Critics compare figure of famous soprano erected in Greek capital to an Oscar statuette
Drama in life, drama in posterity. For Maria Callas, Greece’s greatest diva, there is, even 44 years after her death, no let up from the artistic wrangling that was her lot.
But this time the uproar is focused on a statue erected at the foot of the ancient Acropolis, opposite the Roman theatre where the world-renowned opera singer made her debut.
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After decades of fun, noise, fame and money, the London art fair has found its soul. But there’s still plenty of outrage and sleaze at the grown-up Frieze
I was relieved when I finally found the hidden willies. At times, the first post-pandemic Frieze art fair is so relaxing you could fall asleep in one of its classy lounges. So it was good to see Lindsey Mendick flying the flag for subtle outrage. At the Carl Freedman Gallery booth I come across her lustrous, decadent ceramic vases, whose wounded sides spurt octopus arms. Mendick should be on next year’s Turner shortlist if the Tate has any desire to save its dying prize. Then Freedman showed me another detail. From one of the pots protrude penises like shiny wet worms. It turns out there’s sleaze at the new, grownup Frieze after all – you just need a longer attention span to find it.
The art world has looked into itself during the pandemic. And it’s found that art has to be be more than just fun and noise and fame and money … it has to be sustaining. But how does a cultural sphere that has spent decades celebrating shallowness suddenly find its inner light? At first sight, Frieze has simply gone numb with shock.
Continue reading...In a new exhibition, the female abstract artists between 1930 and 1950 whose work was sidelined at the time finally get their space in the spotlight
In 1934, the abstract painter Alice Trumbull Mason wrote her sister, Margaret Jennings, a letter, noting that she was eager to resume painting, which she had temporarily stopped in order to raise her children.
“I am chafing to get back to painting and of course it’s at least a couple of years away,” Mason wrote. “The babies are adorable and terribly interesting. I’m not saying anything against them, but … I can’t be just absorbed in them.”
Continue reading...First came K-cinema, then K-pop and K-TV. Now South Korea’s young stars are conquering the world with K-art. But what do their dark visions say about their nation’s psyche – and ours?
Ohnim is having a blue period, just like Picasso. Over Zoom from a gallery in Seoul, the Korean rapper Song Min-ho, better known as Mino to K-pop fans but Ohnim in the art world, shows me a painting he finished the previous evening in collaboration with artist Choi Na-ri. It depicts a blue crouched figure, like a depressed version of Rodin’s Thinker. It may be still wet but will soon be shipped to London’s Saatchi Gallery for an art fair that showcases work by three of Korea’s biggest K-pop stars.
The meeting of K-pop and K-art is making the art world lick its lips. Businessman David Ciclitira, who set up the StART Art Fair at the Saatchi, says: “K-pop stars have immense reach through their social media. Guys like Mino, Henry Lau and Kang Seung-yoon, whose work will be in the show, have six to seven million followers each on Instagram. In Seoul, fans queue round the block just to see a work of art by any of them. Then they fight each other to buy. I don’t suppose it’ll be quite like that at the Saatchi Gallery, but you never know.”
Continue reading...Preparatory work for ‘redoing’ of The Potato Eaters – savaged in his lifetime – to feature in exhibition
A collection of Vincent van Gogh’s preparatory drawings sketched ahead of a planned “redoing” of The Potato Eaters, a masterpiece brutally slated by buyers, friends and family at the time of its painting, are being exhibited for what is believed to be first time.
The Dutch artist considered his depiction of a peasant family from the village of Nuenen in Brabant eating a meal of potatoes as one of only four of his works that could be regarded as important, alongside The Bedroom, Sunflowers and Augustine Roulin (La berceuse).
Continue reading...Award-winning artist Maqbool Jan is one of a handful still practising the ancient artform, but without government help he fears it could be lost
Kashmir’s ancient papier-mache artworks are famous throughout the world. The art form is a staple of the luxury ornamental market, and has a rich and long cultural lineage. It is closely associated with the advent of Islam in Kashmir, and depicts scenes from the Mughal court, Arabic verses from the Qu’ran, Persian poetry, as well as Kashmir’s iconic tourist attractions.
However, this ancient art form is vanishing, with only a handful of artisans left practising.
Continue reading...As the covers come off the Arc de Triomphe, work begins to realise an ambitious project in the desert and secure the artist’s legacy
Before he died last year the artist Christo had not one but two dreams: to wrap the Arc de Triomphe and to build a massive structure out of oil drums in the desert sands of Abu Dhabi. L’Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped was completed last month and today visitors to Paris will have one last chance to see the arch swathed in silver blue fabric before it is dismantled tomorrow.
