Category Archives: Art

How Holbein left clever clue in portrait to identify Henry VIII’s queen

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New evidence shows miniature long held to be of Catherine Howard could depict Henry’s fourth wife, Anne of Cleves

Created in around 1540 by Hans Holbein, court painter to Henry VIII and one of the greatest portraitists of all time, the miniature is a prized treasure in the Royal Collection. But the sitter is unknown, with the artefact long catalogued merely as “Portrait of a Lady, perhaps Catherine Howard”, Henry VIII’s fifth queen.

Now, as a result of fresh research, she has been given a new identity: that of Anne of Cleves, Henry VIII’s fourth wife. Art historian Franny Moyle has amassed evidence to show that this is the face of the noblewoman whom the king married in 1540 to form a political alliance.

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Poussin painting ‘copy’ to hang in main galleries with new label

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The Triumph of Silenus was relegated to storerooms but new study casts it in a new light

It was bought by the National Gallery in the 1820s as a painting by Nicolas Poussin, the 17th-century French master. But The Triumph of Silenus – a bacchanalian revel – has long been relegated to the storerooms, having been repeatedly rejected by some of the 20th-century’s foremost experts as a mere copy.

Now doubts about the picture have been dispelled and it will hang in the main galleries with a new label bearing Poussin’s name.

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Did art peak 30,000 years ago? How cave paintings became my lockdown obsession

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Portraiture, perspective, impressionism, movement, mythology: cave artists could do the lot. And I have spent the past year on a virtual odyssey of their primordial wonders

I was recently awoken in the night by lions, their eyes glaring in the dark from blunt rectangular faces as they stalked bison through an ancient, arid grassland. As I came to, however, I realised I was not about to be eaten alive. This was simply one of the perils of spending too much time looking at images of cave art on the web.

Cave artists could do it all. The faces of the animals they painted are exquisite portraits, while their bodies are rendered in perfect perspective. But wait – weren’t these supposed to be the great achievements of European art? After all, in his classic study The Story of Art, EH Gombrich tells how western art took off when the ancient Greeks learned how to show movement, that the perspective was discovered in 15th-century Europe, and that the communication of sensation rather than the seen was the gift of the impressionists. Gombrich had probably not seen much cave art. Lascaux, a series of caves in the French Dordogne, was a recent discovery when he published his book in 1950 – and Chauvet, also in France, wouldn’t be found until 1994.

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‘Damn! This is a Caravaggio!’: the inside story of an old master found in Spain

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Art dealer Giancarlo Ciaroni attempted to buy painting listed at €1,500 for €500,000 – but discovered bewildered owners already had two offers of €3m

It took all of six minutes for Massimo Pulini to realise that the small oil painting due to go under the hammer in Madrid earlier this month with a guide price of €1,500 (£1,300) could be worth millions.

At 9.48pm on 24 March, Pulini, a 63-year-old professor at the Bologna Fine Arts Academy, received an email request for an evaluation. Sent by an antiques dealer and friend of Pulini’s, it included a photo of a luminous oil painting of the scourged Christ.

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Was Nero cruel? British Museum offers hidden depths to Roman emperor

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Nero: the man behind the myth brings together more than 200 artefacts from across Europe

Nero, one of the most notorious Roman emperors of them all, murdered his mother and two wives, ruthlessly persecuted early Christians, including Saint Peter and Saint Paul, and even set fire to Rome itself – famously fiddling amid the flames – to make room to build himself a vast, luxurious palace.

Or did he? That is the question posed by an exhibition opening at the British Museum next month which seeks, if not to rehabilitate Nero’s reputation, at least to challenge some of history’s assumptions about him.

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‘When I paint, all the voices in my head go still’: Juliet Stevenson on how art got her through lockdown

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Painting has helped one of Britain’s most revered actors survive Covid restrictions and the loss of a child. We join the actor for an art class that never quite happens

If you go down to the woods today, you may just come across Juliet Stevenson dangling from a branch, fumbling to photograph the light falling through a caterpillar hole on a particularly disobliging leaf, with her partner Hugh chuckling, resigned, as yet another quick stroll turns into a day trip. Upside down Juliet Stevenson has been a rare constant of Suffolk’s lockdown landscape, even as snow buried it and tides hacked away at its crumbling coastline. The 64-year-old has been all over the East Anglian country, leaving a trail of snow angels on her quest to find its most picturesque – and acrobatic – angles.

What’s an actor to do when the West End goes dark? All that creative energy must go somewhere – and this actor is training the newly discovered painter’s eye that has kept her sane over lockdown. “By the time you get to my age,” she says, when I question why painting would be the basis of our interview, “you become too settled into the skills you know you have. I can sort of do my job. I know quite a lot about parenting. But to be absolutely at the beginning of something – at square one – it’s just a great feeling.”

