The Courtauld Institute and Gallery has received a £30m donation from the Reuben Foundation, the charity established by the British businessmen and brothers David and Simon Reuben. The gift, the largest the Courtauld has received since its founding in 1932, will go towards the refurbishment of the Strand site which is due to be completed in 2029. Since 2018 the Courtauld Institute has been using a building at Vernon Square near King’s Cross as its campus. As part of a long-term partnership, the Foundation will also lend works from the family’s art collection to the Courtauld Gallery. Mark Hallett, the director of the Courtauld, said the partnership ‘marks a defining moment in the Courtauld’s history’.
Months after dropping and later reinstating Khaled Sabsabi as Australia’s representative at the 2026 Venice Biennale, Creative Australia has awarded the artist a grant of A$100,000 (around £48,000). The grant is one of 16 available under the organisation’s Visual Arts, Craft and Design Framework, and will fund new works to be shown alongside those for the Biennale at the Samstag Museum of Art in Adelaide in early 2027. Creative Australia removed Sabsabi as Australia’s Biennale representative in February, just days after his selection was announced, after criticisms in the press and in parliament of his previous depictions of Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah. Creative Australia reinstated Sabsabi in July following an external review.
The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office has announced the return of 29 antiquities with a combined value of $3m to Greece. The objects, which were handed over during a ceremony at the Consulate General of Greece in New York on 3 October, include a bronze sculpture that was one of 18 artefacts seized from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Dating to 600 BC, the piece was donated to the museum by an individual who had purchased it from Robin Symes, the British art dealer who was convicted of smuggling in
Five of the seven 18th-century snuffboxes that were stolen from the Musée Cognacq-Jay in Paris last year have been recovered, ArtNews reports. Included in the museum’s exhibition ‘Pocket Luxury’, the snuffboxes, worth £1m in total, were taken by thieves on 24 November 2024. Two of the recovered boxes were on loan from the British Royal Collection, two were from the Louvre and another was from the Victoria and Albert Museum. One box belonging to the V&A and one from the Royal Collection are still missing.
Witherford Watson Mann has won this year’s RIBA Stirling Prize – the most prestigious architectural prize in the UK – for the Appleby Blue almshouse in south London. Run by the charity United St Savior’s, Appleby Blue is a modern take on the almshouse: it provides affordable housing for the over 65s. Ingrid Schroder, director of the AA School of Architecture and a member of the prize jury, said that the project was ‘a clarion call for a new form of housing at a pivotal moment.’ This is the second time that Witherford Watson Mann has been awarded the top prize, which it first won in 2013 for its renovation of Astley Castle in Warwickshire.