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CDF Announces 1st Cultural Financing of its Kind in Saudi Arabia

The Cultural Development Fund (CDF) logo
The Cultural Development Fund (CDF) logo
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CDF Announces 1st Cultural Financing of its Kind in Saudi Arabia

The Cultural Development Fund (CDF) logo
The Cultural Development Fund (CDF) logo

The Cultural Development Fund (CDF) has announced Cultural Financing, the first program of its kind in Saudi Arabia to support and provide essential financing for projects and enterprises across 16 cultural sub-sectors.

The program seeks to drive sustainable growth of the cultural sector, amplify its creative output, and boost its contribution to the Kingdom’s gross domestic product (GDP), thereby driving national economic growth.

Cultural Financing has been designed to support the development of cultural enterprises through flexible, accessible, and competitive packages that maximize profitability while minimizing risks for both the cultural enterprises benefiting from the program and the local banking partners. The program finances micro, small, and medium-sized cultural enterprises, enabling them to launch and scale their operations through a range of financing products available for both short-term and long-term needs, CDF said in a statement.

"The Cultural Financing marks a new chapter in our mission to empower the cultural sector in collaboration with our local banking partners. This financing solution is designed to meet the diverse and evolving needs of the sector’s entrepreneurs and support their aspirations, reaffirming our commitment to building strategic partnerships with the private sector," said CDF Chief Executive Majed bin Abdulmohsen Al-Hugail.

"We look forward to seeing the positive ripple effects of this collaboration in revitalizing the cultural sector and, in turn, bolstering the national economy."
Thursday’s announcement follows the CDF's signing of partnership agreements with five local banks -- Al-Rajhi Bank, Alinma Bank, BSF, Arab National Bank (ANB), and Bank AlJazira -- to provide financing to cultural enterprises.
The partnerships underscore the vital role of the banking sector in the sustainable development of the cultural sector. They also reinforce the CDF's ongoing efforts to spur growth across various cultural sectors in the Kingdom and strengthen partnerships with the private sector to provide attractive financing solutions that support the cultural and creative sector and maximize its impact on economic development and job creation.

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Culture

Ithra Announces Launch of Ithra Winter 2026 Program

Ithra said the program's events will feature visual storytelling, lighting effects and live performances. (SPA)
Ithra said the program's events will feature visual storytelling, lighting effects and live performances. (SPA)
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Ithra Announces Launch of Ithra Winter 2026 Program

Ithra said the program's events will feature visual storytelling, lighting effects and live performances. (SPA)
Ithra said the program's events will feature visual storytelling, lighting effects and live performances. (SPA)

Saudi Arabia’s King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture (Ithra) announced on Tuesday the launch of the Ithra Winter 2026 program, in cooperation with the Sharqia Development Authority and the Saudi Tourism Authority (STA).

The program will coincide with the opening of Khobar Season on November 13 at the Khobar Sea Front.

Ithra said the partnership reflects the integration of efforts among various entities to strengthen cultural and tourism activities in Eastern Region by highlighting tourist destinations and attracting visitors through a range of programs, events and initiatives.

These efforts aim to enhance the region's standing as a destination offering a blend of cultural, recreational and creative experiences, it added.

Moreover, Ithra said the program's events will feature visual storytelling, lighting effects and live performances, including maritime boat shows and fishermen's performances, as well as poetry recitals, an artistic performance and the Saudi Ardah.

A cultural program will also be held at Dhahran International Exhibitions Company "Dhahran Expo" in Al-Khobar.

Culture

Egyptian Mummy Portraits Show Antiquity's Piercing Gaze in New Rome Show

Some of the masterpieces in the Rome exhibition were allowed to leave Egypt for the first time. Andreas SOLARO / AFP
Some of the masterpieces in the Rome exhibition were allowed to leave Egypt for the first time. Andreas SOLARO / AFP
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Egyptian Mummy Portraits Show Antiquity's Piercing Gaze in New Rome Show

Some of the masterpieces in the Rome exhibition were allowed to leave Egypt for the first time. Andreas SOLARO / AFP
Some of the masterpieces in the Rome exhibition were allowed to leave Egypt for the first time. Andreas SOLARO / AFP

An elegant woman gazes out from her portrait with expressive eyes, a gilded wreath worn in her hair and a gentle, questioning look on her face.

She is one of the 2,000-year-old "Faces of Fayum", startlingly realistic funerary -- or mummy -- portraits painted after Egypt became part of the Roman empire.

The fragile portraits dating from the first to third centuries AD -- painted on thin wooden panels and designed to be placed over the face of mummies -- will go on display in Rome in what organizers hail as a "milestone" collaboration between Italy and Egypt, AFP reported.

"Egypt and Rome, the Faces of Fayum", opening Wednesday at Rome's Ara Pacis museum, also includes mummies, masks, shrouds, jewelry, marble busts and statuary.

The majority of the artefacts come from Egypt, with some allowed to leave the country for the first time.

Such is the case of the "Tondo of the Two Brothers" from Cairo's Egyptian Museum, a freshly restored double portrait from the time of Emperor Hadrian that depicts two curly-haired young men, possibly brothers, with soulful eyes.

