Long-lost mosaic commissioned by Emperor Caligula disappeared from Italian museum during second world war
A priceless Roman mosaic that once decorated a ship used by the emperor Caligula was used for almost 50 years as a coffee table in an apartment in New York City.
Dario Del Bufalo, an Italian expert on ancient stone and marble, described how he found the mosaic in an interview with CBS’s 60 Minutes on Sunday.
Continue reading...Memorial to novelist would be by Thames, which would evoke her suicide by drowning
Concerns have been raised about a planned statue of Virginia Woolf overlooking the Thames, which has been called insensitive because of the way she killed herself.
The memorial the author, designed by Laury Dizengremel, would be positioned on a park bench overlooking the river on Richmond riverside in south-west London, where she lived for about a decade from 1914.
Continue reading...Antonella Bordon’s hair was her family’s pride and joy. But as the pandemic kept her out of school for 18 months, the 12-year-old Argentinian vowed to lop it all off as soon as she could return to class
When she finally cut her hair, Antonella Bordon had trouble sleeping. At the age of 12, her first haircut meant more to her than a simple change of style.
For most of her childhood, Bordon’s silky hair ran all the way down her back to her calves, such a deep brown it looked like a black mane. Her mother and sister would comb it every day, rubbing the locks with rosemary oil, and helping her style it in a way to keep her cool during the hot Argentinian summer.
Continue reading...As the first Black woman – and the oldest person – ever to win the Turner, the artist reflects on being a trailblazer, and how her early life moulded her
Lubaina Himid has waited a long time for a show at Tate Modern. She is now 67, and in 2017 she had the bittersweet honour of being the first Black woman, and the oldest-ever artist (at 63), to win the Turner prize. Bittersweet because “I knew very definitely, in the way that you don’t necessarily if you’re 45, that I had more years behind me than in front. You could think, if you won it at 45, that you might have the same amount of time again to try things, to fail, to try things again. To live fast and loose, and have big parties. And I suppose at 63 I thought: ‘Well, at the best, I’ve probably got 20 years of making.’”
We are in Preston, the city where she has lived since the age of 36. She holds a chair at the University of Central Lancashire, and her studio, where we are talking, is in a Victorian block above the Citizens Advice Bureau, right in the city centre, looking out over the covered market and a step away from the grandly Grecian Harris Museum. All is neat and white in her eyrie, aside from a few unfinished canvases that are bright with blues, oranges and greens. On a table are dozens of tubes of acrylic paint, set out in ordered rows. A sizable chunk of floorspace is occupied by an antique handcart that at some point she will use to make a work; there are some old wooden drawers whose interiors she has painted with male heads.
Continue reading...In post-USSR Russia and neighbouring states, places now abandoned offer reminders of the region’s turbulent history, from the grandeur of a ruined Orthodox church, to the frescos that still adorn the crumbling walls of former barracks, schools and factories
Continue reading...The director is being sued by the film production company, Miramax, for planning to sell ‘non-fungible tokens’ of the film he wrote and directed
Name: Pulp Fiction.
Age: 27.
Continue reading...From railway signs to perfume bottles to Taiwan’s official passport stamp, the artist is giving ancient lettering a modern twist. How will her work go down at Hong Kong’s controversial new M+ gallery?
The most striking thing about Tong Yang-tze, sitting inside her modest Taipei studio residence, is her confidence, and the sense that she’s had it all along. Now in her late 70s and considered one of Taiwan’s foremost calligraphers and artists, Tong grins and jokes over cups of green tea and local sweets, belying her fame and cultural significance. “Of course I’m good!” she laughs at one point, recalling an offer early in her career from her former university to teach. “I said no, I don’t want a teaching job. At that time, everybody needed a job but I wanted to be an artist. No regrets.”
Last week Tong’s calligraphy with a modern art twist greeted visitors to the hotly anticipated M+ museum in Hong Kong, an ambitious decade-long project to create what has been dubbed Asia’s Tate Modern. The 33-gallery space, in a harbourside building designed by “starchitects” Herzog & de Meuron in collaboration with TFP Farrells and Arup, opened last week.
Continue reading...Spokesperson’s comments before Boris Johnson meets Greek PM appear to signal softening of position
Returning the Parthenon marbles to Greece is a matter for the British Museum, Downing Street has said, apparently reversing longstanding UK government opposition to the idea, reiterated by Boris Johnson as recently as March.
Johnson was scheduled to meet the Greek prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, at No 10 later on Tuesday, and Mitsotakis was expected to argue that the reunification of the “stolen” sculptures was a key mutual issue, and one that had to be resolved by ministers.
