Category Archives: Art

Hitler’s favourite artists: why do Nazi statues still stand in Germany?

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A shocking new exhibition reveals the thriving postwar careers of artists the Führer endorsed as ‘divinely gifted’. Many made public works that remain on show today

A photograph from 1940 shows three conquering Nazis in Paris against the backdrop of the Eiffel Tower. Within a few years one of these men, Adolf Hitler, was dead by his own hand; another, Albert Speer, was writing his memoirs in Spandau prison, having eluded a death sentence at the Nuremberg trials. But the third, Arno Breker, was alive and free, making sculptures in the new West Germany that in their bombast and iconography echoed those he had made during the Third Reich.

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How street art is helping young migrants paint a brighter future in Italy

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An innovative community project has brightened buildings, ‘brought people together’ and provided an emotional outlet after traumatic journeys

Jadhav*, 18, from Bangladesh, arrived in Italy 10 months ago, but is still haunted by memories of his journey with people smugglers across the Mediterranean Sea.

“There were 156 people packed into a small boat. There were women and children,” says Jadhav in broken Italian and Bengali translated on a smartphone app. “Waves were coming over the side. People were weeping. There was no hope of survival.”

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‘I’m that little lady who made all this big stuff!’: Judy Chicago’s 60 years of monumental feminist art

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San Francisco’s de Young Museum honors the creator of The Dinner Party and a vast body of urgent work

Criticized at the time for an over-emphasis on white women and its stylized representations of vaginas, Judy Chicago’s room-sized installation The Dinner Party has only recently come to be seen as a canonical example of late-20th-century art.

Created over a five-year period (1974-79) and consisting of 39 elaborate place settings, it imagines a meal shared by notable women throughout history, such as Elizabeth I, Sojourner Truth, and the goddess Ishtar.

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‘It’s not cutesy’: the art show co-curated by a five-year-old

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My Kid Could’ve Done That! invited 15 artists to create work alongside their children. From leaking breasts to hours in front of childrens’ TV, the results are admirably honest

At five years of age, Astrid might well be the youngest exhibition curator of all time.

“I’m really looking forward to deciding where the art goes,” she says, demonstrating a natural instinct for her new role. “And I’ve really enjoyed working with Daddy too!”

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‘Forgotten masters’: auction shines light on India’s overlooked artists

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Paintings commissioned by East India Company in 18th and 19th century up for sale at Sotheby’s

Remarkable paintings of the flora and fauna of India, including a work once owned by Jackie Kennedy Onassis depicting a stork eating a snail, are to go on sale in the first auction dedicated to Company School art.

Sotheby’s has announced details of a sale that shines light on overlooked Indian artists today regarded as forgotten masters.

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Tsitsi Dangarembga’s next work won’t be read by anyone until 2114

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The Zimbabwean writer joins authors including Margaret Atwood and Ocean Vuong who have agreed to lock away new writing in the Future Library

Tsitsi Dangarembga made the Booker shortlist for her most recent novel, This Mournable Body, the story of a girl trying to make a life in post-colonial Zimbabwe which was praised as “magnificent” and “sublime”. Her next work, however, is likely to receive fewer accolades: it will not be revealed to the world until 2114.

The Zimbabwean writer is the eighth author selected for the Future Library project, an organic artwork dreamed up by the Scottish artist Katie Paterson. It began in 2014 with the planting of 1,000 Norwegian spruces in a patch of forest outside Oslo. Paterson is asking one writer a year to contribute a manuscript to the project – “the length of the piece is entirely for the author to decide” – with Margaret Atwood, Ocean Vuong and Karl Ove Knausgård already signed up. The works, unseen by anyone but the writers themselves, will be kept in a room lined with wood from the forest in the Deichman library in Oslo. One hundred years after Future Library was launched, in 2114, the trees will be felled, and the manuscripts printed for the first time.

