Category Archives: Art and design

Biggest ever Leonardo da Vinci exhibition to open in Paris

Posted on by

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.

Continue reading...

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

Posted on by

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.

Continue reading...

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

Posted on by
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.

Continue reading...

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

Posted on by

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.

Continue reading...

The big picture: boy with balloons in Santiago, Chile

Posted on by
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.

Continue reading...

Judge orders removal of #MeToo posts accusing Indian artist

Posted on by

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.

Continue reading...

Prince Harry’s Instagram takeover barks up the right tree

Posted on by

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.

Continue reading...

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

Posted on by

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.

Continue reading...

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

Posted on by

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

Continue reading...

Beach towels and Brexit: how Germans really see the Brits

Posted on by

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.

Continue reading...

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

Posted on by

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.

Continue reading...

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

Posted on by

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.

Continue reading...

The ‘kidnapped’ Caravaggio: how the mafia took a razor blade to a masterpiece

Posted on by

Masterpiece was kept in the home of notorious Sicilian, who sliced off a piece in order to make a deal with Catholic church

A Caravaggio masterpiece stolen from a Palermo church 50 years ago and listed among FBI’s “most wanted” stolen artworks, was kept in the home of a powerful mafia boss, who sliced off a piece of the canvas in order to convince the Catholic church to make a deal for its return, according to previously unseen testimony from the priest who tried to recover it.

In an video interview filmed in 2001, but locked in a drawer and now revealed exclusively to the Guardian, the parish priest of the Oratory of San Lorenzo revealed astonishing details of the October 1969 theft of Merisi da Caravaggio’s Nativity With St Lawrence and St Francis.

Continue reading...

‘It’s a beacon for the city’: inside the new New York library that cost $40m to build

Posted on by

The project earned criticism for its price tag, but it is being seen as a positive sign for the health of New York libraries

Strategically positioned on the bank of the East River, across the water from the United Nations headquarters, New York city has a shimmering new addition to its skylines.

Unusually for such prime real estate set among parkland, panoramic views of Manhattan and convenient transport links, this $40m development in Queens is neither an upscale apartment block, exclusive members club or the offices of a huge corporation.

Continue reading...

‘A crazy amount of talent’: contemporary art thrives in Harare

Posted on by

An unexpected post-Mugabe boom has caught the attention of international art collectors

In a makeshift studio, in an empty house on a ridge with a spectacular view of trees and blue sky, two artists are setting out brushes and paint. Half-finished canvases lean against walls. The bustle and noise of the city is far away.

Gresham Tapiwa Nyaude and Helen Teede are among a new wave of young artists in Zimbabwe who are attracting attention from collectors and curators worldwide. Both now work in a converted house surrounded by forest, a 40-minute drive from the capital, Harare.

Continue reading...

Artist pans claims he orchestrated theft of solid gold toilet

Posted on by

The artist and serial prankster Maurizio Cattelan denies stealing 18-carat loo entitled America from Blenheim Palace

The artist who made a solid gold toilet reportedly worth £4.8m has denied orchestrating its theft in a Banksy-style prank.

The 18-carat working loo was ripped from a wood-panelled room at Blenheim Palace, the birthplace of Sir Winston Churchill, in the early hours of Saturday.

Continue reading...

Reclaimed lakes and giant airports: how Mexico City might have looked

Posted on by

The Mexican capital was founded by Aztecs on an island in a vast lake. No wonder water flows through so many of its unbuilt projects

Ever since Mexico City was founded on an island in the lake of Texcoco its inhabitants have dreamed of water: containing it, draining it and now retaining it.

Nezahualcoyotl, the illustrious lord of Texcoco, made his name constructing a dyke shielding Mexico City’s Aztec predecessor city of Tenochtitlan from flooding. The gravest threat to Mexico City’s existence came from a five-year flood starting in 1629, almost causing the city to be abandoned. Ironically now its surrounding lake system has been drained, the greatest threat to the city’s existence is probably the rapid decline of its overstressed aquifers.

Continue reading...