News from the art world
A major prehistoric discovery
A 5,000-year-old chalk sculpture found next to the grave of three children has been hailed by the British Museum as “the most important piece of prehistoric art” uncovered in Britain in a century. The “Burton Agnes drum” was unearthed near the Yorkshire village of that name in 2015, during a routine excavation on the site of a new biogas plant, says Daniel Cassady in The Art Newspaper. Its existence has only just been widely revealed. Thought to be a sculpture of a drum, it features elaborate motifs in a style which flourished in Britain and Ireland at the time Stonehenge was built; the buried children have been carbondated to 3005-2890 BC. The work is similar to three other chalk drums in the British Museum’s collection, known as the Folkton drums, which were found in a child’s grave in North Yorkshire in 1889. They are thought to have been talismans designed to protect the deceased children. All four drums will go on display together in the British Museum, as part of The world of Stonehenge exhibition, which opened this week.
Avant-garde vandalism
A Russian museum guard has been charged with vandalism after drawing eyes on the “faceless figures” depicted in an avant-garde Soviet-era painting, says Sian Cain in The Guardian. According to the Boris Yeltsin Presidential Centre in Yekaterinburg, a “bored” 60-year-old guard used a ballpoint pen to draw eyes on figures painted onto a 1930s canvas by the artist Anna Leporskaya, valued at around £750,000. Fortunately, the damage to the painting was not irreparable: the guard, a contractor for a private security company, reportedly did not press the pen hard enough to disturb the paint. The unnamed culprit has since been dismissed. “His motives are still unknown,” said curator Anna Reshetkina. “But the administration believes it was some kind of lapse in sanity.”