Category Archives: Art and design

John Singer Sargent sketch to return to National Trust house where it was created

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Oil sketch of Elsie Palmer to go on display at Ightham Mote in Kent after being acquired by trust

An oil sketch by John Singer Sargent of one of his most famous models will be returned to the English country house where it was painted after being acquired by the National Trust.

Sargent’s sketch of Elsie Palmer, which was done in preparation for his masterpiece A Lady in White, will go on display at Ightham Mote in Kent, where the Palmer family lived and hosted artistic and literary gatherings for the likes of the actor Ellen Terry and the novelist Henry James in the late 1890s.

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Protesters who targeted Girl with a Pearl Earring jailed by Dutch court

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Two activists from Just Stop Oil Belgium each sentenced to two months in prison with one month suspended

Two Belgian climate change activists who last week targeted the Johannes Vermeer painting Girl with a Pearl Earring have been sentenced to two months in prison by a Dutch court, of which one month was suspended.

One activist glued his head to glass covering the painting at a museum in The Hague. The artwork was not damaged, gallery staff said.

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Andy Warhol work not seen in public for 15 years could fetch $80m at auction

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White Disaster (White Car Crash 19 Times) to go under the hammer in New York

Six months after a vivid image of Marilyn Monroe smashed records when it sold for $195m, a rather more dark and brutal work by the cult pop artist Andy Warhol may also be about to fetch a large sum.

White Disaster (White Car Crash 19 Times) – repeated graphic black and white images across a huge canvas measuring 12ft tall and 6ft wide – is expected to sell for at least $80m in New York next month.

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Mondrian painting has been hanging upside down for 75 years

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Despite the discovery, the work, titled New York City I, will continue to be displayed the wrong way up to avoid damaging it

A painting by abstract Dutch artist Piet Mondrian has been hanging upside down in various museums since it was first put on display 75 years ago, an art historian has found, but warned it could disintegrate if it was hung the right side up now.

The 1941 picture, a complex interlacing lattice of red, yellow, black and blue adhesive tapes titled New York City I, was first put on display at New York’s MoMA in 1945 but has hung at the art collection of the German federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia in Düsseldorf since 1980.

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2,500 naked bodies needed: Spencer Tunick announces his return to Sydney

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The US artist’s next mass nude installation will take place in November at a Sydney beach. ‘We’re hoping for a rainbow of people,’ he says

The US artist who has made an international name for himself by urging volunteers to strip naked en masse in public is returning to Australia.

Spencer Tunick’s next “nude installation”, commissioned by the charity Skin Check Champions to raise awareness of skin cancer and coinciding with National Skin Cancer Action Week, will take place on 26 November at a Sydney beach.

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Brisbane-based Indigenous art collective proppaNOW wins prestigious global prize

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Curator at school which awards Jane Lombard Prize says the artists’ work would ‘galvanise arts and social justice communities’ in New York


Indigenous Australian art collective proppaNOW has won a prestigious prize that will take them to New York next year after the selecting jury found their practices would serve as “models for political empowerment throughout the world”.

But don’t expect traditional Aboriginal artworks.

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Salford museum pays £7.8m for LS Lowry’s Going to the Match

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Purchase of 1953 painting beloved by football fans made possible by gift from charitable foundation

A painting by LS Lowry beloved by football fans and art enthusiasts has been bought by the Lowry museum and gallery in Salford, saving it from disappearing into a private collection.

The museum paid £7.8m including fees for Going to the Match, painted in 1953, at an auction on Wednesday evening. The purchase was made possible by a gift from the Law Family charitable foundation, which was set up by the hedge fund manager and Conservative party donor Andrew Law and his wife, Zoë. The painting had been estimated to fetch £5m-£8m.

