Louvre blockbuster marking 500 years since artist’s death may end up a casualty
He was a Renaissance master – painter, scientist, engineer and inventor – who was hailed as one of the greatest artists who ever lived.
But as Europe stages a year-long frenzy of events to mark 500 years since Leonardo da Vinci’s death, Italy and France are engaged in a diplomatic tussle over him that threatens a blockbuster exhibition at the Louvre in Paris.
Continue reading...A museum in New York claims to be the only collection focusing on the KGB’s espionage operations in the world. The newly opened exhibition hall, housed in a former warehouse on 14th Street, is home to 3,500 original period objects, which the designer of the museum, Julius Urbaitis, has gathered after 30 years of research around the world
Continue reading...Artwork thought to be homage to the 90 people who died in an Islamist attack on Paris venue
A mural by British street artist Banksy on a fire-exit door at Paris’ Bataclan theatre, where Islamist militants killed 90 people three years ago, has been stolen, the venue has said.
The work, one of a series of murals painted last June in the French capital and attributed to Banksy, showed a veiled female figure in a mournful pose.
Continue reading...Apichatpong Weerasethakul to receive £40,000 for his political artwork Invisibility
The Palme d’Or winning film director and artist Apichatpong Weerasethakul has won one of the UK’s most important and lucrative contemporary art prizes.
On Thursday evening, Weerasethakul was named winner of the eighth edition of the Artes Mundi prize, a biennial competition rewarding political art from across the world. It comes with a prize of £40,000, the largest visual art prize in Britain.
Continue reading...An urban photo essay of the Chinese territory made between October and December 2018
Continue reading...A collection of vintage ski and winter sports posters up to a century old – some worth thousands of dollars – is about to be auctioned in New York. The resorts advertised range from Europe’s Alpine jewels to the mountains of Canada, and all offer fun in the outdoors
Continue reading...Sleek, pared-back, industrial elegance – that’s how most of us think of Bauhaus, the modernist design group born in Germany in 1919. But that was only one side of this short-lived but longlasting movement…
• Norman Foster, Margaret Howell, Michael Craig-Martin and others on Bauhaus’s rich legacy
The Bauhaus, simply put, was a German school of art and design that opened in 1919 and closed in 1933. It was also very much more than that. It was the most influential and famous design school that has ever existed. It defined an epoch. It became the pre-eminent emblem of modern architecture and design. The name has become an adjective as well as a noun – Bauhaus style, Bauhaus look. And now it is coming up for the centenary of its founding, which shows both that what was called the “modern movement” is now part of history and that its influence is very much still around us.
It is nowadays usually clear what the word “Bauhaus” means – design stripped down to its essentials, the rational and elegant use of modern materials and industrial techniques, clarity, simplicity, cool minimalism. The device on which I am writing this and the one on which you might be reading it follow these principles. So (with greater or lesser degrees of bastardisation) do buildings without number around the world, countless domestic objects, road signs, the lettering on a tube of toothpaste or the design of a car. The Bauhaus brand is consistent, coherent and universal. Its best-known creations, the tubular steel chairs of Mart Stam and Marcel Breuer or the steel-and-glass building built to house the school, reinforce its image.
Continue reading...After Norway’s Storelgen stole Mac the Moose’s place as world’s tallest, a Canadian city hopes to ‘stick it to Oslo’ by increasing their statue’s size
For three decades, the Canadian city of Moose Jaw took pride in its status as the home of the world’s largest moose statue.
Standing at a majestic 10 meters tall, Mac the Moose has weathered brutal winters, graffiti and even the inglorious loss of his jaw. His recognition was so great that in 2013, he was named the city’s most popular celebrity.
Continue reading...Photojournalist Finbarr O’Reilly has been covering Dakar fashion week for over a decade. He charts the city’s burgeoning style scene
Alongside its golden beaches, glitzy nightclubs and vibrant music scene, Senegal’s capital, Dakar, is emerging as a key African fashion hub.
Continue reading...Winter Night in the Mountains part of first Harald Sohlberg show outside Norway
Edvard Munch’s The Scream is a classic symbol of dread that has been hailed as the ultimate icon of contemporary politics – but a very different Norwegian painting is the country’s favourite.
Continue reading...In a country where myths about albinism can have deadly consequences, an organisation set up to battle discrimination is having a profound impact
Paschal Merumba has suffered prejudice from the day he was born.
His mother refused to breastfeed her “cursed” baby, the second child in the family born with albinism; the first had already died of neglect. Merumba was thought to have contaminated the community. He was made to eat apart and sleep on the floor.
Continue reading...Police called after 16th-century painting disappears days before expert due to visit
It is a storyline worthy of a Hercule Poirot whodunnit. After confiding in just 20 trusted people of his suspicion that a painting in his church was a lost masterpiece, a priest in the small Flemish town of Zele, 45 miles north of Brussels, has had to call in the local police over its sudden disappearance.
Pastor Jan Van Raemdonck, 61, turned to the detectives after two women laying flowers in the nave of the Sint-Ludgerus church last Friday morning discovered that the 16th-century painting, known as the Holy Family, had gone missing from its usual position by the altar.
Continue reading...Jim Bachor beautifies the world’s streets with colourful designs ranging from chickens to Aretha Franklin
Jim Bachor makes street art – quite literally.
For the last few years the 52-year-old has been making art out of the blight on our roads.
Continue reading...LA is a city of concrete. From Frank Lloyd Wright’s modernist mansions to Rudolph Schindler’s tilted houses, architects working there have embraced the material. A new map by Blue Crow Media shows some lesser-known structures are just as striking
Continue reading...More than 10,000 artists, craftspeople and revellers take part in the carnival, a fusion of different cultural celebrations. It takes place every year from 2 to 7 January in the city of Pasto and is on Unesco’s intangible heritage list
Continue reading...Designed by Brazilian modernist Oscar Niemeyer, Lebanon’s international expo site has been abandoned since civil war broke out in the 1970s
“It could collapse at any time,” says the architect and activist Wassim Naghi. The facade of the unfinished, subterranean space museum in Tripoli, Lebanon, is visibly decaying and its steel reinforcements are rusted – but that may not be its biggest problem. “The ageing concrete’s carbonation is invisible,” explains Naghi when we meet in his office in the centre of the city. “We don’t know how bad it really is.”
Situated beneath an elevated concrete helipad, the museum was part of a planned permanent international fair designed by the Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer in the early 1960s that was expected to accommodate more than 2 million visitors a year. The 100-hectare (250-acre) site’s 15 existing buildings also include a domed theatre, an atrium, an arch and collective housing. A 717-metre-long boomerang-shaped canopy was designed to house the permanent exhibition, alongside a separate, traditionally styled pavilion for exhibitions relating to Lebanon.
Continue reading...The inauguration of the Brazilian president took place in Brasilia
Continue reading...After the Finnish city was razed to the ground by the German army in the second world war, architect Alvar Aalto rebuilt it to a reindeer-shaped street grid. Then Santa came to town …
As soon as you land at Rovaniemi airport in Lapland you see a reindeer. Not a real one, admittedly, but somebody in a Rudolf suit cheerily greeting passengers who have just arrived. A couple of miles from “Santa’s official airport” lies Santa Claus Village, an amusement park complete with elves, real reindeers, huskies, shops and restaurants that draws more than 600,000 visitors a year to this isolated spot at the edge of the Arctic Circle.
There are reindeer everywhere in Rovaniemi: humans dressed as them at the airport, real ones pulling sleighs at Santa Claus Village and statues of them throughout the city centre.
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