Continue reading...From a mosque that breathes to innovative bamboo houses, Marina Tabassum has won the prestigious Soane medal for her humanitarian buildings
For the people of coastal Bangladesh, the monsoon can bring untold torment – and, occasionally, unexpected joy. Every year from June to October, in the Ganges delta region where the country’s three major rivers converge, the waterways swell and riverbanks burst, causing catastrophic flooding. The torrential rainfall is joined by heavy glacial runoff from the Himalayas, exacerbated in recent years by global heating. Homes and livelihoods are lost overnight. But the meltwater also brings cascades of sediment that, a few months later, leave unpredictable gifts – new strips of land, known as “chars”, rising from the riverbed.
“You can’t really call it land,” says Marina Tabassum, who has been awarded the Soane medal, the first architect from the global south to win the prestigious gong. “It is wetness. It belongs to the river. But for the landless, the chars offer some years of relief. They provide a place to fish, cultivate and settle with their families.”
Tabassum turned her attentions to the delta region last year when the pandemic struck and work in her Dhaka office, MTA, slowed down. It gave her time to pause and reflect, and reassess where the skills of an architect can make the most difference. The national lockdown had caused many to lose their jobs, increasing homelessness in the region, with countless delta-dwellers forced to live under makeshift tarpaulin shelters.
How did the British fashion photographer Perou end up shooting a book of grimy, deserted underpasses around England? It started, he says, “when Karl Hyde of Underworld asked me to photograph one for his [2013] solo album Edgeland”. Hyde suggested they expand the idea, and the result, eight years later, is Tunnel Vision, featuring more than 200 English underpasses photographed at night, with gnomic captions (supplied by Hyde) taken from graffiti found nearby.
“The more I photographed underpasses the more wonderful I found them,” says Perou. “They’re all unique: they have different designs and lighting, different paint or municipal art on the walls. They’re almost all uniformly smelly and cold,” but, he insists, “beautiful and full of character.”
Kyriakos Mitsotakis offers to loan Greek treasures to British Museum if ‘stolen’ sculptures are returned to Acropolis
The Greek prime minister has demanded that the 2,500-year-old Parthenon marbles be returned to Athens and has repeated an offer to loan some of his country’s treasures to the British Museum in an attempt to broker a deal.
Kyriakos Mitsotakis told the Daily Telegraph that the sculptures, also known as the Elgin marbles, belong in the Acropolis Museum at the foot of the Periclean masterpiece.
Continue reading...The colossal mirrored bowl of the Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen costs a fortune to clean and has upset a neighbouring hospital. So how are locals finding it?
Inspiration often strikes at lunch in the office of Dutch architects MVRDV. It’s the one moment in the day when everyone breaks from their screens and comes together around a long communal dining table, spread with assorted salads, to eat and chat. One fateful day in 2013, during a lunchtime brainstorming session, the tableware would prove to be more inspirational than ever. Eight years on, a monumental Ikea salad bowl has been added to the Rotterdam skyline – a €3.99 Blanda Blank rising 40 metres high.
“I was looking for something round,” says Winy Maas, the puckish frontman of MVRDV, describing the origins of the Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen. This €94m (£80m) open archive for the city’s art museum now stands as a colossal mirrored bowl in Rotterdam’s Museumpark, reflecting the surroundings in a surreal panorama. “The interns had put a big rectangular block of Styrofoam on the site model,” Maas recalls. “It was too rude. I thought something round would be nicer to our neighbours, so I replaced it with a mug. Then we wanted to reduce the footprint, so I grabbed the stainless steel bowl, with its nice mirroring aspect. That was it.”
Such is the design process in an office founded on whimsical spectacle. Maas revels in turning models upside down, or grabbing whatever is to hand and adding it to the mix. One project began as a cluster of blocks before he draped a cloth over the model, turning it into a lumpy hill. Another building, with house-sized blocks dramatically cantilevered from its side, was the result of a model of a grid of little towers being mistakenly placed horizontally on the table. The comical process is intrinsic to the practice’s quirky Superdutch brand, and key to their global exportability. (For the Depot launch, a dedicated press conference was held in Chinese.) As architectural slapstick, their work transcends cultural boundaries.
Hollywood actor paints over original work, which was created for Stephen Merchant’s TV series The Outlaws
A piece of art created by Banksy was painted over by Hollywood actor Christopher Walken in the final episode of BBC series The Outlaws.
The six-part comedy-drama, which Stephen Merchant co-created with US writer and producer Elgin James, and also directed, follows a group of misfits renovating a derelict community centre in Bristol, as part of community service for crimes they have committed.
