Illustrator Nancy Liang says she “explores whimsy and magic” in her art, a passion that’s clear in these wonderful GIFs.

“Using my interest in dioramas, my illustrations take shape through textures and colors from papers, found objects and other miscellaneous materials,” she says.

See more on her website, here.

Or her Tumblr, here.

It was hard to resist Nick Dahlen’s fluid and colorful paintings when he first came to wide attention five years ago. His classically influenced, highly designed works are even more appealing now, upstyled by an artist who’s rapidly grown into his own fierce talent.

Dahlen’s chess game painting, and the smaller pieces near it, are part of an exhibition just ended in Los Angeles at The Landing gallery. The images above are from his solo show in Taipei earlier this year. This is major recognition for an illustrator-designer and one-time-tagger who less than a decade ago was showing work strung up with duct tape on outdoor walls (see the earlier Art Junkie post, here).

Also, his prints are instant sellouts. He pulled this six color screenprint – called Juicy Bite – by hand for an edition of 20 and there are plenty of others on his Big Cartel site here.

His artistic influences – Kandinsky, Picasso, Le Corbusier and others – continue to guide him, Dahlen says, without any sacrifice to his own creativity. He continues to provide illustrations for the advertising industry and other clients while he works on his art.

Nick Dahlen’s Instagram here.

More than 50 Picasso exhibitions are being offered worldwide in 2023, for the 50th anniversary of the master artist’s death at his home in Mougins in the south of France. Christie’s has created a very long list of these, here.

There have been several posts about Picasso on this blog through the years, one of my favourites being the one about his ceramics (see that post here)

Of all the other posts / mentions of Picasso on this blog, I’ve always loved this piece about the artist in studio with Brigitte Bardot best. Read the long version on The Guardian, here.

And in a related topic, consider listening to this podcast – also tied to the 50th anniversary of Picasso’s death. It’s about Hugh Eakin’s new book “Picasso’s War: How Modern Art Came to America,” a behind-the-scenes look at the dealers, writers, and curators who helped bring the artist—and Modernism—into the mainstream. (Listen on this youtube link provided by the David Zwirner gallery here. )

NOTE: I do not find Picasso exhibitions in Canada for 2023, possibly because several have taken place in recent years. For example the immersive Quebec City and Vancouver Imagine Picasso shows, the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Painting the Blue Period and the Winnipeg Art Gallery’s Picasso in Canada, all of them superb. (But if you know of one, please let me know in the comments or via the Contact the Junkie link at the top of the blog – thanks. )

A Toronto company that specializes in the recovery of valuable artworks looted from families in Europe during WWII is behind the return of a 19th Century painting to the heirs who rightfully own it.

The Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge University in the U.K. (above) has agreed to return the 19th-century painting by French artist Gustave Courbet, which was seized by the Nazis, to the descendants of its original owner, Robert Bing. The oil landscape is called La Ronde Enfantine.

The 1862 work was looted by a German taskforce called the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg and was earmarked for the personal collection of Hermann Göring.

Seal of the “Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg“, used from 1941 to 1944 to mark seized documents by the German occupation troops.

“This is a deliberate seizure by the German authorities from a Jewish citizen of France with the diversion of the work of art to Nazi leaders,” the United Kingdom’s Spoliation Advisory Panel wrote in its ruling, released this week. “No other reason for seizure other than the Jewishness of Mr Bing has appeared to explain this seizure.”

In the U.K, The Times of London put together this photoshopped visual to show how La Ronde Enfantine is thought to have been at the centre of a proposed art swap between two of the most powerful figures in Europe, Luftwaffe commander Hermann Göring and Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler’s foreign minister. However, that deal fell through.

The landscape is among hundreds of thousands of pieces of art looted by the Nazis during World War II. The claim was brought to the British panel in 2021 by Mondex Corp., the Toronto art restitution firm.

Bing, a Jewish engineer from a prominent family, fled Paris with his mother in 1940, just before the Nazi occupation, abandoning their upscale apartment and its possessions. As part of the Nazi looting of Jewish homes and buildings, the painting was carried off and reserved for the collection of Göring, the British panel determined.

The British panel gave no criticism for the Fitzwilliam Museum, where the painting was donated in 1951, saying the institution had acted honourably.

Bing joined the French resistance after fleeing Paris and received the the Croix de Guerre medal. He died in 1993.

The Nazis took approximately 600,000 paintings from Jews during WW II, at least 100,000 of which are still missing. Art experts, the storied “ Monuments Men ,” were embedded in the liberating U.S. Army. The looted wealth they preserved was returned to the countries where it was stolen in the expectation that original owners or heirs would receive it. But that has not always been the case, leading to families having to spend decades to prove ownership.

A longer piece about the painting is on the Mondex website, here.

An excellent interactive piece on looted Nazi art, here.