Category Archives: Art and design

‘We go after them like pitbulls’ – the art detective who hunts stolen Picassos and lost Matisses

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Christopher Marinello has spent three decades finding missing masterpieces, recovering half a billion dollars’ worth of art. He talks about threats from mobsters, tricky negotiations – and bungling thieves

One summer morning in 2008, Christopher Marinello was waiting on 72nd Street in Manhattan, New York. The traffic was busy, but after a few minutes he saw what he was waiting for: a gold Mercedes with blacked-out windows drew near. As it pulled up to the kerb, a man in the passenger seat held a large bin-liner out of the window. “Here you go,” he said. Marinello took the bag and the car sped off. Inside was a rolled-up painting by the Belgian artist Paul Delvaux, Le Rendez-vous d’Ephèse. Its estimated worth was $6m, and at that point it had been missing for 40 years.

Marinello is one of a handful of people who track down stolen masterpieces for a living. Operating in the grey area between wealthy collectors, private investigators, and high-value thieves, he has spent three decades going after lost works by the likes of Warhol, Picasso and Van Gogh. In that time, he says he has recovered art worth more than half a billion dollars. When I call him, he answers, then abruptly hangs up. “I was just on my way to a police station to recover a stolen sculpture,” he explains later, apologising.

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It’s a hard sell but Africa must invest in art and imagination

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Building an arts centre in Uganda, in a pandemic, was never going to be easy but it’s crucial to our post-Covid future

I’ve been raising funds for a building project: not a hospital, not a school, but an arts centre.

It’s not an easy sell at the best of times but add in a pandemic and the fact that I’m in Africa and, according to the current rules of financial engagement, art is the verylowest of priorities.

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Crude, obscene and extraordinary: Jean Dubuffet’s war against good taste

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He was the inventor of ‘art brut’ who rebelled against his parents, his teachers and then art itself. Yet the impact of his wild provocative paintings, often culled from graffiti, can still be seen today

Which great artist of the 20th century has been most influential on the 21st? Neither Picasso nor Matisse, as they have no heirs. And not Marcel Duchamp, however much we genuflect before his urinal. No, the artist of the last century whose ideas are everywhere today was a wine merchant who took street art and fashioned it into something extraordinary more than 75 years ago.

After four years of Nazi occupation, you’d think Parisians would have been unshockable. But in 1944, the newly liberated city was sorely provoked by the antics of Jean Dubuffet. Even as the last shots were fired, he was creating newspaper collages bearing the fragmentary graffiti messages he saw in the streets: “Emile is gone again”, “Always devoted to your orders”, “URGENT”. In the next couple of years, he unveiled shapeless, childlike paintings that abandoned all pretence at skill.

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How Holbein left clever clue in portrait to identify Henry VIII’s queen

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New evidence shows miniature long held to be of Catherine Howard could depict Henry’s fourth wife, Anne of Cleves

Created in around 1540 by Hans Holbein, court painter to Henry VIII and one of the greatest portraitists of all time, the miniature is a prized treasure in the Royal Collection. But the sitter is unknown, with the artefact long catalogued merely as “Portrait of a Lady, perhaps Catherine Howard”, Henry VIII’s fifth queen.

Now, as a result of fresh research, she has been given a new identity: that of Anne of Cleves, Henry VIII’s fourth wife. Art historian Franny Moyle has amassed evidence to show that this is the face of the noblewoman whom the king married in 1540 to form a political alliance.

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Poussin painting ‘copy’ to hang in main galleries with new label

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The Triumph of Silenus was relegated to storerooms but new study casts it in a new light

It was bought by the National Gallery in the 1820s as a painting by Nicolas Poussin, the 17th-century French master. But The Triumph of Silenus – a bacchanalian revel – has long been relegated to the storerooms, having been repeatedly rejected by some of the 20th-century’s foremost experts as a mere copy.

Now doubts about the picture have been dispelled and it will hang in the main galleries with a new label bearing Poussin’s name.