Once he has overseen the monument’s restoration to its original glory in time for Armistice commemorations next month, Christo’s nephew Vladimir Yavachev will turn his attention east to create the last monumental project that – if completed – will be the artist’s only permanent large-scale sculpture and the largest artwork in the world.
Continue reading...The Tyneside rocker on his favourite bath time podcast, a second world war memoir and where to get the best breakfast kippers
Sam Fender was born in 1994 and raised in North Shields. He began writing songs aged 14, building on an affinity with Bruce Springsteen, and started acting a few years later, appearing in the ITV series Vera. After releasing his first single, Play God, independently in 2017, Fender featured in the BBC’s Sound of 2018 poll. He won the critics’ choice award at the 2019 Brits and his debut album, Hypersonic Missiles, entered the UK charts at No 1. His second album, Seventeen Going Under, is out this week on Polydor.
Continue reading...Veronica Ryan creates UK’s first permanent artwork dedicated to people affected by the scandal
The first permanent artwork to honour the Windrush generation in the UK has been unveiled in the east London borough of Hackney, as councils across the country kick off the first day of Black History Month.
The work, created by the artist Veronica Ryan, is one of two permanent sculptures that symbolise the council’s respect and commitment to the Windrush generation and their legacy and contribution to the area. The second, by Thomas J Price, will be unveiled next spring.
Continue reading...People with the condition can face being seen as ‘cursed’ in the east African country, says Martin Senkubuge, whose art aims to make them proud of their skin
It was a confrontation with a female Michael Jackson fan that first drew Martin Senkubuge’s attention to the skin condition vitiligo.
Senkubuge, a Ugandan artist, was describing his tattoo of the musician to the woman at an art exhibition in Kampala in 2019, when he accused the pop star of bleaching his skin.
Continue reading...Why has the artist painted scenes of bloodletting, decapitation and a woman with 10,000 breasts? He’s scared to talk about it – but he can explain his fascination with vaginas and the world’s blackest black
At 67, Anish Kapoor, with a knighthood, a Turner prize and a retrospective due at the Venice Biennale next year, appears determined to strip away his own artistic skin. Like Marsyas – the satyr flayed alive by Apollo, whose gory fate Kapoor once commemorated in a 150m-long, 10-storey-high sculpture – the artist is exposing his innards. That’s the only way to describe his latest works. One of the world’s most renowned sculptors is about to go public as, well, a painter. Yet it is the content of the works he’s about to unveil that may disconcert. “They’re very, very violent,” he confesses. “And I just wonder what the hell that has to do with what’s in me. I can’t sit here and psychoanalyse them. I don’t know how to. But I recognise that it’s there.”
The works, about to go on display at Modern Art Oxford, are beautifully painted yet brutal: full of images of bloodletting, decapitation and disembowelling. Kapoor seems to have taught himself to paint the human figure in order to desecrate it. At his London studio, there are stacks of these blood-soaked canvases depicting huge wounded bits of bodies and purple organs spattered on the walls.
Continue reading...Denmark museum of modern art says Jens Haaning’s Take the Money and Run violates legal agreement
In an unexpected reinterpretation of an earlier work, a Danish artist has left a museum with empty frames, a depleted bank account and red faces all round.
Rather than applauding Jens Haaning’s artistic commentary on modern capitalism, the Kunsten Museum of Modern Art in northern Denmark has said the artist is in violation of a legal agreement – and in possession of more than $84,000 belonging to the institution.
Continue reading...Rijksmuseum says change in focus prompted by renewed interest in wake of Black Lives Matter
The two earliest portraits of men of African descent in the history of European art are being exhibited together for the first time in their 500-year history, reflecting a change of focus championed by the Black Lives Matter movement, curators at the Rijksmuseum have said.
Among more than 100 portraits by Renaissance artists being showcased by the museum in Amsterdam from Tuesday are Albrecht Dürer’s 1508 sketch, discovered in the German painter’s workshop at the time of his death, and Jan Jansz Mostaert’s portrait, dating from about 1525.
Continue reading...Serious themes are undercut by the flippant tone of this story about a Syrian refugee who becomes a conceptual art object
Here is a muddled caper of movie that doesn’t know what it wants to say; it doesn’t work as a satire of the international art market, nor as a commentary on the racism of white European culture. And its attitude to Syria is undermined by a silly and unconvincing ending that leaves a strange taste in the mouth. It is inspired by the Belgian conceptual artist Wim Delvoye and his human artwork called Tim: in 2008, Delvoye tattooed an elaborate punk-crucifixion scene on the back of a Zurich tattoo parlour owner named Tim Steiner, who in return for a cash payment agreed to sit still with his tattooed back on show in galleries for a certain number of times a year and have his tattooed skin surgically removed and put on display after his death. And of course it is this macabre destiny that lends fascination to the ongoing live events.
