Art news daily: 4 July | Apollo Magazine

Our daily round-up of news from the art world

St Fagans National Museum of History wins Art Fund Museum of the Year 2019 | St Fagans National Museum of History was named Art Fund Museum of the Year 2019 yesterday evening during a ceremony at the Science Museum in London. St Fagans director David Anderson received the prize of £100,000 on behalf of the museum, which is the most visited heritage attraction in Wales and the first Welsh institution to win the award. The other finalists, which have each received £10,000, were V&A Dundee, the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, HMS Caroline in Belfast and Nottingham Contemporary.

France returns group of 445 ancient stolen artefacts to Pakistan | A large group of stolen ancient artefacts were returned to Pakistan on Tuesday, the result of an investigation triggered after French customs officials confiscated 17 terracotta pots, en route to an unnamed gallery, at Charles de Gaulle Airport in 2006. A total of 445 objects including busts, vases and goblets, some dating as far back as the third millennium BC – and worth an estimated €139,000 – were uncovered. Experts who studied the relics decided they had been looted from ancient burial sites in the Balochistan province of Pakistan, and they were handed over during a repatriation ceremony at the Pakistani embassy in Paris.

German city rejects artist’s heirs claim to Mondrian paintings | The city of Krefeld in Germany has rejected a claim made by the heirs of Mondrian that they are the rightful owners of four works in the collection of Krefeld’s Kaiser Wilhelm Museum. The heirs say that Mondrian loaned the works – along with four others that the museum deaccessioned in the early 1950s – for an exhibition that never took place, and left them behind when he fled Europe at the beginning of the Second World War. The New York Times reports that neither party has definitive proof of when and how the paintings entered the museum’s collection.