My life seemed to fall apart in 2020. But having nothing to lose meant I was free to pursue my passion
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The person who got me through 2021: Heather Phillipson’s sculpture brightened my trips to hospital
On my way to have painful medical tests, I felt dejected. Then I saw a giant dollop of whipped cream with a cherry on top in Trafalgar Square
Most people were keen to leave 2020 behind but had I known what was coming in 2021, I might have chosen to stay there. From the first days of January I started to experience extended bouts of dizziness – a feeling that the ground was moving beneath me, with bursts of tinnitus, nausea and head pressure thrown in.
One thing I can tell you about near constant dizziness is that it’s not the ideal state to be in if you are trying to homeschool a four-year-old, entertain a stir-crazy one-year-old and hold down a full-time job. As for fun activities: just looking at a playground roundabout was enough to send me spinning out.
Continue reading...Outcry as memorial to Tiananmen Square victims removed from Hong Kong University
Site of the Pillar of Shame at city’s oldest university under guard after workmen cut up statue
Hong Kong’s oldest university and the territory’s authorities have been accused of rewriting history after cutting up and removing a statue mourning those killed in the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.
The erasure of the memorial from where it had stood for nearly 25 years came as Beijing has intensified its targeting of political dissent in Hong Kong since the Covid pandemic.
Continue reading...Suspected Caravaggio work given protected status in Spain
Painting came close to being sold at auction for €1,500 before its true potential value of £50m came to light
A small oil painting that avoided being sold at a Spanish auction for €1,500 earlier this year after experts suggested it could be the work of the Italian master Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio has been granted protected status as an item of cultural interest.
The painting of the scourged Christ, which measures 111cm by 86cm, was withdrawn from sale in April after suspicions grew that it had been incorrectly attributed to the circle of the 17th-century Spanish artist José de Ribera.
Continue reading...Pandemic park life and a secret knitting cult: the best photography books of 2021
From meditative portraits that nod at the Dutch old masters to an incendiary, epic exploration of the Troubles, these are the volumes that resonated this year
The photography book that I returned to more than any other this year was Encampment Wyoming by Lora Webb Nichols, an extraordinary record of life in a US frontier community in the early 20th century. Comprised of photographs by Nichols and other local amateur photographers, it emanates a powerful sense of place. Domestic interiors and still lifes punctuate the portraits, which range from the spectral – a blurred and ghostly adult plaiting the hair of a young girl – to the stylish – a dapper, besuited woman peering through a window. An intimate, quietly compelling portrait of a time, a place and a nascent community.
Perhaps because of the strangely suspended nature of our times, I was also drawn to contemporary books that dealt in quiet reflection. Donavon Smallwood’s Languor was created during the lockdown spring and summer of 2020, as he wandered through the woods in the relatively secluded north-west corner of New York’s Central Park. Smallwood’s images of glades, streams and ravines suggest stillness amid the clamour of the city and are punctuated by his deftly composed portraits of the individuals who were regularly drawn there during the pandemic. The book’s subtext deals with the fraught history of Central Park, a space that has often echoed the city’s racial tensions. “What’s it like to be a black person in nature?” asks Smallwood in this quietly powerful debut.
Continue reading...‘I go too far, too deep’: the Swiss wanderer who found the soul of Japan
In 1951, Werner Bischof was sent to cover the war in Korea. The photographer instead found himself captivated by Japan, where US soldiers took their leave, and spent a year exploring ‘the depths of the Japanese soul’
Continue reading...Richard Rogers: Pompidou and Millennium Dome architect dies aged 88
The British architect changed the London skyline with creations such as the Millennium Dome and the Cheesegrater
British architect Richard Rogers, known for designing some of the world’s most famous buildings including Paris’ Pompidou Centre, has died aged 88.
Rogers, who changed the London skyline with distinctive creations such as the Millennium Dome and the ‘Cheesegrater’, “passed away quietly” Saturday night, Freud communications agency’s Matthew Freud told the Press Association.
Continue reading...‘I wanted the focus to be on their smiles’: Brunel Johnson’s best phone picture
The London-born photographer on his image of Gambian football fans
There’s a strong Premier League following in the Gambia: just like Brunel Johnson, 14-year-old Musa is an Arsenal fan. The London-born photographer was on his way to lunch when he noticed the teen, in his favourite football shirt, huddled with friends. They were on the grounds of Spot Academy, watching game highlights on one of the older kids’ phones.