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In your face: how Chuck Close built images and tore them apart

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Face blindness meant the photorealist artist, who has died aged 81, had to dismantle and reconstitute, making every cell of his pixellated portraits ever more dramatic

Hugely enlarged, Chuck Close stares back at you from behind his glasses, a cigarette lodged in the corner of his mouth. It is a face with a what-you-looking-at stare, and you look back, dwarfed by his image, thinking get-out-of-my-face in return.

Taking us from the top of his head to his sprouting chest hair, via every pore and bristle, the artist’s unkempt anti-grooming and non-coiffure, the trickle of smoke exhaled from his nostril, Close’s 1967-8 Big Self-Portrait charts every centimetre of his black and white photograph, which was gridded, enlarged and copied on to the canvas, then painted using a spray gun. All the aberrations of the original photograph, with its blank background and out-of-focus ear, are retained in the painting. The tip of the smouldering cigarette looms out at you. It makes you want to duck. Painted when Close was in his late 20s, the self-portrait was Close’s big move, both calling card and confrontation.

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Our art deals with real injustices, some in Palestine: no wonder we faced opposition « Forensic Architecture

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Our battle to restore a statement to a Manchester exhibition was really about what can and can’t be said in cultural spaces

On Wednesday, protesters in Manchester reclaimed one of the city’s main cultural institutions. Despite the rain, pro-Palestine activists gathered in front of the closed doors of the Whitworth gallery, part of the University of Manchester. It was because of their persistent action, and 13,000 letters sent to the gallery, that part of our exhibition, a printed statement titled “Forensic Architecture stands with Palestine”, has been reinstated. The exhibition, which we insisted be shut as a result of the statement’s unilateral removal, has now reopened.

On Sunday 15 August, a blog post on the website of UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI) announced that, following the group’s intervention, the statement had been removed from our exhibition, Cloud Studies. When we first heard of the news, we were not altogether surprised. The same group had already criticised a statement of solidarity with Palestinians published on the Whitworth’s website in June, and succeeded in convincing the university to have it removed. And this was hardly UKLFI’s first attack on us as an organisation. In 2018, when we were nominated for the Turner prize, UKLFI urged the Tate not to award the prize to us on the outrageous grounds that documents that we had published in relation to Palestine amounted to “modern blood libels likely to promote antisemitism and attacks on Jews”.

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‘They call us bewitched’: the DRC performers turning trash into art – photo essay

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Dolls found in rubbish dumps, radio parts and discarded flip-flops are among items used to create surreal costumes by a Kinshasa collective highlighting political and environmental issues

As a child, Shaka Fumu Kabaka witnessed the atrocities that took place during the six-day war between Ugandan and Rwandan forces in his home town of Kisangani in June 2000.

“It was not even our war, but a war between two foreign armies,” he said.

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Anne Bean: ‘People said Yoko Ono ruined the Beatles. I think the Beatles ruined her’

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The performance artist on her new 10-hour work, rethinking her distance from feminism, and why she told Malcolm McLaren her avant garde covers band was ‘unmanageable’

Anne Bean has been revisiting her past. On 21 August the pioneering performance artist is taking part in a 10-hour “durational live event” as part of PSX: A Decade of Performance Art in the UK. Not only did this require her to look back on five decades of practice – her past work, she tells me, is “intimately linked” to her present – but it’s taking place at Bermondsey’s Ugly Duck, a stone’s throw from the Butler’s Wharf studio in London in which she worked from the mid-70s to the mid-80s.

Many artists at the time, including Derek Jarman and Andrew Logan, squatted in warehouses there, and in her time Bean has worked with everyone from slapstick clowns the Kipper Kids to artists such as Paul McCarthy and Rose English, as well as sharing bills with Psychic TV, Genesis P-Orridge and Cosey Fanni Tutti. She even opened for Roxy Music as part of the pseudo-pop band Moody and the Menstruators, an avant garde performance covers group she founded in 1971. Bean has often used sound in her work and loves music – her father was a classical and jazz musician – but Moody was never supposed to be a real band, more “a subversive exploration of the boundaries between art and music”.

