The Met has announced its next artist for the museum’s ongoing site-specific rooftop installation series, commissioning French conceptualist Pierre Huyghe to create a new piece looking out on Central Park.  “Pierre loves the fact that the park is full of animals,” says associate curator Ian Alteveer. (more…)

Juan Gris, Figure Seated in a Café (Man at a Table) (1914). via New York Times

Leonard Lauder, the former chairman of Estée Lauder and a noted collector of early 20th century art, has donated a vast collection of Cubist works to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, valued at more than $1 billion. (more…)

The Metropolitan Museum has acquired an early Jusepe de Ribera painting, a 1612-13 depiction of St. Peter praying on a rock, painted when the artist was in his early 20s. Paintings from this period rarely come on the market; about 10 years ago an Italian scholar named Gianni Papi reattributed several paintings to the young Ribera. This particular painting was only discovered last year and was offered through Madrid dealers Coll & Cortés. (more…)

Turkey has asked for the return of what it calls cultural patrimony, sparking international debate about who owns antiquities after centuries of shifting borders. Major museums such as The Met, The Getty, The Louvre and The Pergamon in Berlin are being asked to return works from their collections to Turkey under a 1906 Ottoman law that banned the export of artifacts, even though Turkey ratified the Unesco convention in 1981, which allows museums to acquire objects that were outside their countries of origin before 1970. (more…)