Exclusive: First show of figurative painter’s work to be displayed in city he fled in 1939 to escape Nazi regime
Frank Auerbach is to be the subject of what has been billed as a homecoming show in Berlin, at which some of his final paintings will be displayed in the city he fled as a child.
Auerbach, who died in November last year, never had a show in the city of his birth, which he left due to persecution by the Nazis. Both of his parents were later killed in Auschwitz.
Continue reading...Tributes paid to Italian known for images that drew attention to social themes including HIV/Aids and racism
Tributes have been paid to Oliviero Toscani, the Italian fashion photographer renowned for the provocative images used in Benetton’s advertising campaigns, who has died aged 82.
Toscani, who for two decades was the art director of the global clothing chain, died on Monday after being hospitalised close to his home in the Tuscan town of Cecina.
Continue reading...A National Trust viewing platform at Corfe Castle offers visitors a glimpse into the king’s royal quarters in Dorset
A luxurious suite of “rooms with a view”, built for the son of William the Conquerer but partly destroyed in the English Civil War, has become accessible to visitors for the first time in almost 400 years, thanks to a new viewing platform at one of England’s most dramatically situated castles.
The King’s Tower was built in 1107 for William’s son Henry I at Corfe castle, which sits on top of a steep hill on the Purbeck peninsula near Wareham in Dorset. Constructed from gleaming white limestone inside the imposing fortification, the 23-metre tower was Henry’s personal penthouse, built to the highest standards of luxury and including an “appearance door” from which he could be seen by his subjects far below.
Continue reading...Jan Davidsz de Heem’s four paintings of sumptuous food and luxury objects were produced as series
A quartet of influential still lifes from the Dutch artist Jan Davidsz de Heem will go on display together for the first time since the 17th century at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.
The four paintings were produced as part of a series by De Heem, who is considered to be a master of pronkstilleven – a style of ornate still life painting – during the Dutch golden age, depicting displays of sumptuous food and luxurious objects.
Continue reading...Conceptual work created by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan was sold at auction in New York last week
The cryptocurrency entrepreneur Justin Sun has fulfilled a promise he made after spending $6.2m (£4.88m) on an artwork featuring a banana duct-taped to a wall – by eating the fruit.
At one of Hong Kong’s priciest hotels, Sun, 34, chomped down on the banana in front of dozens of journalists and influencers after giving a speech hailing the work as “iconic” and drew parallels between conceptual art and cryptocurrency.
Continue reading...Project involves showing work in Gaza but also sending works across Israeli siege lines for exhibiting worldwide
Palestinian artists in Gaza plan to stage a “biennale” exhibition as an act of defiance against Israel’s military onslaught and to focus attention on the plight of the territory’s 2.3 million people under more than 13 months of bombardment.
About 50 artists from Gaza will exhibit their work within the besieged coastal strip, and are looking for art galleries to host exhibitions overseas. But in order to hold their work to the eyes of the rest of the world, the artists are facing a unique challenge: how to get their art across Israeli siege lines.
Continue reading...Four gilt-bronze sconces that lit up home of Louis XV’s mistress are set to go on sale at Sotheby’s in December
For almost 140 years, four massive gilt-bronze wall lights have hung in the 18th-century drawing room at Swinton Castle in Yorkshire, now an opulent luxury hotel.
Guests will almost certainly have noticed the one metre-high rococo appliques with their entwined branches decorated with leaves, berries and cherubim, and passed them off as impressive reproductions of more valuable original works.
Continue reading...Thieves fired shots and took parts of 1904 work by goldsmith Joseph Chaumet from Hiéron Museum
Armed robbers snatched jewels worth millions from a work by the famed Parisian goldsmith Joseph Chaumet classed as a national treasure, in a brazen heist at a French museum.
The thieves arrived on motorbikes at the Hiéron Museum in Paray-le-Monial, in central France, at about 4pm local time on Thursday. Three entered the building and one stood guard outside, said the local mayor, Jean-Marc Nesme.
Continue reading...Madrid Exhibition intends to rescue the technique – coloured paint applied to statues – from centuries of indifference
In a darkened corner of the Prado, not far from an outsized crucifixion and a sculpture of a dead, recumbent Christ with eyes of glass, teeth of ivory and fingernails of horn, is another depiction of Jesus that is remarkable in its poignancy, its humanity and its history.
The tiny, painted terracotta scene, titled Los primeros pasos de Jesús (Jesus’s First Steps), is domestic rather than divine and shows a chubby, beaming infant ambling towards his equally beaming father. Its creator was the Spanish baroque artist Luisa Roldán who, despite becoming the first female sculptor to the royal court in 1692, is only now making her debut in the hallowed Madrid museum.
Continue reading...State’s housing pattern book, launching in 2025, seeks to cut red tape and reduce development application times with pre-approved designs
Five winning terrace and apartment designs will be pre-approved in a new NSW government “pattern book” in a bid to fast-track housing development in the state.
The designs were selected from more than 200 in the state government’s Pattern Book Design Competition, submitted by architects from Australia and around the world.
