Drawing believed to be by Dürer discovered in Vienna

Our daily round-up of news from the art world

Drawing believed to be by Dürer discovered in Vienna | A wall painting has been discovered in the gift shop of St Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna, with an underdrawing which specialists believe to be the work of the Germain Renaissance master Albrecht Dürer. A two-dimensional representation of a triptych altarpiece, with St Catherine and St Margaret flanking St Leopold, both the later overpainting and the underdrawing were concealed by centuries of dirt that had accumulated. If the attribution is correct, the drawing will be the first evidence of Dürer working in the city.

Roger Scruton (1944–2020) | Roger Scruton, the English conservative philosopher and writer, has died of cancer at the age of 75. Born in Buslingthorpe, a hamlet in Lincolnshire, Scruton attended the Royal Grammar School in High Wycombe and Jesus College, Cambridge, where he studied philosophy. After witnessing the events of 1968 in Paris, he became a conservative, and went on to write over 50 books on aesthetics, morality and politics, often reflecting on works of art. He became the founding editor of the Salisbury Review, a conservative political journal, in 1982, and founded his own publishing house, the Claridge Press, in 1987.

Nazi-looted works restituted to Jewish owners to be auctioned | Sotheby’s is to auction three Impressionist paintings from the collection of Jewish property developer Gaston Prosper Lévy, which were restituted to his heirs after being looted by the Nazis during their occupation of Paris. Two paintings by Paul Signac and one by Camille Pissarro are expected collectively to fetch as much as £20m when they are sold on 4 February. Lévy built a significant collection of French modernist art before fleeing France for Tunis with his wife in 1940.

Winners of the 2020 Jorge M. Pérez Award announced | The National YoungArts Foundation has named Ilana Harris-Babou and Mateo Nava as the recipients of this year’s Jorge M. Pérez Award. The award, which is funded by the Jorge M. Pérez Family Foundation, was established to acknowledge outstanding emerging and mid-career artists. Harris-Babou and Nava will each receive a $25,000 cash prize.

Recommended reading | In the Art Newspaper, Clémentine Deliss proposes that artists and curators in Africa should join forces to redefine the purpose of museums on the continent. CBS profiles Kim Novak, the star of films such as The Man with the Golden Arm, Pal Joey and Vertigo, who turned to painting after retiring from acting in the late 1960s; Novak recently exhibited her work at the Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, Ohio.

Lead image: used under Creative Commons licence (CC BY-SA 4.0; original image cropped)