Category Archives: Art and design

Five thousand years of mystical magnificence: Epic Iran at the V&A – review

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V&A, London
Persepolis and Isfahan are dazzlingly brought to life in a blockbuster show that explores five jaw-dropping millennia of cultural history, from soaring domes to charging horses


Typical. You go for months without any culture, then 5,000 years of it come along at once. That’s what the V&A’s luxury coach tour of a blockbuster promises, and delivers, including quite brilliant recreations of Iran’s two most renowned sites, Persepolis and Isfahan. Epic Iran shows there is a cultural history that connects the country as it is today with the people who lived here five millennia ago. To put this in perspective, that’s like telling the story of Britain from before Stonehenge to the present and hoping it all connects up somehow. But in Iran, it does.

That’s partly because of a pride in history that preserved traditions across the millennia. The most important document of that is The Shahnameh, The Book of Kings, written at the start of the 11th century CE by the poet Ferdowsi. Iran had been converted to Islam in the seventh century, but Ferdowsi’s epic is packed with the heroic deeds and bloody battles of the ancient, pre-Islamic Sasanian empire. It is also written in Persian, as opposed to Arabic. There are gorgeous manuscripts of this classic. A masterpiece made in Tabriz in the 1500s for the Safavid ruler is open on a battle scene in which bejewelled horsemen charge each other across a sea-like expanse of blue: the painter takes time to depict little flowers blooming on the battlefield, just before the horses trample them.

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Outback camel trek: one woman’s 5,000km journey across Australia

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After working with camels for five years, 32-year-old Sophie Matterson decided to embark on an epic trek across Australia, with nothing but the animals she had come to love for company. She trained five of them to carry her provisions before beginning a 5,000km coast-to-coast walk from Australia’s western-most point in Shark Bay, Western Australia, to the eastern-most point in Byron Bay, New South Wales

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Was the fiddler framed? How Nero may have been a good guy after all

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He was a demonic emperor who stabbed citizens at random and let Rome burn. Or was he? We go behind the scenes at a new show exploding myths about the ancient world’s favourite baddie

Nero comes with a lurid reputation. “The main thing we know about him is his infamy,” says Thorsten Opper, curator of the first British exhibition devoted to the Roman emperor. “The glutton, the profligate, the matricide, the megalomaniac.” Also, the pyromaniac: famously, Nero “fiddled while Rome burned”, or at least strummed his kithara to one of his own compositions, The Fall of Troy, while a fire, supposedly begun by him, destroyed three of Rome’s 14 districts and seriously damaged seven.

His afterlife on the page and screen is certainly arresting. Nero inspired some of the greatest Renaissance and baroque operas, notably Monteverdi’s L’Incoronazione di Poppea and Handel’s Agrippina, which chart the emperor’s adulterous love for Poppaea, who became his second wife. In the epic 1951 movie Quo Vadis, Peter Ustinov played Nero as entirely unhinged: a mincing, purple-swathed toddler in a man’s body. Christopher Biggins took him on in I, Claudius, the classic BBC adaptation of Robert Graves’s novel, and made him power-hungry, baby-faced and quite, quite mad.

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Help, it’s 1,000 trillion degrees in here! The Big Bang artwork that makes scientists cry

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What would it have been like to be inside the Big Bang? We meet the ultra-hi-tech art duo who are using light, sound and sub-atomic astro data to recreate the biggest explosion ever

‘Step into the heart of the Big Bang,” says the advert for Halo, a walk-in, 360-degree, audiovisual installation about to open in Brighton. Come off it, I want to retort. You couldn’t “step” into the Big Bang without first travelling 13.8 billion years back in time and then being extremely miniaturised. After all, the universe was, according to one estimate, just 17cm in diameter at its inception.

What’s more, it was dark inside the Big Bang. In fact, there was no light at all. True, if you stuck around for 380,000 years, according to Nasa, you might have been able to see something because that was when free electrons met up with nuclei and created neutral atoms that would have allowed light to pass through. But who has 380,000 years to hang around waiting in the dark?

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Stolen Roman frescoes returned to Pompeii after investigation

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Six fragments returned to archaeological park, some after being illegally trafficked in 1970s

Six fragments of wall frescoes stolen from the ruins of ancient Roman villas have been returned to Pompeii’s archaeological park, after an investigation by Italy’s cultural protection police squad.

Three of the relics, which date back to the first century AD, are believed to have been cut off the walls of two Roman villas in Stabiae, a historical site close to the main Pompeii excavations, in the 1970s before being exported illegally.