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The Who Sell Out: still a searing satire on pop’s commercial breakdown

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Filled with product placement and advertising, the band’s newly reissued 1967 album put the pop in pop art, by showing how closely music was entwined with capital

These days, we think of the period between 1965 and 1967 as one of white-hot musical progress, a dizzying three-year period during which innovation followed innovation, a succession of totemic albums and singles were released and pop music changed irrevocably. But, as Jon Savage’s superb book 1966: The Year the Decade Exploded made clear, not everyone at the time was impressed with how things were going. Savage’s research revealed a succession of contemporary naysayers, devoted to “ringing the death knell” as he put it: 1966 – The Year Pop Went Flat was noted music journalist Maureen Cleave’s assessment of 12 months that had seen the release of Revolver, Blonde on Blonde, Reach Out (I’ll Be There), Eight Miles High, It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World and 19th Nervous Breakdown.

The most striking contemporary quote of all might be one that didn’t appear in Savage’s book. “People aren’t jiving in the listening boxes in record shops any more, like we did to a Cliff Richard ‘newie’,” it lamented, before qualifying: “I like some of the new sounds, purely as sound, that are coming out of pop music.”

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Meet the miniaturist whose tiny homes are a delight

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Carmen Mazarrasa builds exquisite doll’s houses where she can control everything – except when the mice decide to move in…

At moments of unrest I open Instagram and scroll impatiently until I see what I need to see, and then I exhale, a gleeful loosening. What I am looking for is something recognisable – a plant, a pencil, a chair, a bowl of dumplings – shrunk to a fraction of its size. How to describe the pleasure, the sweet, squealy pleasure of studying a miniature iPhone, suitable only for a busy mouse, or smoked salmon bagel that would fit on the head of a pin, or a set of tools balanced on a fingernail? My favourites are the miniatures that are truly banal – a plug extension lead on @DailyMini recently thrilled me, as did a rack of postcards showing scenes from holidays appropriate only for ants. In those moments of tightening stress, when the world feels far too large, I have plenty to choose from.

The world of tiny things is growing. Artists sculpting miniature objects have found new audiences on Instagram and clients on Etsy – a recent purchase of mine on eBay was a gutted fish on a plate, at 1/12th its real size. I am also watching a pack of crumpets. Once the stuff of elderly hobbyists, over the past decade miniature making among millennials has seen a boom. The queen of the miniacs is Carmen Mazarrasa, whose tiny rooms, filled with covetable things, make the viewer feel wobbly, both at the scale and their desire. Because it’s not just that the rooms of rugs or ceramics or beds look real, it’s that they look like rooms you might see in Architectural Digest, filled with artful paintings and replicas of iconic chairs.

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Did art peak 30,000 years ago? How cave paintings became my lockdown obsession

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Portraiture, perspective, impressionism, movement, mythology: cave artists could do the lot. And I have spent the past year on a virtual odyssey of their primordial wonders

I was recently awoken in the night by lions, their eyes glaring in the dark from blunt rectangular faces as they stalked bison through an ancient, arid grassland. As I came to, however, I realised I was not about to be eaten alive. This was simply one of the perils of spending too much time looking at images of cave art on the web.

Cave artists could do it all. The faces of the animals they painted are exquisite portraits, while their bodies are rendered in perfect perspective. But wait – weren’t these supposed to be the great achievements of European art? After all, in his classic study The Story of Art, EH Gombrich tells how western art took off when the ancient Greeks learned how to show movement, that the perspective was discovered in 15th-century Europe, and that the communication of sensation rather than the seen was the gift of the impressionists. Gombrich had probably not seen much cave art. Lascaux, a series of caves in the French Dordogne, was a recent discovery when he published his book in 1950 – and Chauvet, also in France, wouldn’t be found until 1994.

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‘Damn! This is a Caravaggio!’: the inside story of an old master found in Spain

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Art dealer Giancarlo Ciaroni attempted to buy painting listed at €1,500 for €500,000 – but discovered bewildered owners already had two offers of €3m

It took all of six minutes for Massimo Pulini to realise that the small oil painting due to go under the hammer in Madrid earlier this month with a guide price of €1,500 (£1,300) could be worth millions.