Continue reading...A British Museum show on ancient Andean civilisations is revealing new insights into their views of time, society and war
The British Museum’s landmark show Peru: A Journey in Time has been a decade in the making and enables the museum to foreground objects from its own collections and present them alongside treasures from Peru seen for the first time in the UK. Its opening coincides with the 200th anniversary of Peru declaring its independence from Spain, with the UK being one of the first countries to recognise the new nation’s sovereignty. But the neatness of this chronology is perhaps, to a western audience, almost the only familiar aspect of a show that consistently challenges the most basic notions of how the world works and how it can, and should, be lived in. Not the least of these challenges is to the concept of time itself.
The subtitle of the exhibition is both a prosaic description of a chronological examination of many different cultures over 3,500 years, but also an introduction to how Andean time was experienced. “We generally think that we’re in the present, the past is behind us and the future is ahead of us,” explains its co-curator Jago Cooper. “Whereas in Andean societies, the past, present and future are parallel lines happening contemporaneously. So the past isn’t dead, it’s happening at the same time as the present, which can therefore change it. And it is by accepting the interrelationship between the past and present that you can best plan for the future.”
Continue reading...From reclining, topless men to survivors of the war in Azerbaijan, here are the best images from the Taylor Wessing photographic portrait prize 2021
Continue reading...Steve Goldman’s first rule is ‘it has to make me laugh’, and he is sharing the fun with public in Huddersfield
There’s the album cover with the band as rabbits, or the one with a harmony duo walking out of water dressed only in their underwear and ties, but surely the most baffling is the concert guitarist pictured in dinner jacket and no trousers.
Why? “I’ve no idea, sorry,” says Steve Goldman, who owns about 300 records that can lay claim to having some of the world’s worst cover art.
Continue reading...Ahead of a UK exhibition of her photo series Journey in the Death Boat, Güliz Vural describes travelling with Syrians being smuggled to Greece from Turkey
Standing on a Turkish beach ready to join a group of Syrian refugees on an inflatable boat bound for Greece, the photojournalist Güliz Vural’s biggest fear was that the people traffickers organising the illegal crossing would not let her onboard.
If she had known that within a few hours of leaving Turkey she would be under arrest, accused of people trafficking herself, she would have thought twice about the journey.
The migrants carry the inflatable boat they will travel in down to the beach. They had to leave all their possessions as they crammed themselves in. Nearly 50 Syrians made the crossing in a boat designed to carry 12 people, adding to the anxiety felt by the children in particular.
Continue reading...Digital art is a billion-dollar business, with everyone from Paris Hilton to Damien Hirst trading in ‘non-fungible tokens’. But are NFTs just a get-rich-quick scheme masquerading as culture?
“It’s actually a lot simpler than you think.” It’s a Tuesday afternoon, and somewhat to my surprise, I’m on the phone to Paris Hilton, who is graciously explaining the world of NFTs.
Hilton is many things – a reality star, an heiress, an unlikely lockdown fitness guru who uses designer handbags instead of weights. But until now, she has never been considered a significant player in the art world. When artists have acknowledged her, often they’ve done so to fetishise her image. In 2008, Damien Hirst bought a portrait of her by the artist Jonathan Yeo, in which her body is constructed from collaged images cut from porn magazines.
Continue reading...The Prison Arts Collective brings art, and renowned artists, to incarcerated people as a form of therapy and escape
The American prison has a long cultural history, depicted in movies from The Shawshank Redemption to The Green Mile. They are generally portrayed as harsh, dehumanising places populated by hardened criminals and vicious guards.
Who better, then, to demystify prisons and those who live in them than artists themselves? “We’ve had this glorified TV version of what a prison is in America and sure, it’s not a cakewalk, but it’s also humans in there – our fellow humans,” says Brian Roettinger, a graphic designer based in Los Angeles.
Continue reading...In this extract from a book compiling artworks made by Donwood and Yorke for Radiohead, the pair discuss how alienation with Cool Britannia saw them retreat into landscapes, labyrinths and inadvertently inventing Twitter
Stanley Donwood I can’t believe the innocent world we lived in when we were making this work. It was before 9/11, before the “war on terror”, before the conjoining of the police and the military – all of the social changes that have led towards the position we now find ourselves in. It wasn’t possible to know what was going on around the world in the same way that it is now, when news has become a sort of surrogate entertainment.
Thom Yorke Everybody involved felt like we’d been in some weird circus for quite a while, after OK Computer. Personally, I mentally completely crashed, as did Stan. We all did, in a way. Rather than immersing ourselves in this congratulatory atmosphere around us, we felt the total opposite. There was this fierce desire to be totally on the outside of everything that was going on, and a fierce anger, and suspicion. And that permeated everything. It was completely out of proportion, deeply unhealthy – but that’s where we were at.
Continue reading...