The two planned films inspired by the recent Louvre heist will only rub salt into the Paris museum's wounds, so they will be delighted one of their historic triumphs has been immortalized as well.

The museum's former director Jacques Jaujard is not your usual comic book hero, but his exploits saving its collection during World War Two have inspired a new graphic novel.

Gradimir Smudja's new series, The Louvre Exodus, tells how Jaujard and "a group of merry pranksters" including Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dali secretly began evacuating masterpieces including Theodore Gericault's The Raft of the Medusa and Da Vinci's Mona Lisa as war loomed.

Publishers Futuropolis said Smudja contacted "descendants of those who participated in this artistic escape" to create the two-part mini-series.

Jaujard, who died in 1967, was awarded the Legion of Honor and the Resistance Medal for his work saving the collection.

Last year's heist, which cost then-director Laurence des Cars her job, is to be filmed by Romain Gavras with a documentary also being made.

Actor Steve Martin has joined forces with former Hammer Museum director Ann Philbin to curate a show of works by fellow performer Martin Mull.

Mull, who died in 2024, had an eclectic career which saw him open for musicians including Bruce Springsteen and appear in TV shows such as Arrested Development but originally studied to be a painter.

More than 50 paintings and drawings will be shown at Santa Barbara Museum of Art in California in an exhibition next year.

Martin, who knew Mull for five decades, said his surreal takes on his upbringing in the postwar Midwest would be "his primary legacy", describing them as a "worried portrayal of American life".

The number of votes cast for art dealer Esther Kim Varet, as of last night, in her bid to win a place on the general election ballot for California's 40th congressional district. She is third with 77% of votes counted meaning she will not advance to the final ballot as only the top two candidates go through.

Twenty monumental tapestries by Arthur Boyd are finally going on show 51 years after being bought by the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra.

The works, which each measure around 8ft by 11ft, form part of his retelling of the life of St Francis of Assisi and were hand stitched in Portugal to his designs.

Boyd, who died in 1999, sold them to the gallery at cost price intending them to go on show but they are so big that until now only a handful have been displayed.

All 20 will feature in the show at the gallery which opens on June 20 and runs to October 18.

1 - Artists have been left scrambling to salvage their work after a fire in a studio building in Long Island City, Queens. Linda Ganjian, whose work can be seen in Terminals 4 and 8 at JFK airport in New York, said she was "airing out the sculptures in my living room" after the blaze on 48th Avenue.

2 - Works by 19 artists, including Chila Kumari Singh Burman, Lubaina Himid and Bridget Riley, from the UK government collection are going on tour across England. The works, all of which are inspired by the sea, will be on view in a mobile museum traveling between Devon, Cornwall and Lancashire on the Art Explora bus founded by French philanthropist Frederic Jousset.

3 - Abigail Pogson, the new CEO of London's Barbican Center, has defended the controversial sacking of Devyani Saltzman, its director of arts and participation, after just 18 months in the role. The sacking prompted complaints from figures including Salman Rushdie but Pogson told The Times of London there was no need for an overall head of arts when it already had four heads of theatre, visual art, music and cinema.

4 - Pioneering Malaysian art gallery owner Francis Willie has died aged in Kuala Lumpur aged 71. His eponymous gallery in Singapore helped set the stage for the expansion of the city-state's contemporary art scene.

5 - The Lee Kun-hee Collection of Korean art, built up over decades by the late Samsung chairman, is coming to the British Museum in London this October. It includes contemporary work by Nam June Paik and has recently been on show in Washington DC and Chicago.