White Disaster (White Car Crash 19 Times) to go under the hammer in New York
Six months after a vivid image of Marilyn Monroe smashed records when it sold for $195m, a rather more dark and brutal work by the cult pop artist Andy Warhol may also be about to fetch a large sum.
White Disaster (White Car Crash 19 Times) – repeated graphic black and white images across a huge canvas measuring 12ft tall and 6ft wide – is expected to sell for at least $80m in New York next month.
Continue reading...Curator at school which awards Jane Lombard Prize says the artists’ work would ‘galvanise arts and social justice communities’ in New York
Indigenous Australian art collective proppaNOW has won a prestigious prize that will take them to New York next year after the selecting jury found their practices would serve as “models for political empowerment throughout the world”.
But don’t expect traditional Aboriginal artworks.
Continue reading...Purchase of 1953 painting beloved by football fans made possible by gift from charitable foundation
A painting by LS Lowry beloved by football fans and art enthusiasts has been bought by the Lowry museum and gallery in Salford, saving it from disappearing into a private collection.
The museum paid £7.8m including fees for Going to the Match, painted in 1953, at an auction on Wednesday evening. The purchase was made possible by a gift from the Law Family charitable foundation, which was set up by the hedge fund manager and Conservative party donor Andrew Law and his wife, Zoë. The painting had been estimated to fetch £5m-£8m.
Continue reading...Cultural objects kept in museums around the world are in nipaluna/Hobart for an exhibition. But Aboriginal communities are calling for them to stay permanently
In 2014, pakana woman Zoe Rimmer left the British Museum in tears after viewing a 170-year-old kelp water carrier taken from lutruwita/Tasmania in their collection. As she cried, the seed of a big idea was planted: how could she get the rikawa, and other Tasmanian Aboriginal cultural artefacts sitting in institutions across the world, home?
“Seeing our ancestral belongings in a storage facility in the British Museum was quite emotional,” says Rimmer, who until recently was senior curator of First Peoples art and culture at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (TMAG).
Continue reading...Staff member who spoke to the Observer about drive to get workers to join IWGB union claims she was ‘punished’ by arts charity
The Royal Society of Arts has been accused of punishing staff who spoke out about their campaign to unionise the 270-year-old charity.
The Observer reported last week that almost half the charity’s workforce below senior manager level had joined the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain (IWGB), with a petition indicating most staff backed unionisation. The RSA senior management team led by Andy Haldane, a former chief economist at the Bank of England, has rebuffed three requests to voluntarily recognise the union.
Continue reading...Ian Katz says new show, Art Trouble, celebrates the channel’s tradition of ‘iconoclasm and irreverence’
Channel 4 has bought a painting by Adolf Hitler and will allow a studio audience to decide whether Jimmy Carr should burn it with a flamethrower.
As part of its latest season of programmes, the TV channel has bought artworks by a range of “problematic” artists, including Pablo Picasso, as well as convicted paedophile Rolf Harris and sexual abuser Eric Gill.
Continue reading...Culture minister says UK institution ‘should learn from what has happened’ as Smithsonian returns 29 Benin artefacts
The culture minister of Nigeria has urged the British Museum to follow the example of the Smithsonian Institution, which on Tuesday returned ownership of 29 Benin bronzes to Nigeria at a celebratory event in Washington.
Lai Mohammed praised the move by the US National Museum of African Art, which follows a recent restitution agreement with Germany that included the handover of two Benin bronzes. Last year, Mohammed’s ministry formally requested the return of Benin artefacts from the British Museum in London.
Continue reading...Hepworth prize winner’s works have been shown around the world and now arrive in Llandudno
His twisty neon installations and glittering towers of light are frequently shown in some of the world’s most exclusive galleries in New York, Mexico City, Tokyo and Shanghai.
For his first major solo show in his home country of Wales, Cerith Wyn Evans’ work is on display in the traditional surroundings of a gallery built in Edwardian times in the resort of Llandudno, best known for its old-fashioned pier and seafront – and the bold goats that descended on the town during the first lockdown.
The exhibition runs until 5 February 2023.
Continue reading...In what would have been artist’s 90th year, first retrospective at Biesdorf Palace has been a surprise success
Seven men wash the sweat off their toned bodies in a communal shower. Unless you squint and mistake a tightly gripped bar of soap for something else, their limbs are suspended in tantalising proximity but never quite touch.
The German artist Jürgen Wittdorf’s 1963 linocut print, from a series titled Youth and Sport, may look like something out of a top-shelf graphic novel or the virile drawings of the gay liberation icon Tom of Finland.
Continue reading...French auction house tells of build-up to bidding war that led to an expert losing his job and a seller being left ‘traumatised’
In the 41 years of wielding the gavel at his auction house a stone’s throw from the royal chateau at Fontainebleau, Jean-Pierre Osenat has never seen anything like it.
“This is a crazy story,” he said. “Quite extraordinary.”
Continue reading...Tianqiuping-style porcelain sells for nearly 4,000 times its estimated value after buyers are convinced it is a rare artefact
An “ordinary” Chinese vase put up for auction in France and valued at €2,000 (£1,745) has sold for almost €8m after a ferocious bidding war among buyers convinced it was a rare 18th-century artefact.
