Category Archives: Art and design

‘I was part of the Beatles’ act’: Mike McCartney’s best photograph

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‘I call our kid “Rambo Paul” in this one, because he reminds me of Stallone. I have no idea why George is pointing at his nipple’

I didn’t intend to pick up a camera. I’d been practising on drums that had fallen off the back of a lorry into our house on Forthlin Road, Liverpool. But when I was 13, I broke my arm at scout camp, so Pete Best got the job in our kid’s group. That’s when I started taking photos on the family box camera. It was fortuitous, though, because if I had become the Beatles’ drummer, we’d probably have gone the Oasis route.

I would go everywhere with the Beatles. I was part of the act. It’s like if Rembrandt’s kid brother was in the corner with a pad and paper, sketching his older brother. I was lucky – you couldn’t have had a better group to practise on, could you?

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Bikers, rappers and rude boys: the photographer who got to the heart of subcultures

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Janette Beckman has spent four decades documenting underground movements from London’s punks and the birth of hip-hop to LA gangs and illegal girls’ fight clubs. How does she win her subjects’ trust?

It was the tension between Janette Beckman’s shyness and her curiosity about people that helped spark a career photographing subcultures. “I realised that having a camera gave you licence to go up to strangers and say, ‘Hi, I’d like to take a picture of you,’” she says. This epiphany jump-started a 45-year adventure in street photography, documenting the punk and two-tone youths of 70s Britain, the birth of hip-hop in New York, Latino gang members in Los Angeles, bikers in Harlem, rodeos, rockabilly conventions and demonstrations from Occupy Wall Street to Black Lives Matter.

As we talk on a video call, 62-year-old Beckman gives me a tour of her home studio in New York, just off the Bowery where the famous punk venue CBGB used to be. There’s a Salt-N-Pepa snowboard, a Keith Haring painting and gold discs from hip-hop stars Dana Dane and EPMD. On one strip of wall hang a selection of images from Occupy Wall Street in 2011, “for a book,” she says. And on another are pinned a vast selection of her images, for her monograph Rebels: From Punk to Dior.

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Lucian Freud painting denied by artist is authenticated by experts

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The artist insisted he did not paint Standing Male Nude, but three specialists have concluded it is his work

Almost 25 years ago, a Swiss art collector bought a Lucian Freud painting – a full-length male nude – at auction. He then received a call from the British artist, asking to buy it from him. The two men did not know each other, and the collector politely refused, as he liked the picture.

Three days later, he claims he received another call from a now furious Freud who told him that, unless he sold it to him, he would deny having painted it.

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Fabrice Monteiro’s best photograph: a spirit emerges from a rubbish dump in Senegal

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‘The model is holding a child’s doll, looking out over the wreckage. It represents the future generations we’re condemning to environmental catastrophe’

Outside Dakar, Senegal’s capital, is a rubbish dump with its own name: Mbeubeuss. The land on which it sits was once flat swampland. It began as a landfill site in 1968; today, it is a mountain of rubbish. It has accumulated so much plastic waste from the city that to reach it you have to drive on a road of compacted trash.

This is not the Africa I grew up in. As a child here in the 1970s and 80s, it was not like this. But when I returned in 2012, I was shocked at what I found. Here in Senegal, there was plastic waste everywhere – at roadsides, in trees, everywhere. The younger generation don’t know any different: it’s just part of their environment now. I decided I wanted to shoot a series to raise awareness of environmental issues in Senegal, in the hope that people would realise that things do not have to be this way. I wanted to connect environmental issues with the cultural interests of the population, and started researching animism – the belief that objects and the natural world are imbued with spirits.

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Neat enough for Pepys: Magdalene college Cambridge’s inventive new library

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The famous diarist’s dedicated building, left to his Cambridge alma mater, could not be altered. So architect Níall McLaughlin created a magical solution

“My delight is in the neatness of everything,” wrote Samuel Pepys in his diary in 1663, “and so cannot be pleased with anything unless it be very neat, which is a strange folly.”

He was referring in part to the fastidious organisation of his magnificent collection of books. By the time of his death in 1703 he had amassed 3,000 of them, which he left to his alma mater, Magdalene College, Cambridge, to be housed in a dedicated building with his name above the door. He gave strict instructions that his library be kept intact for posterity, without addition or subtraction, its contents arranged “according to heighth” in the bespoke glass-fronted bookcases he had especially commissioned. The responsibility came with an added threat: if one volume goes missing, he instructed, the whole library must be transferred to Trinity.

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Priceless Roman mosaic spent 50 years as a coffee table in New York apartment

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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.

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Planned Virginia Woolf statue challenged as insensitive

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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.

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No school, no hair cut: one girl’s journey through one of the world’s longest Covid lockdowns

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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.

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Lubaina Himid: ‘The beginning of my life was a terrible tragedy’

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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.

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‘She has invaded all our lives’ – Tong Yang-tze, the artist making calligraphy cool

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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.

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Return of Parthenon marbles is up to British Museum, says No 10

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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.

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A £300 monsoon-busting home: the Bangladeshi architect fighting extreme weather

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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.

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The nocturnal​ ​beauty of the ​urban ​underpass – in pictures

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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.”

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Greek prime minister tries to broker deal for return of Parthenon marbles

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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.

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Slapstick architecture: how a €3.99 Ikea salad bowl became part of the Rotterdam skyline

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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.

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Banksy artwork deliberately destroyed by Christopher Walken in BBC comedy show finale

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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.

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‘A remarkable history’: inside the exhibition bringing Peru’s past to life

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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.”

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