Category Archives: Art

‘Joyously subversive sex goddesses’: the artists who gave witches a spellbinding makeover

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Thousands of women were slain after being accused of witchcraft. Don’t they deserve more than the evil cackling hag stereotype? A powerful new book blows away the satanic baby-eating myths

We all know what a witch looks like. A gnarled old face full of warts with teeth missing and bright green skin. Then there’s the long black coat, the tall black hat and let’s not forget the sizable crooked nose, sniffing the fumes rising from a bubbling cauldron in a room festooned with cobwebs.

But that’s not what witches look like at all, or at least not according a hefty new art book being published in time for Halloween. In this compendium of witchy women, from Renaissance paintings to modern Wicca, the caricature of the evil hag is turned upside down. Witchcraft, the latest volume in Taschen’s Library of Esoterica, finds evidence from artists as diverse as Auguste Rodin and Kiki Smith for its revisionist view that witches are typically young, glamorous practitioners of highly sexualised magick. The cover painting, by Victorian artist JW Waterhouse, depicts the ancient enchantress Circe in pale, red-lipped pre-Raphaelite ecstasy – and the fun just keeps coming. The witches here are powerful feminist sex goddesses whose rites and incantations are joyously subversive.

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Six jailed in Spain for selling fakes of Goya and other artists online

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Valencia police seized 27 paintings by various artists being sold for €1.2m, 18 of which were crude forgeries

Six people have been jailed in the eastern Spanish region of Valencia after police broke up a criminal gang that was using the internet to sell crudely forged paintings attributed to artists including Francisco de Goya, José Benlliure y Gil and Nicolás Falcó.

The investigation, carried out by officers from the historical heritage group of the Valencian police, began when doubts arose over the provenance of Falcó’s The Adoration of the Three Wise Men, which had been bought for €18,000 (£15,000) and was being resold for €45,000.

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‘We planted a seed’: the Afghan artists who painted for freedom

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The Taliban has whitewashed Kabul’s political murals – and those who created them have fled into exile

Negina Azimi felt shock and fear like never before when she heard that Taliban fighters had entered Kabul on 15 August. As an outspoken female artist in Afghanistan, she knew they would come for her.

“We heard reports that the Taliban might raid houses. I was scared because I live in a very central neighbourhood and every room in my house is adorned with the kind of art the Taliban won’t approve of,” she says, referring to paintings that feature messages about women’s empowerment and are critical of the Taliban’s atrocities.

Negina Azimi, who is now in a refugee camp in Albania with others of the ArtLords collective. They are now planning an exhibition

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‘You can sense Selim the Grim’s anger’: portraits of Ottoman sultans go on show

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Set of six copies of portraits first produced in 1579 in Venice are going up for auction in London next week

They were powerful rulers of perhaps the mightiest empire the world has ever seen, and their portraits oiled the wheels of diplomacy. Six sultans of the Ottoman empire, which spanned more than six centuries and dominated a great swathe of the world, gaze out beneath magnificent, bulbous turbans, a symbol of their wealth and status.

An original set of 14 portraits was produced in Venice in 1579, and copies were made later. The only surviving intact set is in Munich, but a set of six goes on display at Christie’s in London this weekend before being sold at auction on 28 October.

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‘Secret piety’: new show reveals Andy Warhol’s Catholic roots

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Known for his wild parties and proud queerness, he went to church, met the pope and prayed daily with his mother

He is celebrated for his Marilyn Monroe and Campbell’s Soup prints, legendary parties, proud queerness and worship of celebrity.

But Andy Warhol was raised by a devout Catholic mother with whom he prayed daily throughout the two decades in which they shared a New York home. The wild prince of pop art went to church, met the pope and financed his nephew’s studies to become a priest.

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Egypt detains artist robot Ai-Da before historic pyramid show

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Sculpture and its futuristic creator held for 10 days, possibly in fear she is part of spying plot

She has been described as “a vision of the future” who is every bit as good as other abstract artists today, but Ai-Da – the world’s first ultra-realistic robot artist – hit a temporary snag before her latest exhibition when Egyptian security forces detained her at customs.

Ai-Da is due to open and present her work at the Great Pyramid of Giza on Thursday, the first time contemporary art has been allowed next to the pyramid in thousands of years.

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‘People felt threatened even by a puppet refugee’: Little Amal’s epic walk through love and fear

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From being pelted with stones in Greece to receiving a papal welcome in Rome, the giant girl’s migrant trek from Syria to Manchester provoked powerful responses

In Greece, far-right protesters threw things at her as she walked through the streets, local councillors voted to ban her from visiting a village of Orthodox monasteries, and protests in Athens meant her route had to be diverted. In France, the mayor of Calais raised objections to her presence.

At times, the 8,000km journey across Europe of a 3.5m-tall puppet child refugee highlighted the hostility experienced by refugees who have been travelling along the same route from the Syrian border to the UK for years. Elsewhere, this ambitious theatrical project has triggered the scenes of welcome its artistic directors hoped to inspire when they embarked on this walk in July.

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‘It feels really natural’: hundreds pose nude for Spencer Tunick shoot near Dead Sea

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US artist returns to site for third time to highlight plight of Dead Sea, which is receding by about a metre a year

Hundreds of models wearing only white body paint have walked across a stark desert expanse near the Dead Sea, part of the latest photography project of American artist Spencer Tunick.

The 54-year-old photographer visited the spot in southern Israel as a guest of the tourism ministry to portray for the third time the shrinking Dead Sea via nude subjects.

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Gandhi in heels? Maria Callas statue hits the wrong note

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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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From concealed penises to Barbra Streisand: how Frieze got its mojo back – review

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Regent’s Park, London
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.

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‘Museums overlooked these artists’: celebrating the forgotten women of abstract art

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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.”

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K-boom! How the unstoppable stars of K-pop went gunning for the art world

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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.”

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Unseen Van Gogh sketches that rework scorned masterpiece to go on display

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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).

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‘We want dignity’: the vanishing craft of Kashmir’s papier-mache artists

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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.

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It’s a wrap: Christo’s final art project follows Paris triumph

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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.

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On my radar: Sam Fender’s cultural highlights

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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.

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Fruit sculptures in Hackney honour Windrush generation

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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.

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Embracing vitiligo: Ugandan artist dispels skin stigma with portraits

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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.

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Anish Kapoor on vaginas, recovering from breakdown and his violent new work: ‘Freud would have a field day’

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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.

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Danish artist delivers empty frames for $84k as low pay protest

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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.

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