Picasso masterpiece "Les Femmes d'Alger" went on show for the first time in Hong Kong Wednesday ahead of an auction where it is tipped to smash the world record price for a painting.

The 1955 piece depicts women in a harem and is the final work in a 15-painting series which pays homage to the 19th century artist Delacroix, who Picasso admired.

The Dutch royal family will return a painting in its collection after discovering that the Nazis confiscated it from Jewish owners, the palace said on Tuesday.

The discovery was made by independent research commissioned by the palace in 2012 into art objects acquired since the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933.

Hollywood screen icon Lauren Bacall's personal possessions from the precious to the mundane hit the auction block in New York, drawing plenty of fans Tuesday.

Collectors were jostling for a memento of the Oscar-winner from among more than 200 items from fine art to kitchenware, and avant-garde to kitsch. 

Huge black and gold sarcophaguses with kohl-rimmed eyes dwarf visitors at Turin's palatial Egyptian museum, which is reopening to the public after a "pharaonic" five-year renovation.

What was it like to be an early 20th-century explorer, stumbling across the ancient tombs of pharaohs and dignitaries and unearthing the mummified bodies and treasures within?

Jewish teenager Anne Frank died in a Nazi concentration camp at least a month earlier than her official date of death, a new study said on Tuesday.

"New research... has shed fresh light on the last days of Anne Frank and her sister Margot," the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam said on Tuesday, until now her official death date.

Libyan antiquities officials looked on with horror at Internet video footage that showed Islamist extremists wielding sledgehammers and power tools to grind ancient Iraqi treasures into dust.

They fear the Islamic State group jihadist movement's growing influence means the fate that befell these priceless Assyrian and Akkadian artefacts now awaits their own rich heritage dating back millennia.

The sequel to Swedish author Stieg Larsson's best-selling Millenium crime trilogy, due for release in August, kicks off with an artificial intelligence intrigue involving a U.S. spy agency, the book's publishers revealed Tuesday.

"That Which Does Not Kill" was completed in November by David Lagercrantz, known for co-authoring Swedish football star Zlatan Ibrahimovic's autobiography. 

With its dignity battered by six years of "humiliation" at the hands of its international creditors, cash-strapped Greece is turning to folk music and patriotism to restore its injured national pride.

Since taking power in January on a wave of anti-austerity sentiment, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras has repeatedly hammered home his intention to do whatever is necessary to restore the nation's self respect.

As artists, they pushed the limits, bathing in blood, mud and urine. Vienna's famed "Actionists", whose avant garde movement may be the most radical in contemporary art, are the focus of a new exhibition in their home city.

The movement emerged in the 1960s as part of the new performance-based art, which broke with the confines of traditional painting and used the body as both surface and site of art-making.

A perennial debate over the birthplace of the cherry blossom has taken a fresh turn as a Chinese industry group claims the Asian giant is the tree's true home, rather than Japan or claimant South Korea.

Cherry blossoms have long been associated with Japan, where viewing the short-lived blooms is an enduringly popular pastime to herald the arrival of spring.