Category Archives: Art and design

Rita Keegan: the return of black British art’s forgotten pioneer

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She was a crucial part of a cultural movement in the 1980s. Now a first solo exhibition in 15 years will allow her work to shine

From the 1980s to the early 2000s, artist and archivist Rita Keegan fervently collected and preserved newsletters, leaflets, photographs and exhibition literature from the British black arts scene. “It [didn’t] matter how fabulous the show – if you didn’t have the ephemera, it was hard to say that you existed,” she told the Art Newspaper last summer. “It’s very easy to be written out of history, if you don’t have those pieces of paper.”

Boxes and files stored behind the sofa in Keegan’s living room and a garden “shedio” in her south London home are a portal to the past, specifically, into the seminal British black arts movement founded in 1982. This pivotal moment in art history saw artists such as Sonia Boyce, Eddie Chambers, Denzil Forrester, Lubaina Himid and Maud Sulter galvanised to create and curate works together in the aftermath of the 1981 Brixton uprisings and in response to their marginalisation from the mainstream art world.

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Photographer David Bailey reveals he has vascular dementia

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‘It’s just one of those things,’ says the British celebrity snapper, 83, who is still busy with new work

David Bailey has revealed he has dementia, a life-limiting condition the British photographer described as a bore.

Speaking to the Times, Bailey, 83, said: “I’ve got vascular dementia. I was diagnosed about three years ago.

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The Lost Leonardo: has a new film solved the mystery of the world’s most expensive painting?

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Is the $450m Salvator Mundi a fake? This film – featuring tearful sycophants, sneering experts, dodgy dealers and a secretive superyacht – may finally settle the great da Vinci controversy

It is almost exactly 10 years since Salvator Mundi was unveiled, this “lost Leonardo” instantly triggering astonishment around the world. Since those giddy days, the work has had a turbulent time. As well as becoming the most expensive painting in history, going for $450m (£326m) at auction, Salvator Mundi was denounced by many as a fake and subsequently vanished from view. The painting is now the subject of The Lost Leonardo, a documentary by Andreas Koefoed that opens in cinemas this week.

“I would be surprised,” says Luke Syson, “if I went to see this documentary.” Syson is the curator who, back in 2011, first displayed The Saviour of the World, as its title translates, at the National Gallery’s Leonardo da Vinci blockbuster. Syson is probably making a wise choice. He’s in the film and the way he clams up mid-interview makes him look like the archetypal embarrassed expert caught out on screen.

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Berlin’s bizarre new museum: a Prussian palace rebuilt for €680m

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A cross between a Disneyland castle and a chilling concrete block, the Humboldt Forum is set to teach visitors about Germany’s colonial era. But is the past being examined – or exalted?

A museum gift shop has never been such an ideological battleground. At one end of the store in Berlin’s new Humboldt Forum is a display of souvenirs adorned with the gilded silhouette of the Stadtschloss, the city’s former royal palace, which was bombed to pieces in the second world war. Racks of silk scarves and Christmas baubles hang above rows of candles in regal colours, emblazoned with an image of the stately Prussian pile.

At the other end of the shop is a rival range of merchandise, themed around the former East German parliament and leisure centre, the Palast der Republik, which was triumphantly built on top of the ruins of the palace in the 1970s. With its sharp white marble walls, bronze-mirrored windows and space-age chandeliers, it was designed to showcase the wonders of socialism. You can buy keyrings and enamel mugs in a retro Soviet style, as well as a model kit of the building in Formo, the East German version of Lego, for €250.

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‘Running didn’t even occur to me’: Gulnara Samoilova on photographing 9/11

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‘A cop asked me: “How can you take photographs?” I told him: “I have to document this. It’s history”’

I was asleep when the first plane hit. At the time, I lived just four blocks from the World Trade Center, right next to a hospital, a fire station and the HQ of the New York police. The sirens woke me up. They were nonstop. I turned on the television and saw one of the towers on fire. As I watched the second plane hit the south tower on TV, I also heard it because I lived so close.

I was working for Associated Press (AP) as a photo editor. I knew, as their closest staff member, that I should go out and document it. I got dressed, threw some film into my camera bag, and ran out to the World Trade Center. A lot of photography is like muscle memory. Even in a situation like this, your body knows exactly what to do. I remember a cop asking me: “How can you take photographs?” I told him: “I have to document this. It’s history.”

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Hitler’s favourite artists: why do Nazi statues still stand in Germany?

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A shocking new exhibition reveals the thriving postwar careers of artists the Führer endorsed as ‘divinely gifted’. Many made public works that remain on show today

A photograph from 1940 shows three conquering Nazis in Paris against the backdrop of the Eiffel Tower. Within a few years one of these men, Adolf Hitler, was dead by his own hand; another, Albert Speer, was writing his memoirs in Spandau prison, having eluded a death sentence at the Nuremberg trials. But the third, Arno Breker, was alive and free, making sculptures in the new West Germany that in their bombast and iconography echoed those he had made during the Third Reich.

