Art news daily: 16 May | Apollo Magazine

Our daily round-up of news from the art world

Previously unknown Rembrandt is newly identified | An unsigned painting depicting a young gentleman has been identified as the work of Rembrandt, Dutch newspaper NRC yesterday reported. Previously attributed to the ‘circle of Rembrandt’, the portrait was purchased from Christie’s in 2016 for £137,000 by art dealer and historian Jan Six, who makes the case for the new attribution in a book, Rembrandt’s Portrait of a Young Gentleman, published yesterday. The claim been corroborated by a number of leading conservators and art historians, including Rembrandt authority Ernst van de Wetering. This is the first painting to be newly identified as a Rembrandt since 1974.

Tom Wolfe (1930–2018) | The American journalist, novelist and art critic Tom Wolfe has died at the age of 88. As well as pioneering the hybrid of literary prose and journalistic reportage in the 1960s and ’70s that became known as the New Journalism, Wolfe authored a number of acclaimed novels, including The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987): a satire of the financial excesses of 1980s New York. A frequent commentator on the art world throughout his career, Wolfe wrote an influential book of art criticism in 1975, entitled The Painted Word.

New German code of conduct on handling colonial-era objects | The German Association of Museums and culture minister Monika Grütters have published a new code of conduct for museums, detailing proper practice with regards to artefacts that were acquired in a colonial context, the Art Newspaper reports.In a statement on 14 May, Grütters described the colonial era as ‘a blind spot in our culture of remembrance for too long’. The new guidelines urge museums to conduct research into provenance, to build relationships with the countries from which artefacts originated, and to publish their holdings online, among other recommendations.