Category Archives: Art and design

British Museum is world’s largest receiver of stolen goods, says QC

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Geoffrey Robertson says it should ‘wash its hands of blood and return Elgin’s loot’

The British Museum has been accused of exhibiting “pilfered cultural property”, by a leading human rights lawyer who is calling for European and US institutions to return treasures taken from “subjugated peoples” by “conquerors or colonial masters”.

Geoffrey Robertson QC said: “The trustees of the British Museum have become the world’s largest receivers of stolen property, and the great majority of their loot is not even on public display.”

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Tutankhamun’s glitzy farewell tour a timely promotion for Egypt

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Riches to move permanently to new Grand Museum, so London show is being milked by country’s PR department

In the manner of an ageing rock star with a faltering voice but a hefty tax bill, King Tutankhamun and his entourage rolled into London this weekend for the latest stop in what his handlers insist will be absolutely, without question, his last world tour.

Related: Tutankhamun review – thrills and fun as King Tut gets the Hollywood treatment

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Brian May completes stereoscopic ‘devil cards’ collection

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Queen guitarist finds last two of 19th-century set of French ‘Diableries’ after 30 years

They have names like The Infernal Cavalry, Satan the Journalist and Bicycle Race in Hell, and tell horrible stories of oppression, torture and misery.

There are also scenes that show the damned playing billiards at “Cafe Chez Satan”, a fancy dress carnival with the Prince of Darkness as an untrustworthy nurse, and a “lottery in hell” for which there is only one winner.

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Rescued at sea: how did refugees’ lives in Europe turn out?

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In June 2018, Italian photographer Nicoló Lanfranchi joined the last ship patrolling the Mediterranean to save refugees. Then, over many months, he tracked them down to their new homes

• Life aboard the Aquarius: a photographic diary
• Photo diary part two: the Aquarius arrives in Malta

In early 2018 Italian-born photographer Nicoló Lanfranchi was living in Berlin combining reportage work with commercial projects. He travelled the world for German media, producing stark images of the slow death of Brazilian rivers and the dignity of survivors of the Haiti earthquake.

But he began watching with growing horror as a crisis unfolded closer to home. In his native Italy he could see an increasingly rightwing government cracking down on the rescue ships that patrolled the Mediterranean, particularly off the coast of Libya, threatening fines of tens of thousands of euros for bringing ashore people who were risking their lives trying to reach Europe in flimsy boats. By June, when the country’s hardline interior minister Matteo Salvini began closing Italy’s ports to the rescue ships, 45,000 migrants had already crossed the Mediterranean that year, with more than 1,000 deaths. Salvini’s crackdown worked. Ships began to vanish, until there was only one left: the Aquarius, run by Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and SOS Méditerranée.

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Strike a contrapposto pose to look more attractive, science says

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Study finds pose makes waist-to-hip ratio seem lower on one side and looks more appealing

Dancers do it, Instagrammers do it, even the Venus de Milo does it. When it comes to striking a pose, it seems the only way is contrapposto. Now research has shed light on why the attitude is so appealing.

Experts say the pose, which involves standing with weight predominantly on one foot with a slight twist in the upper body, makes the waist-to-hip ratio appear strikingly low on one side of the body.

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‘They didn’t allow me inside’: Daleside revisited – a photo essay

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When Magnum nominee Lindokuhle Sobekwa’s mother worked as a live-in help in this one-time white-dominated community, the family wouldn’t let him inside. He returned as a photographer to document the town’s transformation

“I first went because my mother used to be employed there as a domestic worker,” says photojournalist Lindokuhle Sobekwa. “When I first visited Daleside, to me it seemed an isolated place, a ghost town.”

Daleside used to be a white-dominated area, but now it is mixed. In the early 2000s Sobekwa’s mother took a job as live-in help with a white family in this town south of Johannesburg. As she struggled alone to support her four children he only saw her on weekends and during school holidays.

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Biggest ever Leonardo da Vinci exhibition to open in Paris

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Louvre will host works of Italian artist after long-running political spats and legal battles

The most important blockbuster art show in Paris for half a century took 10 years to prepare and was nearly thwarted by the worst diplomatic standoff between Italy and France since the second world war. With days to go before the opening, there is still no sign of whether one of the major works will appear.

The Louvre’s vast Leonardo da Vinci exhibition to mark 500 years since the death of the Italian Renaissance master will finally open next week as the world’s most-visited museum prepares to handle a huge influx of visitors.

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Restored 19th-century ships’ figureheads to go on display in Plymouth

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The 14 carvings will hang from the ceiling in arts venue The Box, due to open in the spring

A collection of 19th-century wooden figureheads from British naval warships has been lovingly restored from the ravages of years at sea and will form a striking display at a new heritage and arts complex in Plymouth.

The 14 figureheads, some of which were so badly water-damaged that their insides had turned into a soggy mulch, are to be suspended from the ceiling of The Box gallery and museum, which is due to open in the spring.

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Paris art scene roars back to life … with a little help from Brexit

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A reinvigorated contemporary art fair, opening this week in the Grand Palais, is one sign of a renaissance for the French capital

“If our generation did not reinvigorate the French art market, what would we be leaving to the younger people?” asks Jennifer Flay, director of the international fair of contemporary art in Paris. “So we decided to take ourselves seriously.”

As the 46th Foire internationale d’art contemporain (FIAC) prepares to open the doors of the Grand Palais this week, it is clear that not only did Flay and her colleagues achieve their goal, but they also created an environment in which artists and their work could flourish. The fair has gone from dusty irrelevance during a long sojourn in the suburbs to a glittering fixture on the art world calendar.

