A copy of a 27-foot-tall sandstone Buddha destroyed by the Taliban in Afghanistan will tower over the High Line in New York 25 years after the original was blown up.

Tuan Andrew Nguyen's work has been selected for the plinth by 30th Street and 10th Avenue on the elevated park which is home to a rotating cast of contemporary sculpture.

The commission is inspired by the larger of the two Bamiyan Buddhas which were carved directly into a rock face in the sixth century and then demolished in 2001 by the Taliban in scenes broadcast around the world.

Nguyen told The New York Times the work, which will be unveiled next year, was based on surviving photographs but would include new hands cast in brass from melted-down artillery shells.

He told the newspaper: "It’s really daunting to produce a replica of something that doesn’t exist."

The billionaire founder of the Latin American Art Museum of Buenos Aires has celebrated its 25th anniversary by adding another 1,233 works to its collection.

Eduardo F. Costantini acquired the Daros Latinamerica Collection which includes work from 117 artists made between 1950 and 2010.

It has nearly doubled the museum's collection just as work begins to double the Argentinian museum's floor space.

The collection was established by Zurich-based collectors Ruth Schmidheiny and her then-husband, Swiss businessman and philanthropist Stephan Schmidheiny.

It includes work by Ana Mendieta, Doris Salcedo and Cildo Meireles whose (Mission/Missions (How to Build Cathedrals)), 1987, is a monumental installation made up of 600,000 coins, 800 communion wafers, 2,000 cattle bones and paving stones.

A 16th-century painting sold to finance a German Jewish family's escape from the Nazis has been returned to their descendants 85 years later.

The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne, believed to be by an artist associated with Lucas Cranach the Elder, was returned to the heirs of Ernst Magnus from the Bavarian State Painting Collections in Munich.

It was sold in 1940 by Magnus, who had escaped with his family to Switzerland, to finance their onward journey to the United States.

It ended up in the collection of Nazi leader Hermann Goering before being transferred to the state after the war.

The family's first restitution claim was rejected in 2010 but since then the rules have changed and researchers take into consideration some sellers were acting under duress when they were forced to send works to auction.

Bavarian Minister of the Arts Markus Blume said the painting's return marked "a new era in the restitution of Nazi-looted art".

He said: "For museums in Bavaria and across Germany, this creates the opportunity to re-examine complex issues and base decisions on a broader, more sustainable foundation."

1 - Heidi Lau and Wong Ping have been named by Hong Kong's M+ museum as joint winners of the Sigg Prize 2025. The prize, which celebrates outstanding contemporary artists from Greater China and its diasporas, is worth $38,564 to each winner.

2 - Anthony Elms has been named as the new artistic director of the Mattress Factory contemporary art museum in Pittsburgh. A former chief curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, he also co-curated the 2014 Whitney Biennial in New York.

3 - Visitors to the Louvre were warned the Paris museum "may open later and some exhibition rooms may remain closed" tomorrow after a staff walkout. The strike, called to protest working conditions, closed the museum yesterday. It is always closed on a Tuesday.

4 - Work by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Emile Bernard, Camille Pissarro and Paul Gauguin are all on show in a new exhibition dedicated to printmaking at Amsterdam's Van Gogh Museum. The show includes 35 prints and runs from January 30 to May 17.