LONDON (AFP) ― One of the youngest dancers ever to be a principal of the Royal Ballet, Ukrainian Sergei Polunin, has quit just days before a new production opens and only two years after he was promoted. “This has obviously come as a huge shock,” said Monica Mason, the director of the Royal Ballet, in a statement issued late Tuesday. “Sergei is a wonderful dancer and I have enjoyed watching him...

WASHINGTON (AP) ― Photographer Annie Leibovitz says she has come back from some dark days and revived her creativity with a new project now on view at the Smithsonian American Art Museum that marks a departure from her popular celebrity portraits. Two years ago, Leibovitz was facing millions in debt and a mismanaged fortune that nearly cost her the legal rights to her own work, which includes so...

ABU DHABI (AFP) ― The oil-rich emirate of Abu Dhabi announced on Tuesday that it had given the green light for the completion of the Louvre and Guggenheim museums after construction delays. The executive council of Abu Dhabi, which functions like a government for the emirate, said it had “approved the budgets and deadlines for the inauguration of projects on the island of Saadiyat, particularly ...

WASHINGTON (AFP) ― The 14 rooms of the National Gallery of Art in Washington dedicated to French Impressionism and Post-Impressionism are due to reopen Saturday after a two-year renovation. The paintings from artists like Corot, Picasso, Monet, Cezanne and Renoir are displayed in a new thematic arrangement designed to make them have a “conversation” with each other, Mary Morton, director of the ...

WASHINGTON (AP) ― The Smithsonian American Art Museum is holding its first major exhibit exploring the art and evolution of video games. The unusual exhibit opens March 16 and will be on view in Washington through Sept. 30. “The Art of Video Games’’ will focus on the graphics, technology and storytelling of some of the best games for systems ranging from Atari to the PlayStation 3. It will incl...

NEW YORK (AP) ― Photographs by the wife of imprisoned 2010 Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo will be shown at Columbia University next month. Beijing artist Liu Xia has been under house arrest since shortly after her husband was awarded the peace prize. Her photos were smuggled out of China just before she was placed under house arrest. Liu’s works are censored in China. The series of 25 phot...

LONDON (AFP) ― Britain’s greatest living artist, David Hockney, has swapped the Californian sunshine for the landscape of his native Yorkshire for a blockbuster exhibition which goes on show this week. Hockney has portrayed country lanes and hedgerows in a riot of colour that leaps off the wall at the Royal Academy of Arts, a short walk from Piccadilly Circus in London. In the show, “A Bigger P...

NEW YORK (AP) ― Producers of Broadway’s “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark’’ have fired back in their legal fight with one-time director Julie Taymor, claiming the woman who they once called a visionary later failed to fulfill her legal obligations, wrote a “disjointed’’ and “hallucinogenic’’ musical, and refused to collaborate on changes when the $75 million show was in trouble. In a countersuit fi...

PARIS (AP) ― American tourists fill the galleries of the Louvre Museum, yet American art is surprisingly scarce. Paris’ premier museum and three U.S. art institutions are seeking to change that with an exhibit tracing the birth of American landscape painting and its influences. “As soon as I arrived at the Louvre, I noticed that American art was not displayed at the level it merits,’’ said Louv...

NEW YORK (AFP) ― British artist and self-marketing genius Damien Hirst looks to connect the dots in a big way with the opening Thursday of a global show for his body of colored spot paintings. The Gagosian Gallery network, with 11 locations in New York, London, Paris, Los Angeles, Rome, Athens, Geneva and Hong Kong, has been turned over entirely to Hirst’s geometric blizzard of round spots. At ...

HONG KONG (Yonhap) -- A South Korean-led international art fair will open in Hong Kong in May, in a bid to provide a platform where participants in the art industry can meet and exchange views, organizers said Wednesday. The Hong Kong Contemporary art fair, arranged by Moon Eun-myung, a South Korean art dealer operating in the special administrative region, will run from May 17 through 20. The ...

ATHENS (AP) ― Thieves carried out a well-organized, pre-dawn heist at Greece’s biggest state art museum on Monday, taking two oil paintings by 20th century masters Pablo Picasso and Piet Mondrian, police said. A police statement said the burglars who entered through a balcony door also took a pen and ink drawing of a religious scene by Italian 16th century painter Guglielmo Caccia. It said a fou...