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‘We always see sex from the man’s view’: Cammie Toloui, the peep show performer who peeped back

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Turning her camera on her customers, the sex worker and photojournalist exposed the male gaze to itself – and opened up a world of shame and desire

“As a rebellious preteen, I sat down and made a list of my life goals,” writes Cammie Toloui in her photobook 5 Dollars for 3 Minutes. “It was pretty simple: 1. Sex. 2. Drugs. 3. Rock’n’roll.”

Born in the San Francisco Bay Area in the Summer of Love, Toloui was in the right place to hit these targets, and by 1990 was a member of a feminist punk band, Yeastie Girlz, and working at the Lusty Lady strip club. Stripping was part-rebellion and part-necessity because Toloui was studying photojournalism at San Francisco State University and the Lusty Lady paid well, but when she was given an assignment to shoot her own life, it also became a project. Deciding not to photograph herself or her colleagues, because female nudes have been seen so many times before, she trained her camera on the customers.

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Smashed pumpkin: tropical storm batters famous Japan sculpture

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Experts consider possibility of rebuilding Yayoi Kusama work, which was swept into sea off Naoshima

Experts are determining whether it is possible to reconstruct one of Japan’s most recognisable works of modern art after it was badly damaged during a recent tropical storm.

The sculpture, a giant black and yellow polka-dotted pumpkin by the celebrated artist Yayoi Kusama, has stood at the end of a pier on the “art island” of Naoshima in the Seto inland sea since 1994.

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Picasso pieces worth about $100m to be auctioned in Las Vegas

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Sotheby’s to sell 11 works in Bellagio hotel and casino, in one of most valuable Picasso auctions yet

Las Vegas: the city of sin, where you can gamble away your savings, get married on a whim, dine on an octuple bypass burger at the Heart Attack Grill – and soon, it has been announced, take part in one of the most valuable Picasso auctions ever staged.

Sotheby’s has announced it is to sell 11 Picasso works owned by MGM Resorts, which have a combined value of about $100m (£72m).

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Drawing a blank: can artistic talent ever be taught?

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While Romantics insist artists are born not made, some of the best painters, sculptors and modern artists followed conventional teaching

Genius cannot be taught but skills can. And even the wildest, most visionary of artists relies on the techniques they were taught. If you want to make digital art, you need to learn to code. A training in film will help with moving-image art. So much is obvious. But today we’re in thrall to a vacuous Romanticism that insists artists are born not made.

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How the ‘art of the insane’ inspired the surrealists – and was twisted by the Nazis

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The author of an acclaimed new book tells how Hitler used works by psychiatric patients in his culture war

On a winter’s day in 1898, a stocky young man with a handlebar moustache was hurrying along the banks of a canal in Hamburg, north Germany. Franz Karl Bühler was in a panic, fleeing a gang of mysterious agents who had been tormenting him for months. There was only one way to escape, he thought. He must swim for it. So he plunged into the dark water, close to freezing at this time of year, and struck out for the far side. When he was hauled on to the bank, soaked and shivering, it became clear to passersby that there was something odd about the man. There was no sign of his pursuers. He was confused, perhaps insane. So he was taken to the nearby Friedrichsberg “madhouse”, as it was known then, and taken inside. He would remain in the dubious care of the German psychiatric system for the next 42 years, one of hundreds of thousands of patients who lived near-invisible lives behind the asylum walls.

Bühler’s incarceration disturbed him, but it also marked the beginning of a remarkable story, one in which he played a leading role. It reveals the debt art owes to mental illness, and the way that connection was used to wage history’s most destructive culture war.

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Tate donor warns: ‘I’ll take back my £20m Francis Bacon collection’

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Barry Joule, a close friend of the artist, says the gallery has not kept to a pledge to stage exhibitions of the works

When more than 1,200 sketches, photographs and documents from the studio of Francis Bacon were donated to the Tate in 2004, it was described as one of the most generous gifts the gallery had ever received, estimated to be worth £20m. Now the donor is threatening to cancel the gift, accusing the gallery of reneging on pledges to stage exhibitions of the material.

