Robert Gates, the Secretary of Defense, announced on Thursday that the Pentagon will be lifting the ban on media images of soldiers’ coffins as they return from Iraq and Afghanistan, so long as the affected families agree to the pictures. A Pentagon working group still has to settle details of how permission will be granted. [...]

Even this early in 2009 it’s safe to say that the deeply entertaining new exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art is one of the best shows of the year. It goes beyond the standard connections between Cezanne and Matisse or Cezanne and Cubism — though it does very nicely by those, too — to demonstrate [...]

The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., has been operating with an interim director for a year and a half, since its former director Olga Viso decamped to become head of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. But this afternoon it announced that Richard Koshalek would be its next director. Koshalek is best [...]

As part of the giant Yves Saint Laurent auction that Christie’s has just wrapped up in Paris, that pair of Qing Dynasty bronze animal heads sold for a combined $40 million. Those are the heads that were looted by French and British troops who ransacked the Old Summer Palace in Beijing in 1860. Before the [...]