How to make a new museum in Nigeria

Plus: Making lunch for Lucian Freud

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Samuel Reilly on the creation of Nigeria's Museum of West African Art

'The irony with the discussion around restitution,' Phillip Ihenacho, director of the Museum of West African Art, tells me, 'is that West Africa is not short of objects.' Thousands of them are held in the prodigious collections of the National Commission for Museums and Monuments (NCMM), which oversees 52 museums, 10 libraries and 65 monuments across the length and breadth of Nigeria. Most, however, are in poor repair, the treasures of Nigeria's past languishing in inhospitable storerooms, without temperature controls – or staff with sufficient training – to protect them. Rectifying this has long been low on the political agenda, due to a prevailing attitude that Ihenacho describes as: 'Nigeria has so many critical issues in education, in health care. Why would you spend money showcasing some old objects?'

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Apollo's round-up of the most important recent museum acquisitions

The Met has acquired a painting from the late 17th century by the Master of the Canesso Peddler, probably painted in Lombardy. This enigmatic portrait of a bookseller clutching a basket, a staff and a bundle of pamphlets had been thought to be the work of the late baroque artist Giacomo Ceruti – and was classified as Ceruti's in an exhibition last year in Brescia – but the Met has rejected the attribution. A painting of a spectacle-seller, thought to be by the same artist, was bought by the Medicis in 1689 and currently hangs in the Palazzo Pitti in Florence.

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Liliane Lijn talks to Fatema Ahmed about making it in a man's world

Lijn has spoken, more than once, about what it was like to be a very young woman in Paris in the late 1950s. Through the mother of her best friend, Nina Thoeren, she met André Breton, who was still holding court among those members of the Surrealist Group he hadn't excommunicated. It's no surprise that she and Nina 'got very bored' listening to the internal politics of an artistic groupuscule. (Poets, the Beats in particular, were much more interesting and a good deal friendlier.) Throughout Lijn's memoir, which covers her life from ages 18 to 27, the sexism of avant-garde artistic circles is never far from our minds. (When she first moves to Paris, a painter friend of her father says, 'For a woman, this is no career. What does she want to be an artist for?') In such a hostile environment, it's not surprising that the women who do succeed aren't friendly, either. As Lijn tells it, when she met Meret Oppenheim, the Swiss Surrealist more or less ignored her.

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Sally Clarke talks to Edward Behrens about feeding Lucian Freud

Freud ate breakfast at Clarke's every day, and lunch quite often too. His former studio is round the corner. Clarke and Freud struck up such a friendship that she sat for him once or twice a week for 'about two years'. They would leave the restaurant when he had eaten breakfast, 'and when he felt it was time to finish the sitting he would say, "I think that's good for the day." And then about an hour later, I'd see him in the restaurant having lunch.' In an obituary for the Guardian Clarke wrote, 'I planned to spend my "sitting" time writing future menus in my head […] but I soon realised that I was wishing to work as hard, and as intensely, as he was.'

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Christina J. Faraday on the mosaic murals of Manny Vega in New York

If you've ever taken a stroll through El Barrio ('the neighbourhood'), also known as Spanish Harlem in New York City, you will probably have encountered the work of the Bronx-born artist Manny Vega (b. 1956). For decades he has been celebrating the cultures of the African diaspora in his vibrant mosaics for the local community, drawing together global and local influences to create colourful, historically inspired pieces in the style he calls Byzantine Hip-Hop. Mosaic is a fitting medium for this artist, whose work makes connections between small details and the big picture, between individuals and the cultural and cosmic forces that shape them. 'Byzantine Bembé', an exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York, celebrates Vega's work, with an accompanying guide to help visitors discover his murals in the surrounding area.

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In the current issue…

James Purdon explains how the Cold War gave Scotland the chills

Cold War history has tended to favour the large canvas and the broad sweep: understandably, given the global and potentially lethal stakes of the half-century nuclear stand-off. History, at this scale, is geopolitics: a succession of proxy wars and regional crises playing out across and between nations whose names have come to stand for periods of heightened global tension – Hungary, Cuba, Vietnam, Afghanistan. In comparison with these well-known flashpoints, an exhibition assembling artefacts and oral testimony recounting Scotland's place in the conflict might risk seeming parochial, even quaint. It is anything but. Though modest in scale, 'Cold War Scotland' marshals a cleverly chosen array of objects and media to show how the Cold War left its traces in the Scottish landscape, in Scottish culture and in the lives of ordinary people: primarily Scots themselves, but also, on occasion, visitors from both the United States and the USSR.

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