37 tombstones desecrated at Jewish cemetery in France

THE NEW YORK TIMES
By Palko Karasz

The Jewish cemetery in Herrlisheim, north of Strasbourg, France, on Friday. The incident comes on the same week as a deadly attack at a Christmas market in Strasbourg.Credit Vincent Kessler/Reuters

French officials paid their respects Friday at a Jewish cemetery near Strasbourg, where 37 tombstones and a monument to Holocaust victims had been defaced with swastikas and other anti-Semitic graffiti in the same week that a deadly attack that shook the nation. “When a place of recollection is desecrated, it’s the entire Republic that is sullied,” Christophe Castaner, France’s interior minister, wrote on Twitter after visiting the cemetery in Herrlisheim. “Everything is being done to identify and detain the authors of this desecration.” On Friday, local religious and government officials gathered at the ceremony in Herrlisheim. [More]

Seeing the divine: Pahari painting of North India at Metropolitan Museum

THE APOLLO MAGAZINE

Detail of “Radha and Krishna walking at night,”  ca. 1775–80

Pahari painting in the 17th and 18th centuries, the focus of this exhibition, presented the Hindu gods in a variety of novel ways, providing royal patrons in the Punjab with new contexts in which to frame their relationship to divinity. Find out more about ‘Seeing the Divine’ from the Met’s website. This picture comes from the series, which once comprised some 70 paintings, believed to be the earliest example of pahari painting – literally, ‘painting from the Punjab Hills’. The exhibition argues that such paintings provided the patrons who commissioned them with a new means of visualising their relationship with divinity, as the gods were presented variously as naughty children, compassionate lovers, and powerful protectors. [More]

Black collectors cultivated an art habit and romance at museum

THE NEW YORK TIMES
Show Us Your Walls
By Hilarie M. Sheets

Monique and Ronald Ollie in front of Ed Clark’s “Untitled” (1975). Credit: Sam Gilliam/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Daniel Dorsa for The New York Times

When Ronald Ollie was an engineering student at the Missouri University of Science and Technology in the early 1970s, he would take dates to the St. Louis Art Museum. Today, Mr. Ollie, a retired mechanical engineer, and his wife, Monique, who has a doctorate in biomedical engineering, talked about their collection in their Newark apartment, which has a spectacular view of Manhattan and walls covered with abstract work by black artists. The collecting compulsion was a pre-existing condition when Mr. Ollie met his future wife in 2003 at the National Black Fine Art Show. “I have picked out a few pieces, but mine are in the back,” Ms. Ollie, who is a project manager at Johnson & Johnson, said good-naturedly. [More]