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Would you pay £99,000 for this self-lacing Nike? Sneakers Unboxed review

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Design Museum, London
From battered Vans to box-fresh Adidas, how did sneakers become an $80bn-a-year global industry? This fun show has all the answers – including how to get really fat laces

‘It was all about being the freshest,” says Koe Rodriguez, toothbrush in hand. “That’s how you pulled honeys, how you got respect from the hard rocks. That’s how you laid your game down. It was all about being fresh.” The hip-hop historian’s not talking about his teeth, though, but his sneakers.

Rodriguez appears in Just for Kicks, a 2005 documentary about sneaker culture that also features an MC explaining his painstaking monthly shoelace-cleaning ritual. Treating his precious laces as if they were the finest cashmere, he would carefully scrub them between his clenched knuckles, then pinch out the water, squeeze them with a towel, and press them with the tip of a hot iron, to make them as wide as possible. “They gotta be fat,” he insists.

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Tracey Emin on beating cancer: ‘You can curl up and die – or you can get on with it’

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As she starts to rebuild her life after surgery, the artist shares her unflinchingly honest cancer self-portraits, talks about seeing dead people in hospital walls, and explains why she’s buying herself a punchbag – and kittens

‘I’m smiling and talking to you,” says Tracey Emin, sitting at her kitchen table. “But it’s not always like this.” We’ve been delaying this conversation until she finally felt well enough. She has been spending a lot of time in bed, just resting. On the phone, she sounded weak, but today she is indeed smiling, getting excited as she speaks – the Tracey who I have been fortunate enough to get to know.

“Now I’ve got a terrible pain in my legs, it’s unbearable. That’s why I’ve been in bed. I’m determined to go for a walk later because I hardly ever go out. I have a urostomy bag, so I have a major disability. The more well I get, the more annoying it is. Previously it was all right because I was on morphine. But now I want to do things and I can’t.”

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Puppet of refugee girl to ‘walk’ across Europe along 12-week arts festival trail

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Three teams of four puppeteers will accompany Little Amal from Turkey to Manchester to celebrate refugees

A giant puppet of a nine-year-old Syrian refugee girl is to “walk” from Turkey to the UK through villages, towns and cities for one of the most ambitious and complex public artworks ever attempted.

The Walk project was meant to have taken place between April and July but was delayed by the pandemic. Now the 5,000 mile (8,000km) journey of Little Amal, from Gaziantep, near the Turkish-Syrian border, to Manchester, will take place over 12 weeks from 27 July.

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The Lady in the Portrait review – painterly pageantry in a Chinese royal court

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Fan Bingbing stars as an emperor’s wife having her portrait painted in this artful yet inert period drama

This French-Chinese co-production about an earlier French-Chinese collaboration offers handsome pageantry amid its lavish recreation of 18th-century imperial court life, but it isn’t quite enough to compensate for a puttering narrative motor. Longtime Apichatpong Weerasethakul producer Charles de Meaux has turned director with a far eastern equivalent of Girl With a Pearl Earring – another decorous, ever so slightly sleepy matinee sit.

The film’s subject is Jean-Denis Attiret (played by Melvil Poupaud), a real-life French Jesuit missionary who spent half of his 60-odd years employed as the Chinese court painter. His trickiest commission, recalled here, came from the emperor’s bored wife (Fan Bingbing), thirsting to preserve an image that might turn her indifferent husband’s head.

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David Hockney on joy, longing and spring light: ‘I’m teaching the French how to paint Normandy!’

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While enjoying an idyllic lockdown in France, the 83-year-old artist has created perhaps his most important exhibition ever – offering hope to an injured world

‘I think it looks terrific,” says David Hockney. “It’s all on one theme, isn’t it? And there’s not many exhibitions like that, really, a show all about the spring.” The 83-year-old artist is taking a look around his new exhibition at the Royal Academy in London for the first time. He seems happy with it – and rightly so, for it is hypnotic and ravishing. But while I am getting a sneak preview in person, Hockney is here only virtually, his face appearing on two screens, one a giant TV, the other a small laptop.

He is at home, at what he calls his “seven dwarves house” in Normandy, wearing a red, black and white check jacket, a checkerboard tie, a blue-green pullover and round, gold-framed glasses. His kaleidoscopic choice of clothing, challenging the very limits of the video call’s bandwidth, is as vibrant and beguiling as the canvases hanging around us. Hockney has not just painted spring; he has come dressed as it.

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Leonardo da Vinci bear drawing expected to fetch £12m at auction

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Head of a Bear is to be sold in London in July by Christie’s auction house

A drawing of a bear by Leonardo da Vinci is expected to fetch up to £12m at auction.

The picture, titled Head of a Bear, is being sold in London by Christie’s. It will go on display in New York and Hong Kong before being auctioned and is expected to fetch between £8m and £12m, according to the auction house.

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‘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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