Britain's new Prime Minister Andy Burnham can never be accused of a lack of ambition but he may have set his sights too high with his latest foray into the art world.

Buoyed up by the diplomatic triumph of the arrival of the Bayeux Tapestry to London, Burnham declared he wanted to bring Picasso's monumental anti-war painting Guernica back to the UK.

The painting, which commemorates the bombing of the Basque town in 1937 during the Spanish Civil War, has hung in Madrid's Reina Sofia museum since 1992 and it has refused repeated loan requests.

Spanish and Basque politicians clashed earlier this year after an attempt to bring it to the Miren Arzalluz-led Guggenheim in Bilbao for the 100th anniversary of the attack next year failed.

In 1938 it was shown widely throughout Europe including stops in London, where it was exhibited at Whitechapel Art Gallery, and Manchester.

Burnham, a former Culture Secretary earlier in his career, told Time Out: "I do know the people at the Reina Sofia, so who knows? I might try and pull a string or two out there."

An ancient Greek bronze is returning to the Metropolitan Museum of Art a year after being repatriated by the New York institution when researchers found evidence it was stolen.

The work, depicting a griffin and used to decorate a cauldron, will be exhibited in the show Across Wine-Dark Seas: Art and Identity beyond Ancient Greece which opens on December 20 at the museum led by Max Hollein.

It was handed to the Archaeological Museum of Olympia following its return to Greece in 2025 after the Met's then newly expanded provenance research unit discovered it had likely been stolen from a museum in the 1930s before being left as a gift from a former Met trustee in 1972.

Greek culture minister Lina Mendoni said the loan was testament to "the value of sustained scholarly cooperation and mutual trust" between her country and the United States.

A Michael Richards sculpture has gone on show at the Brooklyn Museum today in tribute to the artist who died on 9/11.

His 1997 work Free F’All was made to commemorate the US Air Force’s first Black unit, known as the Tuskegee Airmen, and shows the figure of a pilot with nails driven into him.

Richards died in the attack on the World Trade Center’s North Tower, where he had his studio, 25 years ago in New York.

The sculpture will be on show on the first floor of the museum, led by Anne Pasternak, to June 6.

Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum opens its "posthumous tribute" to Yayoi Kusama today.

The show, which includes new works, was developed with the artist in the months before her death in August aged 97 and runs to January 17.

After her death was announced in her native Tokyo, a museum spokesman said the "retrospective exhibition has now become a posthumous tribute celebrating Kusama’s life and work" and a "space to consider her lasting influence and significance".

The exhibition, co-organized with Fondation Beyeler and Cologne's Museum Ludwig, follows a record-breaking run in the German city with more than 480,000 visitors making it the most successful in the museum's history.

1 - Literary agent and philanthropist Dasha Shenkman is behind a new acquisition scheme supporting young artists at this year's Frieze London. The Dasha Shenkman Focus Fund will buy a work at the fair before giving it to a museum with Abbot Hall in Kendal, northern England, the first recipient.

2 - Ching-Ling Wang is joining the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art in Washington DC as curator of Chinese art. He previously worked at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam for a decade.

3 - Costume designer Christina Hribar and collector Adriane Iann are among 10 new trustees of New York's New Museum announced by its director Massimiliano Gioni. Hribar, an art history graduate, has worked on shows including The Affair and Iann is a trustee of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

4 - The Tokyo Gendai fair opens to the public today in Yokohama with work from 69 galleries on show. A jury including Mori Art Museum curator Hirokazu Tokuyama and collector Monique Leong will decide the winner of this year's Hana Artist Award for an up-and-coming artist given at the event led by director Eri Takane.

5 - Madrid gallery weekend has started with more than 60 spaces hosting shows. Here is our pick of six solo shows worth seeing this weekend in the Spanish capital.