

Maison Ruinart has picked its latest collaborator for Conversations with Nature, the ongoing art programme the champagne house has been running for several years now, and this time the choice is Tadashi Kawamata, the Japanese artist known for building sprawling, temporary structures out of scrap wood and salvaged furniture.

The human toll of September 11, 2001 remains, and should remain, the central fact of that day. Nearly three thousand people died when the World Trade Centre fell, and no accounting of lost paintings or sculptures belongs anywhere near the same sentence as that number without acknowledging as much first.

Surely there can be no one in Britain today who does not know that the Bayeux Tapestry recounts the events leading up to the Battle of Hastings, when Britain was last invaded. True, our memories of this period may be hazy, as for many of us the Anglo-Saxons appeared in the curriculum between the ages of 7 and 12. The tapestry, which as now known should be termed an embroidery, was made in the years following the conquest of England by William, Duke of Normandy, shortly to be William the Conqueror.

Greece has refused to lend nine fragments of the Parthenon marbles to a Frankfurt exhibition that would have marked the first attempt to fully reconstruct the temple’s east pediment, after learning the show would also include pieces held by the British Museum, the institution Athens has spent decades trying to persuade to give its own Parthenon holdings back.

The Bayeux Tapestry has arrived at The British Museum in London after a historic loan agreement with France. The 70-metre Bayeux Tapestry depicts the 1066 Norman invasion and the Battle of Hastings, and is the first time it has been shown in the UK since it was made almost 1,000 years ago. After a week of previews, the exhibition opens to the public on 10 September and will run until 11 July 2027.

Charleston, the former Sussex home and studio of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, has been awarded Designated status by Arts Council England, recognising the national and international importance of its collection. The designation is among the highest honours available to museums, libraries and archives in England. It is reserved for collections considered outstanding in terms of their quality, significance and contribution to cultural life.

The Courtauld has unveiled its 2027 programme, and it is, by any measure, a strong one. Three major exhibitions anchor the year, each approaching landscape, the body and the female gaze from wildly different angles, alongside a run of smaller displays that dig into the gallery’s own collection with the kind of specificity that only an institution of the Courtauld’s scale can really afford.

Two thieves broke into the Renoir Museum in Cagnes-sur-Mer early Tuesday morning and made off with four artworks, according to French authorities, in the latest incident to strike an art institution already reeling from a wave of high-profile thefts across the country. it has now been reported that the thieves abandoned two paintings in the garden as they fled.