Brunel had been living alongside the boys for two weeks, documenting the work of the charity, which serves as a community school while providing boarding places for orphans. He’d left his digital camera in his room and knew the moment would pass if he went back for it. So he reached for his iPhone. The photograph’s angle was a spur-of-the-moment decision, chosen simply to fit as many faces in as possible; he added the black and white “Noir” filter later.
Continue reading...Images of India: from courtesans and colonial rule to a child’s-eye view – in pictures
Since its invention in the 1840s, photography has played an integral part in Indian art history. Although it is often said that India is the most photographed country in the world, the history of its representation is more complicated, and more political, than initially meets the eye. Visions of India: From the Colonial to the Contemporary is the first major survey of Indian photography in Australia and will be on show at the Monash Gallery of Art in Melbourne until 20 March 2022
Continue reading...Sotheby’s sells record $7.3bn of art so far in 2021
Auction house credits younger, tech-savvy collectors for highest annual sales in its 277-year history
Sotheby’s has sold a record $7.3bn (£5.5bn) worth of art and other collectibles so far this year – the most in its 277-year history.
The auction house said on Wednesday that an “influx of younger, tech-savvy collectors” buying luxury items such as handbags, jewellery, wine and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) during the pandemic had helped lift sales to the record high.
Continue reading...Banksy designs T-shirts to raise funds for ‘Colston Four’ accused of Bristol statue damage
Anonymous artist says sales proceeds will go to the four people accused of Edward Colston statue damage ‘so they can go for a pint’
Banksy says he has made T-shirts that he will be selling to support four people facing trial accused of criminal damage over the toppling of a statue of slave trader Edward Colston.
The anonymous artist posted on Instagram pictures of limited-edition grey souvenir T-shirts, which will go on sale on Saturday in Bristol.
Continue reading...‘This is our voice’: The Uyghur traditions being erased by China’s cultural crackdown
Ancient shrines, oral folklore and hip-hop cyphers are all part of a rich artistic heritage being ‘hollowed out’ in Xinjiang, say Uyghur exiles and scholars
On Thursday, the Uyghur Tribunal delivered its damning judgment on the human rights abuses allegedly committed by the Chinese state in Xinjiang. Over the past months this London-based people’s tribunal has heard testimony from international scholars as well as survivors of Chinese detention and “re-education camps”.
While the ruling has no legal standing, the aim is to highlight the treatment of Uyghurs, Kazakhs and other Turkic Muslims in north-west China. Rachel Harris, a British ethnomusicologist and Uyghur specialist, has described the state’s strategy as an attempt “to hollow out a whole culture and terrorise a whole people”.
Continue reading...New York’s Met museum to remove Sackler family name from its galleries
Art museum announces change in the wake of leading members of the family being blamed for fueling the deadly US opioids crisis
New York’s famed Metropolitan Museum of Art is going to remove the name of arguably its most controversial donor groups – the billionaire Sackler family – from its galleries.
The news comes in the wake of leading members of the US family, one of America’s richest, being blamed for fueling the deadly opioids crisis in America with the aggressive selling of the family company’s prescription narcotic painkiller, OxyContin.
Continue reading...From snubbing Mick Jagger to explaining the cosmos: the secret life of MC Escher and his impossible worlds
The artist’s mind-boggling works – full of stairways leading nowhere and water flowing uphill – defy logic. But did they also foresee the second world war? And why was he so riled by the Stones frontman?
You are walking up a staircase that winds up to the top of a tall square tower. It ascends one side, then the next, then the next – and then suddenly you are right back where you started. This is the kind of problem people who are trapped in the geometrically impossible, yet still strangely plausible, worlds of MC Escher have to deal with all the time. In his mind-boggling creations, dimensions collide and normality dissolves. Looking into his pictures is like standing on the very edge of a cliff – and being right down at the bottom at the same time.
The Dutchman’s illusions have been famous and beloved since the 1950s, when spaced-out fans first started claiming to see hemp plants hidden in his art. And now we have Kaleidocycles, a Taschen book about the artist featuring paper puzzle kits that allow you to actually build his paradoxical structures at home, unlikely as that may seem. The tome has just been reissued in time for Christmas and the 50th anniversary of his death next year. His work does seem perfect for the festive season, given it’s all fun and games. Or at least that’s how it seems, initially.
