Export bar placed on Parmigianino painting in the UK

Our daily round-up of news from the art world

Temporary export bar put on Parmigianino painting | UK culture minister Matt Hancock has put a temporary export bar on Parmigianino’s painting The Virgin and Child with Saint Mary Magdalen and the Infant Saint John the Baptist, which has been bought by an overseas collector and is now at risk of leaving the UK. The painting, acknowledged as one of the finest examples of the artist’s work remaining in private hands, has been in the UK for almost 250 years, after it was acquired from the Barberini Collection in Rome. An export licence will be deferred until June 2017 in order to give UK institutions the opportunity to match the £24.5 million asking price. The deferral will be further extended until December should a British organisation express serious intention to purchase.

Students foil attempted art theft in Boston | Three students thwarted the attempted theft of artworks in Boston this weekend as the city celebrated its victory in the Superbowl. According to NBC, the students were walking past the Galerie D’Orsay on Newbury Street when they heard the sound of breaking glass. Seeing a man leaving the premises with several works, thought to include etchings by Rembrandt and Picasso, the students chased after him and stopped him in his tracks. The suspect, identified as Jordan Russell Leishman, 29, of Chelsea, Massachusetts, is thought to have been taking advantage of the sports celebrations to pull off his heist.

Heirs of Nazi-sympathiser artist win battle to keep his work on display | The heirs of artist Erich Klahn, a known Nazi sympathiser, have won a court battle in Germany that will ensure his works are kept on display at a convent in the north of the country. According to The Art Newspaper, the ruling rejects an appeal made by the Klosterkammer Hannover, the regional body responsible for managing property that belonged to the convent’s church. In 2014, the Klosterkammer cancelled a contract with Klahn’s heirs which compelled it to care for and display the artist’s works.

Recommended reading | In the London Review of Books, John Barrell reviews Elisabeth Einberg’s complete catalogue of the paintings of William Hogarth, and gives a gripping reading of the artist’s March of the Guards to Finchley (£). Elsewhere, The Art Newspaper’s Melanie Gerlis and Julia Halperin look into why an increasing number of auction houses are ‘buying into forensics’. Meanwhile in Art Review, J.J. Charlesworth turns his critical eye to David Hockney’s Tate Britain retrospective, concluding that: ‘Making pictures out of the pleasure of being alive isn’t that fashionable right now. So Hockney’s mercurial, shifting, optimistic passage through half a century might be quite irrelevant, outdated. Or it could be a reminder that some things are still worth celebrating’.