Barry Joule, a longstanding friend of Bacon, had wanted the items to go to the Tate, as it had been the artist’s favourite gallery. Over the years, he kept expecting the Tate to do justice to it with an exhibition, as he says they had planned on accepting the gift. He wrote repeatedly to curatorial staff, asking when the show would happen.

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On my radar: Domhnall Gleeson’s cultural highlights

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The actor on an exhibition that’s like a rave, the best crispy chicken and why he’s having to take a break from Kazuo Ishiguro’s latest

Domhnall Gleeson was born in Dublin in 1983. Following his father, Brendan, into acting, he broke through in 2010 with small but memorable roles in Never Let Me Go, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 (as Bill Weasley) and True Grit. He played the lead in Frank and a romantic interest in Brooklyn, though he is probably best known as General Hux in the latest Star Wars trilogy. From 4 to 29 August, Gleeson stars in Enda Walsh’s new play, Medicine, at the Traverse theatre as part of the Edinburgh fnternational festival. He lives in Dublin.

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Tokyo review – lust and loneliness in Japan’s pleasure quarters

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Ashmolean Museum, Oxford
A seductive encounter with past and present at the Olympic city shows that Tokyo practically invented modern art

Love hotels and cross-dressers make Tokyo’s nightlife eye-popping – and that’s just in 18th-century woodblock prints. The Ashmolean’s seductive overview of the Olympic city’s art sets these classics alongside images of contemporary Tokyo to create a thrilling and informative encounter with one of the world’s great art capitals.

Past and present meet for a sultry encounter in the night. A wall is lit up by Mika Ninagawa’s intensely coloured photos of blue- and pink-haired clubbers. They are so now – yet close by in the same gallery is a painted scroll from the 1600s that is just as provocative. It depicts the pleasure quarter of Edo, as Tokyo was then called, which became Japan’s capital when the Tokugawa shoguns united the country in the 17th century. It was famous for its pleasure quarter, “the floating world”, and the new art genre it inspired – ukiyo-e, “pictures of the floating world”. In the scroll, samurai warriors are seen visiting courtesans. But samurai were banned from the pleasure quarter so they wear straw hats pulled down to hide their faces. The comically phallic swords peeping out from their robes give them away.

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‘It can’t be ignored’: Osman Yousefzada on his gigantic artwork

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He has dressed Beyoncé and Lady Gaga – and now he’s dressed Birmingham. As his ‘infinity pattern’ is unveiled, the artist talks poverty, class – and why he’s not interested in being a ‘good immigrant’

Approaching Birmingham New Street station on the train, you’ll normally spot the scaly curves of Selfridges’ landmark Future Systems-designed building nestling in the cityscape. But right now, rising into the summer sky in its place, is a bright pink and black structure. Startling, cheering and entirely unmissable, Infinity Pattern 1 is a giant installation by the multidisciplinary artist Osman Yousefzada. He was formerly best known as a fashion designer, whose beautifully tailored and elegantly architectural pieces have been worn by Beyoncé, Lady Gaga and Taylor Swift. Now the 44-year-old has tailored a distinctive look for the Selfridges store, said to be the height of three jumbo jets, surrounding the building during a year of restoration.

Infinity Pattern 1 is Yousefzada’s first piece of public art, selected by Birmingham’s Ikon Gallery from an international shortlist. “You can read it clearly from a long way away and that was something we considered when we were selecting,” says Jonathan Watkins, Ikon’s director. “We wanted it to ring out from afar. The fact that Osman comes from Birmingham, but is so cosmopolitan and such a Renaissance man, it’s wonderful that he was the one who won.”

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Departures at high-profile Barcelona museum provoke anger in art world

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Hundreds sign petition after the jobs of Tanya Barson and Pablo Martínez, two senior figures at Macba, are axed

A row has broken out in the international art world over the departures of Tanya Barson, the English curator, and Pablo Martínez, the head of programmes, from the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art (Macba).

The pair departed on 16 July, the day after Elvira Dyangani Ose, the director of the Showroom in London, was appointed as the museum’s new director.

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