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Continue reading...Judge considering complaint by fishing firm Samherji rules artist Odee unlikely to be able to defend work as parody
The property rights of Iceland’s largest fishing company prevail over the right to artistic expression of an artist who spoofed the firm’s website to draw attention to a high-profile corruption scandal, London’s high court has ruled.
For his 2023 work We’re Sorry, the Icelandic artist Oddur Eysteinn Friðriksson, who goes by the moniker Odee, copied the corporate identity of Samherji, a major supplier to Britain’s fish and chips industry, and uploaded on to the spoof website a statement titled “Samherji Apologizes, Pledges Restitution and Cooperation with Authorities”.
Continue reading...Collection of 1,700 pieces dating from third to 20th century is highest-value gift of objects in UK museum history
The British Museum has been given a private collection of Chinese ceramics worth about £1bn, the highest-value object donation in UK museum history.
The 1,700 pieces dating from the third to the 20th century have been given permanently by the trustees of the Sir Percival David Foundation. They had been on loan to the London museum since 2009.
Continue reading...Art police and Pisa prosecutor say 38 people being investigated, with about 2,100 fake artworks seized
Italian police have dismantled a Europe-wide forgery network suspected of producing sophisticated replicas of works by some of the world’s most famous artists, including Banksy, Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol and Gustav Klimt.
Thirty-eight people had been placed under investigation in Italy, Spain, France and Belgium on suspicion of conspiracy to handle stolen goods, forgery and illegal sale of artworks, Italy’s art police and Pisa’s prosecutor’s office said in a joint statement on Monday.
Continue reading...Thieves steal two works after ripping them from their frames as they were too big for their car
Thieves have blown open the door of an art gallery in the southern Netherlands to try to steal four works from a famous series of Andy Warhol screen prints, but damaged them all and only managed to get away with two in the botched heist.
The gallery’s owner, Mark Peet Visser, said the thieves had attempted to steal the works from a 1985 series by the US pop artist called Reigning Queens, which features portraits of the then-queens of the UK, the Netherlands, Denmark and Swaziland, which is now called Eswatini.
Continue reading...World Without End topped bestseller lists but was criticised for embracing nuclear power
In 2019, France’s best known climate expert sat down to work with its most feted graphic novelist. The result? Perhaps the most terrifying comic ever drawn.
Part history, part analysis, part vision for the future, World Without End weaves the story of humanity’s rapacious appetite for fossil fuel energy, how it has made possible the society people take for granted, and its disastrous effects on the climate.
Continue reading...A mechanic working at the LAM museum in Lisse assumed the artwork, entitled All The Good Times We Spent Together, was rubbish
A Dutch museum has recovered an artwork that looks like two empty beer cans after a staff member accidentally threw it in the rubbish bin thinking it was trash.
The work, entitled All The Good Times We Spent Together by French artist Alexandre Lavet, appears on first glance to be two discarded and dented beer tins.
Continue reading...Fashion Museum exhibition charts how shortlived Taboo and its founder, Leigh Bowery, inspired decade’s fashion
With ITV’s drama Joan on our screens and the bubble skirt back on the catwalks, the 80s are once again having a moment. An exhibition at London’s Fashion Museum, Outlaws: Fashion Renegades of 80s London, takes a different look – by going deep into the creative explosion on the dancefloors of the decade.
It focuses on Taboo, a London club that lasted barely a year but was pivotal in the careers of people including the singer Boy George, the designers John Galliano and Katharine Hamnett, the choreographer Michael Clark and the performance artist Leigh Bowery, who started the club in 1985.
Continue reading...Enclosure older than Salisbury monument found under late novelist’s garden is given heritage protection
When the author Thomas Hardy was writing Tess of the D’Urbervilles in 1891, he chose to set the novel’s dramatic conclusion at Stonehenge, where Tess sleeps on one of the stones the night before she is arrested for murder.
What the author did not know, as he wrote in the study of his home, Max Gate in Dorchester, was that he was sitting right in the heart of a large henge-like enclosure that was even older than the famous monument on Salisbury Plain.
Continue reading...Work of German-Jewish sculptor Fred Kormis, who fled Nazis in 1930s, is subject of exhibition in London
The work of an overlooked German-Jewish artist who created the UK’s first memorial to victims of Nazi persecution is to be the focus of an exhibition that shines light on the unreported aspects of his life.
Fred Kormis, who fled Germany in the 1930s and later became a British citizen, was described by the Wiener Holocaust Library in London as a forgotten émigré artist who played a unique role in Weimar culture and 20th-century British art.
Continue reading...Gloomy segmented head of famed playwright fails to convey his wit and brilliance, says Merlin Holland
A huge sculpture of Oscar Wilde’s head lying on its side, his face sliced into segments, has been condemned as “absolutely hideous” by the playwright’s grandson.
Merlin Holland, an expert on Wilde’s life and works, has criticised a 2ft-high black bronze sculpture by Sir Eduardo Paolozzi that is to be unveiled in a public garden in Chelsea, south-west London, near Wilde’s former home.
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