At the sale in Fontainebleau near Paris, auctioneers were astonished as the offers from about 30 mainly Chinese bidders kept on coming. When the hammer fell the vase had been sold for €7.7m – almost 4,000 times its estimated value. With the seller’s fees, the final purchase price was €9.12m.
Continue reading...Billboards have been hijacked across Europe to highlight role of airline emissions in climate crisis
As Kate, 23, walked out of Seven Sisters station, in Tottenham, north London, she noticed an airline advertisement attracting unusual attention.
“I was on my way back home, I was coming out of the station, and I saw two people taking pictures of the billboard,” she said. “I thought at first it was just a normal airline ad, so I just walked past. Then I did a bit of a double take.”
Continue reading...Actor appears alongside Australian musician Nick Cave and British sculptor Thomas Houseago to reveal his first ever public art exhibition
Most know him for his blockbuster movies, chiselled cheekbones and high-profile relationships, but Brad Pitt can now add creating sculpture to his list of achievements after publicly debuting his first works of art in a lakeside museum in Finland.
The A-list Hollywood star unveiled the sculptures – what he called a “radical inventory of self” – at the Sara Hildén Art Museum in Tampere, a move that came as a surprise. It is the first time the “largely self taught” artist presented his sculptures to the public, the gallery said.
Continue reading...Section of the Shah Tahmasp Shahnameh is expected to fetch between £4m and £6m at auction next month
A folio from the Shah Tahmasp Shahnameh, one of the “finest illustrated manuscripts in existence” according to Sotheby’s, is expected to fetch between £4m and £6m at auction next month.
The Shahnameh, also known as the Book of Kings, is an epic poem containing 50,000 rhyming couplets, telling the history of Persia’s rulers. It was written by the Persian poet Ferdowsi between 977 and 1010.
Continue reading...The painter’s view of Venice, now in St James’s Palace, once hung in George III’s bedroom
The father of the artist Canaletto painted stage scenery, and the theatrical tricks with light and perspective that he passed on to his famous son were evident in the splendid backdrop to the meeting of the accession council on Saturday in St James’s Palace.
The oil painting that featured so prominently was painted in 1744 and bought by George III in 1762. The Grand Canal With Santa Maria della Salute Looking East Towards the Bacino shows the great church of Santa Maria della Salute towering over the water in the strong morning sun. Measuring more that 2 metres (7 feet) wide, it was signed by the artist – real name Giovanni Antonio Canal – on the moored barge at the front of the composition.
Continue reading...Edmonton decided Ken Lum’s paired figures of a bison and fur trader could ‘cause harm and induce painful memories’
A Canadian city has pulled a public art project over fears that a pair of towering bronze statues could be seen as an endorsement of colonialism – the exact opposite of the work’s intended meaning, according to the artist.
The work, which cost C$375,000 (US$285,000), comprises two large bronze figures which were intended to stand on either end of a pedestrian bridge in Edmonton. On one end, a 13ft bison was to stare out over the water. At the other, a colonial fur trader, measuring 11.5ft, would sit atop a pile of bison pelts.
Continue reading...Sol LeWitt never met Emily Kame Kngwarreye, who began painting in her 80s, but he was blown away by her work. A new AGNSW show celebrates their unlikely link
He was one of the 20th century’s pioneers of modern American art; she was the Anmatyerre artist who put Australian desert painting on the world stage.
Sol LeWitt and Emily Kame Kngwarreye never met, yet one had a profound effect on the work of the other, and led to one of the largest collections of Utopia art outside Australia. LeWitt became a huge fan of Kngwarreye, and of the distinct style produced by the Indigenous Australian artists working in Utopia, Northern Territory.
Continue reading...Atlantic City by Helen Saunders discovered under Praxitella by Wyndham Lewis, who may have painted over it on purpose
A lost masterpiece by a leading abstract artist of the early 20th century has been discovered beneath a portrait by a contemporary who may have painted over the original in a “fit of pique”.
Atlantic City by Helen Saunders, a member of the radical and short-lived vorticist movement, depicts a fragmented modern metropolis, almost certainly in the vibrant colours associated with the group. A black and white image of the painting appeared in Blast, the avant garde journal of the vorticists produced shortly before the outbreak of the first world war.
Continue reading...Crucifixion mosaic and fresco saved from destruction after two-year campaign
A stunning mural created in a Catholic church by a Jewish refugee from the Nazis has been saved from destruction, decay and vandalism after being granted Grade II-listed status by the UK government.
The Crucifixion, by the leading 20th-century artist George Mayer-Marton, is a rare combination of mosaic and fresco standing almost 8 metres (26ft) high, taking up an entire wall inside the Holy Rosary church in Oldham.
Continue reading...‘Deviant’ works by artists including Picasso and Warhol return to display at exhibition in Iranian capital
Some of the world’s most prized works of contemporary western art have been unveiled for the first time in decades in Tehran.
The Iranian president, Ebrahim Raisi, a hardline cleric, rails against the influence of the west. Authorities have condemned “deviant” artists for “attacking Iran’s revolutionary culture”. And the Islamic Republic has plunged further into confrontation with the US and Europe as it rapidly accelerates its nuclear programme and diplomatic efforts stall.
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