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‘He’s telling a story of his time’: how Bill Traylor, born into slavery, became an art titan

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Referred to as ‘the greatest artist you’ve never heard of’, Bill Traylor’s compelling life is put under the spotlight in a new documentary

Bill Traylor had already lived a full life before he was born as an artist. Enslaved at birth on an Alabama cotton plantation in 1853 and having spent his entire life as a farmer within a 40-mile radius of Montgomery, it was only in his late 80s that he, homeless and alone, parked himself by a bustling intersection in the state capitol’s segregated black neighborhood and began to draw and paint.

Related: In the Absence of Light: celebrating the history of black artists in America

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‘Female artists were invisible’: critics didn’t dismiss Nancy Holt’s land art – they didn’t mention it at all

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Holt made mesmerising works that filtered stars and vanished in the desert heat. But land art was seen as a male preserve. A new exhibition redresses the balance

The story of land art is generally believed to be a tale of white men in weathered denim descending on what they thought of as the empty canvas of the American west in the 1960s with bulldozers and big ideas to make their work. But what of the women who were also making their mark? “Today, land art appears as an almost perfect distillation of the art world’s history of male privilege, with its conviction that man is entitled to space to roam, to make his mark,” critic Megan O’Grady wrote in 2018. “It is one of the contemporary art movements most urgently in need of reconsideration.”

A forthcoming exhibition at Lismore Castle in County Waterford, centred on the work of the late Nancy Holt, hopes to redress that balance. The Irish venue launches its post-lockdown programming with Light and Language, a group show looking at her legacy in contemporary art as a central member of the land art and conceptual movements. It is an uncommon opportunity to see a sizeable group of Holt works, many of which haven’t been exhibited in decades. There is a large-scale installation, several video and sound works, photography, drawing and a scattering of her “concrete poems”. The most recognisable piece of Holt’s is a mesmerising earthwork entitled Sun Tunnels – four cylindrical, concrete forms, large enough to walk through, installed in the desert in Utah.

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Painting that was nearly sold for €1,500 could be Caravaggio worth €50m

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Spanish government imposes export ban on oil painting as experts study it to determine authorship

Before it was pulled from sale, lot 229, a small but luminous oil painting of the scourged Christ attributed to the circle of the 17th-century Spanish artist José de Ribera, had been due to go under the hammer in Madrid on Thursday with a guide price of €1,500 (£1,300).

Closer inspection, however, has raised suspicions that the Crowning with Thorns may be the rather more valuable work of the Italian master Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, leading the Spanish government to impose an export ban on the painting.

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‘They are living maps’: how Richard Mosse captured environmental damage in the Amazon

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In a new set of photos, environmental degradation in the Amazon is explored to shine light on ‘a hideously complex story’

In his 20s, Irish photographer Richard Mosse made his first foray into photojournalism by capturing postwar Balkan nations. This experience led to a realisation that the medium was inadequately suited to capture complex, layered narratives. “You have to put the thing in front of the camera, and when that thing is an abstraction, far bigger than a human figure, it’s very difficult to do,” he explained in a recent podcast with Monocle.

The subjects he found himself covering over the next two decades were equally abstract and complex as the first, ranging from conflict in DR Congo to the refugee crisis in Europe. However, in his search for ways to subvert the medium and bend it to his will, he eventually managed to create his own unique brand of photography, characterised by the use of infra-red film and other technology rooted in military reconnaissance.

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If you like salmon, don’t read this: the art duo exposing a booming £1bn market

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Farmed salmon can end up deformed, blind, riddled with sea lice and driven to eat each other. Eco art activists Cooking Sections are highlighting their plight – and getting Tate to change its menus

A few months back, a book arrived in the post – tiny, not much larger than a bank card. Though the cover was grey, its pages were a riot of pinks, from deepest persimmon to pale rose. Printed on them were dense, technical essays referencing everything from fish farming to Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. The title was Salmon: A Red Herring.

Fish is an unexpected topic for an art book – but then the duo who created this little volume, Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe, aren’t really going for the coffee-table market. Operating under the name Cooking Sections, the pair have a thing for food. Their art is about what we eat and its impact on the Earth.

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Hypnotic loops and self-soothing sounds: the rise of #OddlySatisfying and visual ASMR

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As a subreddit devoted to strangely satisfying video clips grows into a behemoth, a new wave of digital artists are manufacturing their own

The subreddit r/oddlysatisfying has always had a wholesome mission: it collects small moments of magic in the world – “those little things that are inexplicably satisfying”.

It began in 2013, when people started sharing gifs of high-pressure hoses and industrial pasta cutters on Reddit. Eight years later, it has grown into an entire subsection of the internet: r/oddlysatisfying has 5.6 million members, and there’s a multi-platform “media network” of the same name. It curates content for a combined 3.44 million followers across YouTube and TikTok. Videos with the hashtag #oddlysatisfying have clocked up 25.9bn views on TikTok alone.

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Stalin statue site reveals chilling remains of Prague labour camp

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Archaeologists have discovered foundations of the previously unknown structure in the city’s Letná park

The colossal monument to Joseph Stalin that towered over Prague at the height of the cold war stood as a frightening reminder of the Soviet dictator’s tyranny and communism’s seemingly unshakeable grip on the former Czechoslovakia.