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Two pints of lager and a view of St Paul’s: the secret life of London’s most thrilling boozers

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What makes a pub special? From the perfect place to flog atomic secrets to the official strictly protected viewpoint for St Paul’s, a new book tells the amazing stories behind the city’s greatest bars

When you stumble out of the medieval warren of Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese pub on Fleet Street, it’s easy to think you’ve had one too many. As you gaze east towards the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral, the skyscrapers of the Square Mile appear to lean back in a woozy limbo, as if lurching to get out of the way.

It’s not the effect of the real ale, but the result of a curious planning rule. The City of London’s policies have long specified the pavement outside this particular pub as the hallowed spot from which Wren’s dome must be perfectly visible against the sky. Even the towers that stand behind it to the east, like the Cheesegrater and the Scalpel, derive their strange chamfered forms from having to preserve a sacred gap behind the cathedral’s silhouette, when seen from outside the pub.

Trace the lines of London’s historic protected views, and you’ll find that many of them end up outside pubs. It reflects not just the fact that the surveyors enjoyed a pint or two, but the central importance of the public house in shaping the history of the city – a phenomenon that is celebrated in a new book.

“There are already so many books about pubs,” says David Knight, co-author of Public House with Cristina Monteiro. “We wanted this one to be different. It’s not a guide to the best places to have a pint but a collection of social and cultural histories, trying to bring together a more diverse range of voices to explore the value of pubs to the city and society.” While the majority of pub literature may be of the stale white male genre, this compendium includes South Asian Desi pubs, African-Caribbean pubs, and a range of pubs that have played a role in LGBTQ+ history.

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‘It’s exactly like a puzzle’: experts on piecing together Roman fresco find

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House in southern France yielded find of outstanding wall paintings dating from 1st century BC

On the right bank of the Rhône in the Provençal town of Arles, the Roman-built House of the Harpist is being hailed as a remarkable record of ancient architecture and interior decoration.

Now, experts have opened their workshop to reveal their painstaking attempts to piece together the vast jigsaw of magnificent and never before seen frescoes discovered in the property thought to date back more than two millennia.

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How street art is helping young migrants paint a brighter future in Italy

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An innovative community project has brightened buildings, ‘brought people together’ and provided an emotional outlet after traumatic journeys

Jadhav*, 18, from Bangladesh, arrived in Italy 10 months ago, but is still haunted by memories of his journey with people smugglers across the Mediterranean Sea.

“There were 156 people packed into a small boat. There were women and children,” says Jadhav in broken Italian and Bengali translated on a smartphone app. “Waves were coming over the side. People were weeping. There was no hope of survival.”

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‘It’s not cutesy’: the art show co-curated by a five-year-old

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My Kid Could’ve Done That! invited 15 artists to create work alongside their children. From leaking breasts to hours in front of childrens’ TV, the results are admirably honest

At five years of age, Astrid might well be the youngest exhibition curator of all time.

“I’m really looking forward to deciding where the art goes,” she says, demonstrating a natural instinct for her new role. “And I’ve really enjoyed working with Daddy too!”

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The curse of Mies van der Rohe: Berlin’s six-year, £120m fight to fix his dysfunctional, puddle-strewn gallery

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The modernist maestro had carte blanche to build a great museum. The result? A breathtaking icon hopeless for displaying art. British architect David Chipperfield relives his gargantuan repair job

Never has so much praise been lavished on so dysfunctional a building. The last major project of modernist master Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie is a perfectly square temple of steel and glass, raised above the street on its own granite acropolis. Built in 1968, not far from the recently erected Berlin Wall, it was intended to symbolise the freedoms of the west, its big black roof enclosing an epic column-free hall for the display of modern art. It has long been venerated as a 20th-century Parthenon, the ultimate example of Mies’s pursuit of “universal space”.

But as a museum, it has always been a disaster. Ever since it opened, the New National Gallery has been dogged by cracking windows, heavy condensation and awkward display spaces, presenting a curatorial nightmare for its staff. Beneath the impractical grand hall are subterranean galleries for the permanent collection that have the dreary feeling of a windowless office complex. It is one of the most extreme examples of the quest for purity of form trumping the demands of function.

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‘Forgotten masters’: auction shines light on India’s overlooked artists

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Paintings commissioned by East India Company in 18th and 19th century up for sale at Sotheby’s

Remarkable paintings of the flora and fauna of India, including a work once owned by Jackie Kennedy Onassis depicting a stork eating a snail, are to go on sale in the first auction dedicated to Company School art.

Sotheby’s has announced details of a sale that shines light on overlooked Indian artists today regarded as forgotten masters.