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Stolen Tasmanian Aboriginal artefacts are finally home. But there’s a catch: they’re only on loan

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Cultural objects kept in museums around the world are in nipaluna/Hobart for an exhibition. But Aboriginal communities are calling for them to stay permanently

In 2014, pakana woman Zoe Rimmer left the British Museum in tears after viewing a 170-year-old kelp water carrier taken from lutruwita/Tasmania in their collection. As she cried, the seed of a big idea was planted: how could she get the rikawa, and other Tasmanian Aboriginal cultural artefacts sitting in institutions across the world, home?

“Seeing our ancestral belongings in a storage facility in the British Museum was quite emotional,” says Rimmer, who until recently was senior curator of First Peoples art and culture at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (TMAG).

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Sydney festival 2023: Town Hall to be filled with 26 tonnes of sand for program showpiece

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The heritage building’s floor will become an indoor beach for an award-winning opera – one of a few architectural landmarks that will get a new life this summer

Twenty-six tonnes of sand will be shipped into Sydney town hall as part of the 2023 Sydney festival, with the heritage-listed building transformed into a faux beach for an award-winning opera starring 79 people and a dog.

The program for the annual festival, announced today, will amplify stories from Indigenous and female-identifying creatives next year. Led by artistic director Olivia Ansell for the second time, it will champion climate action, marginalised voices and the rediscovery of underused spaces in the city – including Harry Seidler’s mushroom-shaped building in Martin Place, which will be turned into a 1970s-themed bar and live music hub, with audiences invited to stay in the retro hotel rooms above.

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Royal Society of Arts accused of ‘spite’ by staff member who spoke out on unions

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Staff member who spoke to the Observer about drive to get workers to join IWGB union claims she was ‘punished’ by arts charity

The Royal Society of Arts has been accused of punishing staff who spoke out about their campaign to unionise the 270-year-old charity.

The Observer reported last week that almost half the charity’s workforce below senior manager level had joined the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain (IWGB), with a petition indicating most staff backed unionisation. The RSA senior management team led by Andy Haldane, a former chief economist at the Bank of England, has rebuffed three requests to voluntarily recognise the union.

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Channel 4 buys painting by Hitler – and may let Jimmy Carr destroy it

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Ian Katz says new show, Art Trouble, celebrates the channel’s tradition of ‘iconoclasm and irreverence’

Channel 4 has bought a painting by Adolf Hitler and will allow a studio audience to decide whether Jimmy Carr should burn it with a flamethrower.

As part of its latest season of programmes, the TV channel has bought artworks by a range of “problematic” artists, including Pablo Picasso, as well as convicted paedophile Rolf Harris and sexual abuser Eric Gill.

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Cerith Wyn Evans brings his neon-lit art home to Wales

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Hepworth prize winner’s works have been shown around the world and now arrive in Llandudno

His twisty neon installations and glittering towers of light are frequently shown in some of the world’s most exclusive galleries in New York, Mexico City, Tokyo and Shanghai.

For his first major solo show in his home country of Wales, Cerith Wyn Evans’ work is on display in the traditional surroundings of a gallery built in Edwardian times in the resort of Llandudno, best known for its old-fashioned pier and seafront – and the bold goats that descended on the town during the first lockdown.

The exhibition runs until 5 February 2023.

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Jürgen Wittdorf: Berlin gallery revives homoerotic art of communist era

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In what would have been artist’s 90th year, first retrospective at Biesdorf Palace has been a surprise success

Seven men wash the sweat off their toned bodies in a communal shower. Unless you squint and mistake a tightly gripped bar of soap for something else, their limbs are suspended in tantalising proximity but never quite touch.

The German artist Jürgen Wittdorf’s 1963 linocut print, from a series titled Youth and Sport, may look like something out of a top-shelf graphic novel or the virile drawings of the gay liberation icon Tom of Finland.

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Battersea power station: timeline of a modern classic

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Begun in 1929, the building was a collaboration between architects Theo Halliday and Sir Giles Gilbert Scott

Battersea power station was built in two phases, as a collaboration between the architects Theo Halliday and Sir Giles Gilbert Scott.

Halliday was responsible for the overall shape and the interior.