This movie from writer-director Kaouther Ben Hania imagines a Syrian man, Sam Ali (Yahya Mahayni) in love with a well-born woman Abeer (Dea Liane). But when he is wrongfully arrested by the tyrannical Assad government, Abeer’s family pressures her into marrying a smooth diplomat, Ziad (Saad Lostan), who takes her to live with him in Brussels where he is an embassy attache. Sam Ali manages to escape from police custody (the least of the film’s implausibilities) and get over the border into Lebanon where, hungry and hard up, he gatecrashes art exhibitions and gobbles the free canapes. And this is where he is approached by a preeningly arrogant artist, Jeffrey Godefroi (Koen De Bouw), who looks like Roger De Bris, the theatre director in Mel Brooks’s The Producers. If Sam will agree to the humiliation of having a massive “Schengen visa” tattooed on his back, then Jeffrey will be legally able to transport him to Brussels as a conceptual art object rather than a human being, as part of a show about the commodification of humanity, and Sam will be able to see Abeer.
Continue reading...Nick Brandt visited five animal sanctuaries in Africa to portray the people displaced by droughts and the creatures whose very existence is under threat
Continue reading...From subtle riffs on traditional script-based decoration to a late father’s letters to his lover, the artists vying for the Jameel prize generate deep emotion from meticulousness
Words have had outsize importance in Muslim culture since the beginning. The Qur’an, which literally means “recitation”, was of course revered as the word of God. But, crucially, images of human beings and animals were disapproved of because they could distract people from prayer; as a result, artists poured all their creativity and imagination into calligraphy. Facing the same restriction, craftsmen and architects created dazzling geometric forms into which words were often incorporated. The discipline imposed by not being able to depict living things gave rise to some of the most beguiling decoration on the planet.
Continue reading...Drawing has been in private hands since around 1910 and is now going on display in Amsterdam
A pencil drawing of a broken old man, head in hands looking utterly exhausted, has been identified as a work by Vincent van Gogh.
The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam said on Thursday that it had authenticated the drawing as being the work of the man himself. Teio Meedendorp, a senior researcher at the museum, said it was a “spectacular” discovery shining light on Van Gogh’s early career as an artist living in The Hague, a time less well known than his years in Paris or the south of France.
Continue reading...Indigenous leaders had hoped to purchase the land, which is home to 1,000-year-old drawings and was auctioned off for $2.2m
A Missouri cave containing Native American artwork from more than 1,000 years ago was sold at auction Tuesday, disappointing leaders of the Osage Nation who hoped to buy the land to “protect and preserve our most sacred site”.
A bidder agreed to pay US$2.2m to private owners for what’s known as “Picture Cave,” along with the 43 hilly acres that surround it near the town of Warrenton, about 60 miles (97km) west of St Louis.
Continue reading...She was a crucial part of a cultural movement in the 1980s. Now a first solo exhibition in 15 years will allow her work to shine
From the 1980s to the early 2000s, artist and archivist Rita Keegan fervently collected and preserved newsletters, leaflets, photographs and exhibition literature from the British black arts scene. “It [didn’t] matter how fabulous the show – if you didn’t have the ephemera, it was hard to say that you existed,” she told the Art Newspaper last summer. “It’s very easy to be written out of history, if you don’t have those pieces of paper.”
Boxes and files stored behind the sofa in Keegan’s living room and a garden “shedio” in her south London home are a portal to the past, specifically, into the seminal British black arts movement founded in 1982. This pivotal moment in art history saw artists such as Sonia Boyce, Eddie Chambers, Denzil Forrester, Lubaina Himid and Maud Sulter galvanised to create and curate works together in the aftermath of the 1981 Brixton uprisings and in response to their marginalisation from the mainstream art world.
Continue reading...Is the $450m Salvator Mundi a fake? This film – featuring tearful sycophants, sneering experts, dodgy dealers and a secretive superyacht – may finally settle the great da Vinci controversy
It is almost exactly 10 years since Salvator Mundi was unveiled, this “lost Leonardo” instantly triggering astonishment around the world. Since those giddy days, the work has had a turbulent time. As well as becoming the most expensive painting in history, going for $450m (£326m) at auction, Salvator Mundi was denounced by many as a fake and subsequently vanished from view. The painting is now the subject of The Lost Leonardo, a documentary by Andreas Koefoed that opens in cinemas this week.
“I would be surprised,” says Luke Syson, “if I went to see this documentary.” Syson is the curator who, back in 2011, first displayed The Saviour of the World, as its title translates, at the National Gallery’s Leonardo da Vinci blockbuster. Syson is probably making a wise choice. He’s in the film and the way he clams up mid-interview makes him look like the archetypal embarrassed expert caught out on screen.
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