Ben and Annie Vautier’s children say in statement their father killed himself just after their mother died of a stroke on Wednesday
French artist Ben, best known for his ironic painted slogans, has died aged 88, killing himself just hours after the death of his wife of 60 years, his family said Wednesday.
His wife, Annie, suffered a stroke on Monday evening and died on Wednesday, the couple’s two children, Eva and Francois, said in a statement.
Continue reading...South Africa-born painter Gavin Jantjes says institutions tried to buy work they ignored decades earlier
British arts institutions deployed “kneejerk” and “stopgap” responses in the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter movement as they attempted to avoid criticism for the lack of diversity in their collections, according to the artist Gavin Jantjes.
The South Africa-born artist, who was a key figure during the British black art movement of the 1980s, told the Guardian that under-pressure organisations approached him to buy work that they had ignored since it was made decades earlier.
Continue reading...Auction house hit by cyber-extortionist group RansomHub which claims to have sensitive information of at least 500,000 clients
A ransomware hack was the last thing the precarious fine art market needed – but that’s what it got when Christie’s website went down days before it began its all-important 20th and 21st century May auctions in New York.
Guillaume Cerutti, CEO of the French-owned auctioneer, gently called the attack a “technology security incident”. Christie’s posted its auction catalogs on a separate site, the sale went ahead with sales of $640m, and 10 days later the website came back to life.
Continue reading...Visitors have been flocking to the National Gallery of Australia amid the controversy over Vincent Namatjira’s painting of Rinehart, director tells hearing
The mining magnate Gina Rinehart gifted a painting of herself to Australia’s National Portrait Gallery, but there appear to be strings attached.
A Senate estimates hearing on Friday heard that the gallery’s board was processing a deed of gift made by Australia’s richest woman – an approved portrait of herself.
Continue reading...Yolŋu rapper says it was ‘an honour’ to be painted by Matt Adnate, who wins category judged by Art Gallery of New South Wales staff
A portrait of Indigenous rapper Baker Boy by Matt Adnate has won the $3,000 packing room prize in the annual Archibald prize.
The judges hailed the Victorian artist’s portrait for its accuracy and ability to capture “its kind and kindred spirits and a strong Indigenous voice through music”.
Continue reading...Museum’s experts realised painter’s Ecce Homo had been misattributed in auction catalogue
Four centuries after it was painted, three and a half centuries after it arrived in Spain and three years after it came perilously close to going under the hammer for just €1,500, a lost, luminous and lovingly restored Caravaggio has gone on display at the Prado in Madrid.
The Ecce Homo, painted in the Italian master’s dark and desperate last years, made headlines around the world after experts at the museum spotted it in an auction catalogue and rang Spain’s culture ministry to share their suspicions that the painting had been misattributed.
Continue reading...The artist used ephemera to convey how white Australia failed to come to terms with the country’s Indigenous peoples
Destiny Deacon, the trailblazing First Nations artist and activist known for her works using “Koori Kitsch” to subvert colonial interpretations of Indigenous culture, has died aged 67.
Deacon’s death was announced on Friday by Sydney’s Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, which has represented the artist for more than two decades.
Continue reading...Two people arrested over theft of José Capelo portraits in Madrid in 2015 – one of which is still missing
Police in Madrid have recovered a portrait by Francis Bacon, valued at €5m (£4.3m), which was one of five works by the famously thirsty and hell-raising artist that were stolen from the home of the painting’s subject almost a decade ago.
The pictures, whose total value has been put at €25m, disappeared in 2015 after a break-in at the Madrid home of José Capelo, a Spanish banker and close friend of Bacon who sat for the painter.
Continue reading...Two installations host a 24/7 live stream in both cities, but a small number of visitors initially abused the opportunity
The live video portal linking Dublin, Ireland, to New York, New York, has reopened after unruly behavior got the modern art sculpture temporarily shut down.
The two installations making up the Portal – created by the Lithuanian artist Benediktas Gylys – host a 24/7 live stream in both cities so people can see and interact with each other. One installation is located in the Flatiron district of New York, and the other is on Dublin’s popular O’Connell Street.
Continue reading...‘Bakery scent’ added via microcapsules to postage stamp celebrating ‘jewel of French culture’
The French Post Office has released a scratch-and-sniff postage stamp to celebrate the baguette, once described by President Emmanuel Macron as “250 grams of magic and perfection”.
The stamp, which costs €1.96, depicts a baguette decorated with a red, white and blue ribbon. It has a print run of 594,000 copies.
Continue reading...Lebohang Kganye blends oral traditions, family photos and theatre in a ‘new and fresh way’ to trace personal history of apartheid era
The South African artist Lebohang Kganye has won the prestigious Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation prize for her work that uses large-scale cutouts and elements of set design to trace and depict her family history during the apartheid era.
The Johannesburg-based artist took home the £30,000 prize for her winning exhibition, which is on display at the Photographers’ Gallery in central London and is called Haufi nyana? I’ve come to take you home.