At 9.48pm on 24 March, Pulini, a 63-year-old professor at the Bologna Fine Arts Academy, received an email request for an evaluation. Sent by an antiques dealer and friend of Pulini’s, it included a photo of a luminous oil painting of the scourged Christ.

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Was Nero cruel? British Museum offers hidden depths to Roman emperor

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Nero: the man behind the myth brings together more than 200 artefacts from across Europe

Nero, one of the most notorious Roman emperors of them all, murdered his mother and two wives, ruthlessly persecuted early Christians, including Saint Peter and Saint Paul, and even set fire to Rome itself – famously fiddling amid the flames – to make room to build himself a vast, luxurious palace.

Or did he? That is the question posed by an exhibition opening at the British Museum next month which seeks, if not to rehabilitate Nero’s reputation, at least to challenge some of history’s assumptions about him.

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A little girl climbing the tree of life: Luis Tato’s best photograph

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‘She climbed to the top unaided, to collect leaves for her family’s dinner. The tastiest ones are usually higher up’

The vast Zinder region in Niger, west Africa, is the most populated part of the country. Its people live mostly in traditional villages, their lives relatively unchanged for decades. Yet they are now being profoundly affected by climate change. I was there in 2019, working on stories about the crisis, reforestation and resilience projects. Most of the region’s inhabitants make their living through cattle. Global warming isn’t just causing droughts that affect crops and cause food shortages – it also means the cattle can’t graze. So people are being forced to travel ever further to find water and food for themselves and their livestock. This creates conflicts over land and access to water.

This girl, who was 10 or 11, lived in the village of Malawama. She is at the top of a massive baobab tree, collecting leaves for the family dinner – the tastiest are usually higher up. Baobab leaves are a popular meal in the region. They’re similar to spinach and eaten as a side dish or added to soups and stews. I saw her from a distance and the image quickly caught my eye. I was surprised to see her climbing this huge tree unaided, but she moved so confidently that I soon stopped worrying. She was completely used to it – as most local people are.

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Whispers to thunderstorms: the world of sound designer Max Pappenheim

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After embarking accidentally on his career, Pappenheim has created innovative soundscapes for theatre, opera and radio

Max Pappenheim’s journey into sound design comprises a series of happy accidents. Music – and especially organ music – was his first love. He spent a year as a cathedral organist and it was only his predilection for experimentation and finding “the weirdest corners of the repertoire” that stopped him from pursuing a professional career in liturgical music.

Instead, he went to Cambridge University, read classics and began teaching at a school in the Midlands. There, he was asked to direct a musical, Sweeney Todd, and it was then the ground began to shift beneath his feet.

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‘When I paint, all the voices in my head go still’: Juliet Stevenson on how art got her through lockdown

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Painting has helped one of Britain’s most revered actors survive Covid restrictions and the loss of a child. We join the actor for an art class that never quite happens

If you go down to the woods today, you may just come across Juliet Stevenson dangling from a branch, fumbling to photograph the light falling through a caterpillar hole on a particularly disobliging leaf, with her partner Hugh chuckling, resigned, as yet another quick stroll turns into a day trip. Upside down Juliet Stevenson has been a rare constant of Suffolk’s lockdown landscape, even as snow buried it and tides hacked away at its crumbling coastline. The 64-year-old has been all over the East Anglian country, leaving a trail of snow angels on her quest to find its most picturesque – and acrobatic – angles.

What’s an actor to do when the West End goes dark? All that creative energy must go somewhere – and this actor is training the newly discovered painter’s eye that has kept her sane over lockdown. “By the time you get to my age,” she says, when I question why painting would be the basis of our interview, “you become too settled into the skills you know you have. I can sort of do my job. I know quite a lot about parenting. But to be absolutely at the beginning of something – at square one – it’s just a great feeling.”