Rome's top official for cultural heritage, Claudio Parisi Presicce, called the work an "absolute masterpiece, perhaps the most important pictorial work to have survived from antiquity".

"These are simple wooden panels, often just a few millimeters thick, made of wood... and they were used to depict, through extremely naturalistic painting, the faces of the individuals who were being buried," Parisi Presicce told a press conference Monday.

Rooted in the tradition of Hellenistic painting, the portraits placed over the head of the mummy and secured into its wrappings come from a relatively brief period between the first and third centuries AD, after Egypt became a province of Rome.

In a fusion of two great civilizations -- Egyptian and Roman -- the men, women and children portrayed often bear Egyptian features, but wear Roman dress.

Their faces are vivid, and haunting, whether bearing signs of greying hair and wrinkles, or the long eyelashes and chubby cheeks of a child.

"These people are not dead," Italian figurative painter Amedeo Modigliani once said of the Fayum portraits.

"They are more alive than those who gaze upon them."

- Ushering the dead -

Works from the Louvre, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Landesmuseum Württemberg and other international museums round out the exhibit.

A fertile area of Egypt on the edge of the desert, Fayum's arid climate helped preserve the delicate painted wood, textiles and papyrus on display in the exhibition.

One work, on loan from the Louvre, is a spectacular, near-pristine linen shroud depicting a man standing between the mummy he will become and Anubis, who helped usher the dead into the Afterlife.

Some of the female portraits are adorned in sumptuous jewelry, such as that of the woman "Isidora" from the first century AD, whose three-tiered gold necklace adorned with precious stones, pearl earrings and elaborately curled hairdo project her status.

Parisi Presicce said that "countless questions" remain about the compelling portraits.

"Were they made earlier and kept until the moment of death? Were they painted at the time the deceased was buried? Were they panels that were hung in homes, in residences?" he asked.

A nail found at the top of one of the portraits makes this theory plausible, he said.

Hisham El-Leithy, secretary-general of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, said the images from so long ago have an uncanny power to move us.

"They are people like us, we look at them, they look back at you across 2,000 years," he said.

"That is the power of the portrait."

The exhibition runs until May 2.

Culture

Museum Sold Kandinsky for $62,000. It May Fetch $80 Million At Auction

“Betonte Ecken” is guaranteed to set an auction record for Kandinsky's work when it goes on sale at Christie's later this month. (Christie's) 
“Betonte Ecken” is guaranteed to set an auction record for Kandinsky's work when it goes on sale at Christie's later this month. (Christie's) 
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Museum Sold Kandinsky for $62,000. It May Fetch $80 Million At Auction

“Betonte Ecken” is guaranteed to set an auction record for Kandinsky's work when it goes on sale at Christie's later this month. (Christie's) 
“Betonte Ecken” is guaranteed to set an auction record for Kandinsky's work when it goes on sale at Christie's later this month. (Christie's) 

Some 15 years after Solomon R. Guggenheim died, the foundation managing his extensive art collection concluded that it owned more Wassily Kandinsky paintings than it knew what to do with.

The late American businessman had been among the Russian painter’s most prominent and dedicated patrons.

But in 1964, despite operating its namesake museum in Manhattan, Guggenheim’s foundation placed 50 of its 170 Kandinsky works — characteristically colorful, geometric takes on abstraction — on sale “for want of space,” according to CNN.

Announcing the decision, his nephew, Harry F Guggenheim, said trustees feared the art would otherwise remain hidden away “in our vaults,” according to reports at the time. “We have concluded that this should not be the fate of these paintings,” he added.

It was a noble sentiment but perhaps, in hindsight, a costly one.

At a London auction later that year, the 50 paintings fetched a combined £536,580, then equivalent to around $1.5 million.

Many of them have since reappeared on the market at significantly higher prices.

And now one of the works — “Betonte Ecken,” which in 1964 attracted a winning bid of just £22,000 (then around $62,000, or $540,000 in today’s money) from a New York art dealer — is returning to auction with an estimate of $60 million to $80 million.

“The Guggenheim had such an embarrassment of riches back then,” said Max Carter, global chairman of 20th and 21st century art at Christie’s, the auction house behind this month’s sale.

The foundation “sold tremendous masterpieces, which would be unthinkable to sell today,” he added, speaking over the phone from New York.

“Betonte Ecken” is not just poised to break the auction record for Kandinsky’s work — it is certain to do so. Christie’s said a guarantor has confirmed an offer exceeding the record £37.2 million ($44.55 million) paid for his painting “Murnau mit Kirche II” in 2023.

The dramatic appreciation in the value of Kandinsky’s work is a testament to his status in today’s art market. While his reputation was well-established by the time of the Guggenheim sale (at which point he had already been dead for two decades), “Betonte Ecken” was, then, “still very forward-looking,” Carter said.

“Now it’s become canonical,” he added, calling the painting “quintessential” Kandinsky.

“If you were to go on the street and ask the first 10 people who’d heard of Kandinsky to close their eyes and describe what one of his masterpieces looked like, it would be this.”