Bill Cunningham archive
The New York Historical
The vast archive of the New York Times fashion photographer Bill Cunningham has found a home at The New York Historical nearly a decade after his death in 2016. Cunningham was a bicycle-riding fixture on Manhattan’s streets and high-society events circuit for 50 years. His archive includes tens of thousands of images capturing the city’s changing style (including the picture, right, of photographer Editta Sherman), as well as negatives, slides, contact sheets, correspondence and documentation going back to his early career in millinery. The young Cunningham once used the New York Historical library for research, and in 2017 his friends donated some of his personal objects there, including his trusty bicycle and blue worker’s jacket. The museum will celebrate Cunningham in an in-depth exhibition planned for its new wing, which is due to open next year.
St Michael defeating the devil
Courtesy of J Paul Getty Museum
Burke collection of Italian manuscript illuminations
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
The Getty Museum has doubled its holdings of Italian illuminated manuscript leaves thanks to a gift of 38 Medieval and Renaissance illuminations from the California couple T. Robert Burke and Katherine States Burke. Spanning from the 12th to the 17th centuries, the tempera paintings once adorned the pages of Christian choir books, depicting religious scenes such as the Nativity and St Michael defeating the devil (right). The most prominent illuminators of the day are represented in the gift, including Giovanni di Paolo, Lorenzo Monaco and Don Simone Camaldolese, whose Initial H: The Nativity measures over a foot high.
René Magritte’s Le Palais de Rideaux (1928)
Photo by Christoph Irrgang, © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2025; © SHK/Hamburger Kunsthalle/bpk
Le Palais de Rideaux (1928) by René Magritte
Hamburger Kunsthalle
“We are surrounded by curtains. We perceive the world only from behind a curtain of appearances,” said the Surrealist painter René Magritte when asked to explain the recurring imagery of curtains in his work. This enigmatic composition, purchased for €2.4m by the Hamburger Kunsthalle from a Belgian private collection, was one of three late-1920s works titled The Palace of Curtains, in which Magritte played with the limits of perception and highlighted the artifice of painting itself. Three shrouded figures open up surprising portals to a forest, a cloudy sky and a wooden surface, while the fourth personifies a draped curtain. The painting is on view until 12 October in the exhibition Rendezvous of Dreams: Surrealism and German Romanticism.