Nearly 60 years after its demolition, the brooding 15.5-metre (51ft) shrine retains a hold on the popular imagination, with locals referring to the now popular meeting point where it once stood as “Stalin’s”.

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The beluga whale who became famous: Aleksander Nordahl’s best photograph

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‘He was called Hvaldimir and he would play in front of crowds at Hammerfest harbour in Norway. One woman dropped her phone and he fetched it for her’

In April 2019, a beluga whale appeared alongside fishing boats off the coast of Norway. He was wearing a harness. A fisherman called Joar Hesten freed him, and saw the harness had stamped on it “equipment of St Petersburg”. The media went crazy, with talk of a “spy whale”, and the creature was named Hvaldimir, a combination of hval, the Norwegian word for whale, and Vladimir, a nod to Russia’s President Putin.

The whale became famous. There were Instagram videos of him playing in Hammerfest harbour in front of crowds. One woman dropped her phone in the water and the whale fetched it for her. He would bring up bones from the depths to show people, almost like little gifts. It became this huge moment on social media: everyone in the country fell in love with the whale. Even the hardcore fishing villages melted for Hvaldimir.

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Can anyone become an NFT collector? I tried it to find out

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This year non-fungible tokens burst into the mainstream after several digital images and animations sold for absurd amounts – so I entered the world of NFTs myself

For years, I’ve kept an ever-growing record of interesting pictures I discover online in a folder entitled Images on my desktop: a fox sauntering through an art gallery; a pixelated rendering of a Tokyo streetscape; Jon Bon Jovi doing yoga. They’re sentimental reminders of things I’ve seen online, but I am under no illusion that I somehow own these images. They come from the internet and can be copied, shared and experienced by many people all at once. My collection really is worthless to anyone but me.

Related: Art, amulets and cryptokitties: the new frontier of cryptocurrencies

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Gerhard Richter gives Holocaust art to Berlin

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Germany’s greatest living painter donates 100 works, including his Birkenau series, to capital’s new museum

Fans of the German painter Gerhard Richter are expected to flock to Berlin to view 100 works that he has in effect donated in a long-term loan to a new museum of modern art. The works include a series of paintings addressing the Holocaust that he has vowed never to sell.

The donation by the 89-year-old, who is one of the world’s highest-priced living artists, is destined for the Museum der Moderne, which is under construction in the German capital.

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On my radar: Monique Roffey’s cultural highlights

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The Costa-winning author on enjoying Sade with a glass of wine, Line of Duty and why the Caribbean’s female writers need to be heard

Monique Roffey is an award-winning writer born in Trinidad in 1965 whose novels include The White Woman on a Green Bicycle and House of Ashes, which were shortlisted, respectively, for the Orange and the Costa prizes. She is also a senior lecturer at Manchester Writing School. Her sixth novel, The Mermaid of Black Conch, won the Costa book of the year and is shortlisted for the 2021 Rathbones Folio prize, announced on 24 March.

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Miraculous moment at a pagan festival: Alexey Vasilyev’s best photograph

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‘Yakutia is five times the size of France with a population of just 1 million. Snow lasts from October to April and there are practically no railways or roads. At these festivals, we become whole’

I grew up in Yakutia. It’s the largest region of Russia, five times the size of France, but with a population of only one million spread over three million square kilometres. The climate is severe and contrasting. In summer, it’s 40C; in winter -60C, with snow from October until mid-April. To go anywhere takes a long time – several hours in the car. There are practically no railways and few roads. It’s easier to fly from the far east to Moscow than it is to travel around. Half of the people are ethnic Sakha from Yakutia, half are Russians. The two communities don’t socialise much. The Russians mostly live in the Aldansky district, but their number is shrinking. Many are moving away to less harsh parts of the country.

As a documentary photographer, I want to record how people live here, what they do, what their problems are, what makes them happy. Each solstice we have a holiday called Ysyakh. It’s a pagan festival, an important part of our national identity and a moment when we become an organic whole. Because we are so spread out it’s often hard to feel any kind of unity. Yakutia’s brand is winter; I wanted to show summer. Participants dress up in national costume. Women wear long, flowing dresses decorated with flowers. It’s a moment when people are relaxed about being photographed. There’s still some paranoia in Russia about posing for a camera. It’s a bit of a Soviet hangover.

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Otto Dix’s ‘apocalyptic’ depictions of life on western front up for auction

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Der Krieg portfolio among extensive collection created by first world war veteran and anti-war artist

One of the most extensive collections of prints by Otto Dix is to be offered at auction this month in which the German artist’s unique perspective of fighting in the first world war and coping with its aftermath is given expression in some of the most poignant images of 20th-century Europe.

The works – which include Dix’s early prints and rare, complete portfolios from drypoint etchings to to wood cuts and aquatints – are considered valuable rarities, having been produced only in limited runs.

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