A lucky visitor will soon become the first ever to sleep overnight at Britain's National Gallery, after the 200-year-old museum launched a competition on Monday to mark the reopening of a wing housing celebrated European paintings.

London's Tate Modern unveiled a huge, spectacular abstract painting by acclaimed US artist Joan Mitchell on Thursday, part of one of the "most significant gifts" to the gallery in recent decades.

A provincial museum in northern France on Friday showed off a picture now attributed to one of the greatest women painters of the Italian Renaissance, Lavinia Fontana, but which had for decades languished in its storage.

More than a century ago, Pablo Picasso smashed the Sacre-Coeur Basilica in Paris into a web of tangled lines on his canvas, deconstructing reality with the brushstrokes of a master cubist.

Gaudy colours, messy brushwork, even a set of missing toes. The debate about the authenticity of a Rubens's masterpiece "Samson and Delilah" will be reignited next week with the release of a book alleging the painting hanging in London's National Gallery is really a copy.