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‘Ordinary’ Chinese vase sells for almost €8m after ferocious bidding war

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Tianqiuping-style porcelain sells for nearly 4,000 times its estimated value after buyers are convinced it is a rare artefact

An “ordinary” Chinese vase put up for auction in France and valued at €2,000 (£1,745) has sold for almost €8m after a ferocious bidding war among buyers convinced it was a rare 18th-century artefact.

At the sale in Fontainebleau near Paris, auctioneers were astonished as the offers from about 30 mainly Chinese bidders kept on coming. When the hammer fell the vase had been sold for €7.7m – almost 4,000 times its estimated value. With the seller’s fees, the final purchase price was €9.12m.

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Campaigners celebrate as V&A severs Sackler links over opioids cash

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London museum bows to years of pressure and removes signs acknowledging the family behind the OxyContin crisis

Campaigners calling for the name Sackler to be dropped from cultural landmarks are celebrating this weekend. Their smiles mark five years of demonstrations and dramatic stunts as another major arts institution – London’s Victoria and Albert Museum – takes down signs acknowledging the financial contribution from this wealthy family.

The museum is dropping it controversial ties with the Sackler family, descendants of US makers of addictive opioid prescription drugs. It’s a victory for the campaign group Sackler P.A.I.N, which staged a dramatic public protest at the gallery in November 2019. The group, led by American artist Nan Goldin, argued that donations from the family that founded now-bankrupt Purdue Pharma, maker of the painkiller OxyContin, were a moral stain on cultural institutions that accepted them.

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Lucian Freud’s etching of Wolseley restaurant creator to be sold

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Artist dined at Mayfair restaurant almost every night in later years, and would sometimes share a table with co-founder Jeremy King

A portrait by Lucian Freud of the restaurateur behind the Wolseley, the Mayfair establishment where the artist dined nearly every evening in the last few years of his life, is to be sold next month.

Freud was completing the etching of Jeremy King when he died in 2011. The two had become friends over a period of about 30 years after Freud began dining at Le Caprice, another King establishment (and a favourite of Diana, Princess of Wales’s), and at the Wolseley when it opened in 2003.

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Brad Pitt makes surprise debut as a sculptor at Finland art gallery

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Actor appears alongside Australian musician Nick Cave and British sculptor Thomas Houseago to reveal his first ever public art exhibition

Most know him for his blockbuster movies, chiselled cheekbones and high-profile relationships, but Brad Pitt can now add creating sculpture to his list of achievements after publicly debuting his first works of art in a lakeside museum in Finland.

The A-list Hollywood star unveiled the sculptures – what he called a “radical inventory of self” – at the Sara Hildén Art Museum in Tampere, a move that came as a surprise. It is the first time the “largely self taught” artist presented his sculptures to the public, the gallery said.

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Folio from ‘world masterpiece’ illuminated manuscript goes up for auction

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Section of the Shah Tahmasp Shahnameh is expected to fetch between £4m and £6m at auction next month

A folio from the Shah Tahmasp Shahnameh, one of the “finest illustrated manuscripts in existence” according to Sotheby’s, is expected to fetch between £4m and £6m at auction next month.

The Shahnameh, also known as the Book of Kings, is an epic poem containing 50,000 rhyming couplets, telling the history of Persia’s rulers. It was written by the Persian poet Ferdowsi between 977 and 1010.

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Canadian city pulls bison sculpture in row over representation of colonialism

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Edmonton decided Ken Lum’s paired figures of a bison and fur trader could ‘cause harm and induce painful memories’

A Canadian city has pulled a public art project over fears that a pair of towering bronze statues could be seen as an endorsement of colonialism – the exact opposite of the work’s intended meaning, according to the artist.

The work, which cost C$375,000 (US$285,000), comprises two large bronze figures which were intended to stand on either end of a pedestrian bridge in Edmonton. On one end, a 13ft bison was to stare out over the water. At the other, a colonial fur trader, measuring 11.5ft, would sit atop a pile of bison pelts.

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