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‘Future relics’: the painter capturing the beauty of council houses

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Frank Laws’s Hopperesque watercolours depict the individual character of east London’s most impressive – and everyday – buildings, as gentrification threatens their very existence

From Mike Leigh’s film Meantime to the TV show Top Boy, the social housing estates of east London have provided rich subject matter for writers and artists exploring the human stories intertwining in their communities. In the paintings of east Londoner Frank Laws, however, there isn’t a person in sight. The only signs of life are curtains flapping at open windows and the luminescent glow emanating from inside a home. Blocks of flats that teem with life in, say, Plan B’s film and album Ill Manors, stand eerily quiet and vacant in Laws’s images.

Laws was born in a village in Norfolk but hated the rural quiet. “I was always scared of the dark in the countryside,” says the 37-year-old. “I’m still scared of it.” It’s this fear, and Laws’ love of film noir, that informs the dramatic, Edward Hopperesque lighting in Laws’ meticulously detailed watercolour and acrylic paintings.

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The big picture: boy with balloons in Santiago, Chile

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Magnum photographer David Alan Harvey pays homage to Cartier-Bresson’s ‘decisive moment’

David Alan Harvey’s photograph of a boy with balloons on a street in Santiago, Chile, was taken in 1997. It is included in Streetwise, a new collection of pictures from the archives of the Magnum agency. The Magnum name became synonymous with street photography in the 1950s and 1960s under the guiding influence of co-founder Henri Cartier-Bresson. The current volume pays homage to Cartier-Bresson’s black-and-white “decisive moments” and examines the way that that spirit has been taken forward, particularly after advances in digital photography and printing enabled a revolution in colour in the 1980s.

Harvey was elected into the agency – there is a voting process among the membership – in the year that this picture was taken. By then, as a staff photographer for National Geographic, he had been taking pictures for more than three decades. A principle subject was the Hispanic diaspora on both sides of the Atlantic – the “divided soul”, as he terms it, of Latin culture.

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Judge orders removal of #MeToo posts accusing Indian artist

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Google and Facebook told to take down sexual harassment claims against Subodh Gupta

The high court in Delhi has ordered Google and Facebook to remove all anonymous social media posts accusing the artist Subodh Gupta of sexual harassment and ordered Facebook, which owns Instagram, to reveal the identity of the person behind the account that first made the allegations.

Last year, many well-known Indian men, mostly in the film and media industries, had their names mentioned at the height of the #MeToo movement including Gupta, one of India’s leading artists.

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Prince Harry’s Instagram takeover barks up the right tree

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While his captions weren’t up to much, the prince’s takeover of the National Geographic’s Instagram on his tour in Africa had a larger purpose

When celebrities become guest editors of corporate social media accounts, it usually results in dozens of pouting selfies. For this reason, Prince Harry’s takeover of the National Geographic Instagram account to encourage people to “look up” and get lost in the beauty of trees is a weirdly enticing concept.

On Monday, the Duke of Sussex curated a set of images of forest canopies each taken by National Geographic photographers, which went out to the publication’s 123 million followers. The idea was to highlight the importance of conservation while spotlighting the Queen’s Commonwealth Canopy campaign, which will result in two national parks being created in South Africa, where Harry is touring. As part of the campaign, 50 countries have either dedicated indigenous forest for conservation or committed to planting millions of new trees to combat climate change.

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Art that survived Isis and Saddam regimes to go on display in London

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Emotionally powerful exhibition of Iraqi Kurdish artists will include paintings peppered by bullets

Kurdish artworks that survived Saddam Hussein’s use of chemical weapons as well as Islamic State’s cultural vandalism will go on display at a London gallery this week.

Iraqi Kurdish artists have made paintings and art installations from artefacts including Assyrian reliefs from 700 BC peppered by Isis bullet holes and the farewell “death” notes of a charity worker smuggling aid to Isis-controlled Mosul.

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Face of China: the retro appeal of Chairman Mao – in pictures

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Many in China may prefer to forget the chaotic and bloody decades under the rule of Chairman Mao Zedong, but 70 years after he founded the People’s Republic his face is on memorabilia in shops across the country. The Great Helmsman has had a kitsch makeover, appearing on everything from posters, fans and ornaments to mugs and plates

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Beach towels and Brexit: how Germans really see the Brits

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Exhibition at Bonn’s House of History documents ‘unrequited love’ of all things British

The strategy that Germany’s diplomatic corps proposed to keep Britain in the European community was unconventional and bold.

In November 1974, the then German chancellor Helmut Schmidt was desperately searching for the right words to convince British Eurosceptics to vote to remain a member of the European Economic Community.

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California Trip: how Dennis Stock caught the darkness beyond the hippy dream

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His iconic portraits of James Dean in a wintry New York won him fame. But it was his travels in the west coast that brought out his true genius, as he captured the cracks in the 60s counterculture

‘For many years California frightened me,” Dennis Stock wrote in the preface to California Trip, first published in 1970. “For a young man with traditional concerns for spiritual and aesthetic order, California seemed too unreal. I ran.”

Stock, a naturally sceptical New Yorker who had served in the US Navy before hustling his way into the ranks of the esteemed Magnum photo agency, had instinctively picked up on the edgy undercurrents of the late 1960s Californian hippy dream. As the idealism of that decade peaked and faded, California became what Stock called a “head lab” – fomenting various radically alternative lifestyles fuelled by eastern mysticism, experiments in communal living, and all kinds of post-LSD mind expansion.

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Zaha Hadid’s massive ‘starfish’ airport opens in Beijing

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Daxing international, said to be world’s largest single-building terminal, to handle 72m passengers

China has opened a vast, multibillion-dollar airport in the country’s capital, in the run-up to a major political anniversary.

Less than five years after construction began, the 450bn yuan (£50bn) Daxing international airport was officially opened on Wednesday in a ceremony attended by the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping.

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