Continue reading...Late British painter’s Les Distractions de Dagobert, ‘the apotheosis of Carrington’s oeuvre’, was inspired by Hieronymus Bosch
The auction record for British surrealist Leonora Carrington was smashed at Sotheby’s in New York on Wednesday night, marking a new high point for the artist, who lived in Mexico for most of her life and was until her death in 2011 one of the last surviving participants of the surrealist movement of the 1930s.
Carrington’s 1945 painting Les Distractions de Dagobert was auctioned for $28m with fees, soaring over a presale estimate of $12m-$18m after 10 minutes of bidding. The sum fetched is nine times Carrington’s previous auction record of $3.2m.
Continue reading...Livestream artwork with 2.4m-wide screen allowed people in both cities to see but not hear each other, leading to offensive conduct
Authorities in Dublin are to temporarily shut down the live video portal with New York because of unruly behaviour.
The city council said in a statement on Tuesday it would switch off the interactive webcam at 10pm Irish time while technicians try to tweak – or censor – a project that has brought delight and notoriety.
Continue reading...Dubliners urged to give ‘Irish welcome’ via interactive sculpture, but bad behaviour has also been on display
Rain sluiced down on a grey Dublin afternoon but the crowd clustering around the portal ignored the downpour and waved at a man cycling towards the screen on a sunny morning in Manhattan.
He gazed back, waved and wobbled before recovering his balance and vanishing down Fifth Avenue, eliciting a cheer from the sodden observers on North Earl Street.
Continue reading...Ann Pizzorusso says she has tracked down the background landscape of the world’s most famous painting
The landscape behind Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa has sparked endless debate, with some art historians suggesting the view was imaginary and idealised, and others claiming various links to specific Italian locations.
Now a geologist and Renaissance art historian believes she has finally solved the mystery in one of the world’s most famous paintings. Ann Pizzorusso has combined her two fields of expertise to suggest that Leonardo painted several recognisable features of Lecco, on the shores of Lake Como in the Lombardy region of northern Italy.
Continue reading...Devastating floods in Rio Grande do Sul state have about left 90 dead with survivors seeking food and shelter
Heavy rains that began last week have caused rivers to flood, inundating whole towns and destroying roads and bridges across the southern Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul.
The local civil defence agency said the death toll had risen to 90, while 131 people were unaccounted for with 155,000 homeless. A state of emergency has been declared in 397 of Rio Grande do Sul’s 497 towns and cities as rescue efforts continue.
The Taquari River in Rio Grande do Sul. Photographs: Maxar Technologies/AFP/Getty Images
Continue reading...Bob Olley’s unsettling vision of clash between miners and police is part of 40th anniversary show in Bishop Auckland
Bob Olley was there 40 years ago at the “battle of Orgreave”. “I saw the violence,” he said, shaking his head. “I thought I was in a foreign country when I saw what the police did. It is hard to believe it happened in this country.”
The brutality he and others witnessed on 18 June 1984 as striking miners met 6,000 police officers on horses or wielding batons on foot will stay in the memory. It was in his head as, some years later, he embarked on his response to one of the world’s greatest artworks, Picasso’s Guernica.
Continue reading...Tents, debris and personal items from the Nova festival, where 364 people died on 7 October, form shocking exhibit on Wall Street
While New York was preoccupied with student protests over the US’s support of Israel’s war in Gaza last week, another aspect of how the city with the largest Jewish population outside Israel is coming to terms with bloodshed in the Middle East was being prepared.
On Wall Street, a gruelling exhibition has opened detailing the horrific attack on the Nova music festival by Hamas terrorists on 7 October, in which 364 people were murdered, many wounded and 44 taken hostage.
Continue reading...New room would give thousands of daily visitors better experience, says museum president
The Mona Lisa, the world’s most famous portrait, could get a room of its own in the Louvre, the museum’s president said.
Such a move would give visitors, many of whom visit the Louvre for the famous painting alone, a better experience, Laurence des Cars told the broadcaster France Inter.
Continue reading...Exhibition explores how a Spanish-Filipino artist in 1966 opened a trailblazing cultural outpost in Cuenca’s ‘hanging houses’
In July 1966, as the Beatles were preparing to release Revolver and Spain was approaching the 30th anniversary of the coup that birthed the Franco dictatorship, a Spanish-Filipino artist called Fernando Zóbel threw open the doors of an improbable but visionary cultural outpost.
Based in a clutch of 15th-century houses overhanging a precipitous gorge in the small city of Cuenca, the Museo de Arte Abstracto Español, or Museum of Spanish Abstract Art, had a simple if daunting mission. As Manuel Fontán del Junco, the director of museums and exhibitions at the Juan March Foundation in Madrid and one of the curators of a new exhibition about the institution, puts it, “it was a museum for artists in a country of artists without museums”.
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