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‘They capture history’: the projects saving Spain and Portugal’s shop signs

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A collective of projects across Iberia is protecting commercial signs to create a living archive

Fire engine red, bordered by polka dots and stretching the length of three cars, the sign for the Orte clothing store had long loomed over Madrid’s Alcalá thoroughfare, its presence steady even as fast-food restaurants and chain stores began moving into the area.

When the store closed its doors and the space was poised to be rented, news swiftly reached Alberto Nanclares. Within days he was on site, working with a team to painstakingly pry the sign from the facade where it had sat for more than five decades.

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‘He’s telling a story of his time’: how Bill Traylor, born into slavery, became an art titan

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Referred to as ‘the greatest artist you’ve never heard of’, Bill Traylor’s compelling life is put under the spotlight in a new documentary

Bill Traylor had already lived a full life before he was born as an artist. Enslaved at birth on an Alabama cotton plantation in 1853 and having spent his entire life as a farmer within a 40-mile radius of Montgomery, it was only in his late 80s that he, homeless and alone, parked himself by a bustling intersection in the state capitol’s segregated black neighborhood and began to draw and paint.

Related: In the Absence of Light: celebrating the history of black artists in America

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‘Female artists were invisible’: critics didn’t dismiss Nancy Holt’s land art – they didn’t mention it at all

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Holt made mesmerising works that filtered stars and vanished in the desert heat. But land art was seen as a male preserve. A new exhibition redresses the balance

The story of land art is generally believed to be a tale of white men in weathered denim descending on what they thought of as the empty canvas of the American west in the 1960s with bulldozers and big ideas to make their work. But what of the women who were also making their mark? “Today, land art appears as an almost perfect distillation of the art world’s history of male privilege, with its conviction that man is entitled to space to roam, to make his mark,” critic Megan O’Grady wrote in 2018. “It is one of the contemporary art movements most urgently in need of reconsideration.”

A forthcoming exhibition at Lismore Castle in County Waterford, centred on the work of the late Nancy Holt, hopes to redress that balance. The Irish venue launches its post-lockdown programming with Light and Language, a group show looking at her legacy in contemporary art as a central member of the land art and conceptual movements. It is an uncommon opportunity to see a sizeable group of Holt works, many of which haven’t been exhibited in decades. There is a large-scale installation, several video and sound works, photography, drawing and a scattering of her “concrete poems”. The most recognisable piece of Holt’s is a mesmerising earthwork entitled Sun Tunnels – four cylindrical, concrete forms, large enough to walk through, installed in the desert in Utah.

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Painting that was nearly sold for €1,500 could be Caravaggio worth €50m

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Spanish government imposes export ban on oil painting as experts study it to determine authorship

Before it was pulled from sale, lot 229, a small but luminous oil painting of the scourged Christ attributed to the circle of the 17th-century Spanish artist José de Ribera, had been due to go under the hammer in Madrid on Thursday with a guide price of €1,500 (£1,300).

Closer inspection, however, has raised suspicions that the Crowning with Thorns may be the rather more valuable work of the Italian master Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, leading the Spanish government to impose an export ban on the painting.

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A cartoon before first communion: Susan Kandel’s best photograph

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‘Left to her own devices, she’d be in a T-shirt and out in the dirt. But she’s been told to be good, stand still and not mess up her dress’

This photo was easy because this is my niece, who’s getting ready for her first communion. Her normal state was to be very active, never stationary for more than a minute. Left to her own devices, she’d be wearing a T-shirt and probably out there in the dirt. What I see in this picture is that she’s been told to be good, stand still and not mess up her dress.

It was 1987 and the family lived in Stoughton, Massachusetts. It’s a blue-collar area, not particularly fancy. There were always kids playing outside, which you didn’t see so much in more prosperous neighbourhoods. There was a lot of excitement. First communion is a very big deal. The rationale is that the girls are becoming brides of Christ, so their outfits are like a wedding dress, and the boys wear white suits, white shirts, white ties. They’re seven years old, considered old enough to have a notion of sin. My niece must have just turned 40 now.

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