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Scrawny trees, patchy grass, terrible view … why £6m Marble Arch Mound still falls flat

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After a summer of free entry, visitors will now have to pay up to £8 to climb the London project. But will they bother?

It has been called a “BTec Eiffel Tower” and a “slag heap”. It’s been compared to “a car-park Santa’s grotto, with dogs pretending to be reindeer”. The Marble Arch Mound, the temporary artificial hill commissioned by Westminster city council as an “ambitious” visitor attraction, has become, as a representative of the local community put it, “an international laughing stock”.

The council responded to criticism by allowing free entry during August, and a certain number of the curious and the ghoulishly fascinated have turned up. This week it will start charging again. Given fundamental flaws in the project’s conception, the question is whether people will want to pay £8 for a weekend fast-track ticket now, any more than they did when it first opened at the end of July.

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Tsitsi Dangarembga’s next work won’t be read by anyone until 2114

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The Zimbabwean writer joins authors including Margaret Atwood and Ocean Vuong who have agreed to lock away new writing in the Future Library

Tsitsi Dangarembga made the Booker shortlist for her most recent novel, This Mournable Body, the story of a girl trying to make a life in post-colonial Zimbabwe which was praised as “magnificent” and “sublime”. Her next work, however, is likely to receive fewer accolades: it will not be revealed to the world until 2114.

The Zimbabwean writer is the eighth author selected for the Future Library project, an organic artwork dreamed up by the Scottish artist Katie Paterson. It began in 2014 with the planting of 1,000 Norwegian spruces in a patch of forest outside Oslo. Paterson is asking one writer a year to contribute a manuscript to the project – “the length of the piece is entirely for the author to decide” – with Margaret Atwood, Ocean Vuong and Karl Ove Knausgård already signed up. The works, unseen by anyone but the writers themselves, will be kept in a room lined with wood from the forest in the Deichman library in Oslo. One hundred years after Future Library was launched, in 2114, the trees will be felled, and the manuscripts printed for the first time.

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Baby on Nevermind cover sues Nirvana over child sexual exploitation

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Spencer Elden, who appeared at four months old on iconic album design, claims the image is child pornography

Spencer Elden, who appeared as a naked baby on one of rock music’s most iconic album covers – Nevermind by Nirvana – is suing the band, claiming he was sexually exploited as a child.

In a lawsuit filed in a Californian district court against numerous parties, including the surviving members of the band, Kurt Cobain’s widow Courtney Love, and the record labels that released or distributed the album in the last three decades, Elden alleges the defendants produced child pornography with the image, which features him swimming naked towards a dollar bill with his genitalia visible.

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In your face: how Chuck Close built images and tore them apart

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Face blindness meant the photorealist artist, who has died aged 81, had to dismantle and reconstitute, making every cell of his pixellated portraits ever more dramatic

Hugely enlarged, Chuck Close stares back at you from behind his glasses, a cigarette lodged in the corner of his mouth. It is a face with a what-you-looking-at stare, and you look back, dwarfed by his image, thinking get-out-of-my-face in return.

Taking us from the top of his head to his sprouting chest hair, via every pore and bristle, the artist’s unkempt anti-grooming and non-coiffure, the trickle of smoke exhaled from his nostril, Close’s 1967-8 Big Self-Portrait charts every centimetre of his black and white photograph, which was gridded, enlarged and copied on to the canvas, then painted using a spray gun. All the aberrations of the original photograph, with its blank background and out-of-focus ear, are retained in the painting. The tip of the smouldering cigarette looms out at you. It makes you want to duck. Painted when Close was in his late 20s, the self-portrait was Close’s big move, both calling card and confrontation.

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Our art deals with real injustices, some in Palestine: no wonder we faced opposition « Forensic Architecture

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Our battle to restore a statement to a Manchester exhibition was really about what can and can’t be said in cultural spaces

On Wednesday, protesters in Manchester reclaimed one of the city’s main cultural institutions. Despite the rain, pro-Palestine activists gathered in front of the closed doors of the Whitworth gallery, part of the University of Manchester. It was because of their persistent action, and 13,000 letters sent to the gallery, that part of our exhibition, a printed statement titled “Forensic Architecture stands with Palestine”, has been reinstated. The exhibition, which we insisted be shut as a result of the statement’s unilateral removal, has now reopened.

On Sunday 15 August, a blog post on the website of UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI) announced that, following the group’s intervention, the statement had been removed from our exhibition, Cloud Studies. When we first heard of the news, we were not altogether surprised. The same group had already criticised a statement of solidarity with Palestinians published on the Whitworth’s website in June, and succeeded in convincing the university to have it removed. And this was hardly UKLFI’s first attack on us as an organisation. In 2018, when we were nominated for the Turner prize, UKLFI urged the Tate not to award the prize to us on the outrageous grounds that documents that we had published in relation to Palestine amounted to “modern blood libels likely to promote antisemitism and attacks on Jews”.

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