Continue reading...Rajan the last ocean-swimming elephant: Jody MacDonald’s best photograph
‘He had been used for logging on the Andaman Islands. When I found him, he was 60, living in retirement – and loving his swims’
I lived at sea for 10 years. I co-owned and ran a global kiteboarding expedition business. We’d sail around the world on a 60-foot catamaran, following the trade winds, kiteboarding, surfing and paragliding in remote locations. One night, I watched a Hollywood movie called The Fall, which had a section where an elephant was swimming in tropical blue water. I didn’t know if it was real or a fake Hollywood thing. But I thought: “Man, if that does exist, I’d love to photograph it.”
I searched the internet and found the elephant from the film was living in the Andaman Islands, an Indian territory in the Bay of Bengal. When we sailed into the capital, Port Blair, a few months later in 2010, I decided to hop off and try to find this elephant. I found Rajan on Havelock (now Swaraj) Island and spent two weeks with him, learning about his incredible story.
Continue reading...Can artistic freedom survive in Sudan? The writing’s on the wall…
The recent coup dashed hopes raised by the end of the military regime but newly liberated artists refuse to submit quietly
In the new dawn of a heady post-revolutionary era, Suzannah Mirghani returned in 2019 to the country of her birth for the first time in years. Her mission was to shoot a short film on Sudanese soil. It proved unexpectedly straightforward.
“When the revolution happened, there was this exuberance,” she says, from her Qatari home. “When we came to make our film, we were given the green light. We were told: ‘Anything you want’.
Continue reading...Banksy offers to raise £10m to buy Reading prison for art centre
Artist would sell stencil used to paint mural depicting what was thought to be Oscar Wilde on listed building
Banksy has offered to raise millions of pounds towards buying Reading prison, where Oscar Wilde was once held, so that it can be turned into an arts centre.
The street artist has promised to match the jail’s £10m asking price by selling the stencil he used to paint on the Grade II-listed building in March, a move campaigners hope will prevent it from being sold to housing developers.
Continue reading...On my radar: Adjoa Andoh’s cultural highlights
The actor on her hopes for Brixton’s new theatre, an offbeat western and the sophistication of African art
Adjoa Andoh was born in Bristol in 1963 and grew up in Wickwar, Gloucestershire. A veteran stage actor, she starred in His Dark Materials at the National Theatre and in the title role of an all-women of colour production of Richard II at the Globe in 2019. On TV, Andoh plays Lady Danbury in Bridgerton, which returns next year, and she will appear in season two of The Witcher on Netflix from 17 December. She lives in south London with her husband, the novelist Howard Cunnell, and their three children.
Continue reading...Filming wild beasts: Cherry Kearton interviewed – archive, 11 May 1914
11 May 1914: The British wildlife photographer tells the Guardian about filming animals ‘unmolested and unharassed in their native wilds’
I found Mr Cherry Kearton, who has just returned from crossing Africa with a kinema camera for the third time, in the private room of his London office (writes a representative of the Manchester Guardian).
He was endeavouring to conduct a business conversation on the telephone. Round him stood half a dozen merry friends, whose joy at welcoming him home was so ebullient that they refused to be serious. The author of several standard books was giving lifelike imitations of a roaring lion, while the others were laughing loudly at his performance.
Continue reading...From utopian dreams to Soho sleaze: the naked history of British nudism
A new book details how nudism began as a movement of intellectuals, feminists and artists, only to be suppressed by the state. But our attitudes to nakedness also tell us a lot about ourselves
When Annebella Pollen was 17, she left behind her strict Catholic upbringing for the life of a new-age hippy, living in a caravan and frolicking naked among the standing stones of Devon, while earning a living by modelling for life-drawing classes. That early experience, followed by a relationship with a bric-a-brac dealer, shaped her later life as an art historian. “I’m very interested in things that are culturally illegitimate,” says Pollen, who now teaches at the University of Brighton. “A lot of my research has been looking at objects that are despised.”
Foraging trips with her partner to car-boot sales alerted her to a rich seam of 20th-century nudist literature that is still emerging from the attics of middle England: magazines whose wholesome titles – Sun Bathing Review or Health & Efficiency – concealed a complex negotiation with both public morality and the British weather. This is the subject Pollen has picked for her latest book Nudism in a Cold Climate, which tracks the movement from the spartan 1920s through the titillating 50s, when the new mass media whipped up a frenzy of moral anxiety, to the countercultural 60s and 70s, when the founding members were dying off and it all began to look a bit frowsty.
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