A retired San Francisco punk rocker is putting her faith in dreams to solve the mystery surrounding a sculpture buried in her backyard.

Judy Gittelsohn's partner dug up the limestone woman’s head and neck at their home in Russian Hill and the former artist is convinced it is by sculptor and muralist Ralph Stackpole who taught at a nearby art school.

The former musician's attempt to identify the work has come up against expert opinion which says it is almost impossible to authenticate without knowing who buried it or why, but Gittelsohn remains positive.

She told the San Francisco Chronicle: "I’m hoping to have a dream about it so that I can understand what it was made for and how it arrived."

With a month to go before the opening of his show at Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie, Maurizio Cattelan is thinking about pigeons, again.

The Italian artist told the New York Times Style Magazine the show was a celebration of free will, saying "It’s always up to us what we want to be, a pigeon or a dove."

And the pigeon theme continues when the show opens on September 10 with several hundred of the taxidermied birds filling its glass-walled atrium and the roof above the building's entrance.

It marks a return to his earlier work, Tourists, which includes hundreds of stuffed pigeons and has twice appeared at the Venice Biennale.

Four photographers have been shortlisted from 1,338 who entered this year's $20,000 Winston Taylor Photo Portrait Prize.

The winner of the prize, formerly known as the Taylor Wessing, is announced on November 3 and all four short-listed works will be on show at London's National Portrait Gallery from November 5 along with 52 other entries.

Among the jury deciding the winner are photographers Nadine Ijewere and Mary McCartney.

The widow of legendary collector Leonard Lauder is loaning her own collection for a series of shows criss-crossing the United States.

Photographer Judy Glickman Lauder has lent around 100 photographs by 50 artists including Richard Avedon, Dorothea Lange and Gordon Parks for the exhibition.

It opened at New York's Southampton Arts Center and will travel to the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston, South Carolina, and Florida's Sarasota Art Museum and the Lowe Art Museum at the University of Miami.

Her late husband, who died last year aged 92, was the heir to the Estee Lauder cosmetics fortune and gave works to New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art and supported the Whitney which named a building in his honor.

Much of his collection was sold by Sotheby's in New York last November with his Gustav Klimt Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer fetching $236 million.

1 - Thieves rubbed salt in the wounds of Italian businessman and collector Mauro Lilli by using one of his fuel distribution company's own trucks to break into its headquarters and steal $4.6 million worth of art. Among the items stolen from the building's lobby and offices are works by Pablo Picasso and Bruno d’Arcevia.

2 - Berlin's Altes Museum is in line to join the billion-dollar rolling refurbishment program of the city's cultural institutions. Marion Ackermann, president of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation which runs many of the capital's museums, told German press agency DPA work is "urgently" needed, adding: "There are now cracks in the walls."

3 - You have six days left to see the Alexander Calder show at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris. The exhibition, which closes on Sunday, marks 100 years since the American artist first arrived in the French city.

4 - Strike action has hit the Gwen John: Strange Beauties show at the National Galleries of Scotland. The show, at Modern Two in Edinburgh, will close on August 12, 16 and 20 "due to industrial action" according to the gallery but runs to January 4.