Dressed in rustic Italian costume or nude on a grassy plain, rendered with a sophisticated use of color and a deft, delicate touch, Corot’s women convey a mysterious sense of their inner lives. Corot: Women features 44 paintings created between the 1840s and the early 1870s: nudes, individual figures in costumes, and an allegorical series of the model in the studio. The National Gallery of Art is the only venue for Corot: Women, on view from September 9 through December 31, 2018. “Recognized as a great master of landscape painting, Corot is among the best represented artists in the Gallery’s collection of 19th-century French art. This unique exhibition presents an opportunity to examine a smaller and less well-known aspect of his career,” said Earl A. Powell III, director, National Gallery of Art. “We are grateful to The Edwin L. Cox Exhibition Fund, as well as Leonard and Elaine Silverstein, who helped to make this exhibition possible.”

A giant screen showing mesmerising landscapes from the hit video game “Journey” greets visitors to a major London show celebrating the industry’s trailblazing fusion of technical genius and artistic vision. The exhibition at London’s iconic Victoria and Albert Museum attempts to demystify the design process behind one of the world’s most popular entertainment industries, focussing on the artistic contribution of games made after the creative explosion of the mid-2000s. The show’s mantra, according to V and A chief Tristram Hunt is “operas made out of bridges” — a phrase coined by US gaming expert Frank Lantz’s to describe the multi-faceted nature of making a video game. The industry is a “fusion of art, craft, literature, cinema, fashion and music,” Hunt said at the press opening, calling it “strikingly innovative, uniquely creative and commercially succesful.

Germany has returned a pre-Columbian gold funerary mask to Peru following a 20-year legal and diplomatic battle, the South American country’s culture minister said on Thursday. Peru had reported the eighth century Sican mask’s disappearance in 1999, after which it was confiscated by Interpol from the German city of Wiesbaden. “I’m happy to receive one of the most emblematic assets from the north Peruvian cultures, the Sican Mask,” said Patricia Balbuena in a statement. The mask was handed over to the Peruvian embassy in Berlin by Bavarian authorities. The Munich regional court ordered the mask be returned to Peru in December 2016 after it had been confiscated by the public prosecutor. It is due to arrive in Peru in the coming weeks. Like neighboring Ecuador, which secured the return