Artist painted pet as present for Marguerite Lathuille, whose family has owned picture for last 140 years
A previously unseen painting of a pet dog by Édouard Manet will be sold for the first time at an auction in Paris next month.
The French modernist artist dashed off the small work in 1879 as a present for Marguerite Lathuille, the daughter of a Paris innkeeper whose portrait he painted around the same time.
Continue reading...‘Trump had threatened Mexico with tariffs if it let in this caravan from Honduras. Two hours after crossing this river, many were teargassed then deported’
I had been following a migrant caravan north from San Pedro Sula, Honduras, for around 10 days. It was 23 January 2020, and this was the moment the group crossed the Suchiate river, which divides Guatemala from Mexico.
The Mexican authorities had deployed the national guard to stop the caravan entering their country because Trump had threatened to increase tariffs on Mexican goods coming into the United States if they let migrants in. Previously, migrants had been allowed to traverse the length of Mexico with no problem.
Continue reading...Germany became a unified state 150 years ago this week – and no other country has produced such original, provocative and powerful art since, from Richter to Klee, from Dix to Höch
Situated on the edge of the Alps, Neuschwanstein Castle may not look like the birthplace of modern art. Best seen from a perilously crowded footbridge across a vertiginous gorge, it floats in misty rains, a cloudy dream of white spires and battlements. Yet this 19th-century colossus is an architectural homage to one man: a composer who inspired the avant garde to make the leap to modernism.
Richard Wagner’s music so enflamed King Ludwig II of Bavaria, he built this magnificent medieval vision in honour of the composer. But, in artists across Europe, Wagner’s musical might released much more futuristic impulses. The abstract leitmotifs and unearthly symbolism of his operas fascinated artists from Aubrey Beardsley to Paul Cézanne. The impressionists, too, were entranced: Renoir travelled to Palermo, Sicily, to portray Wagner when he was composing Parsifal.
Continue reading...Museum shut due to coronavirus was unaware that 500-year-old Salvator Mundi had been missing
Italian police has found a 500-year-old copy of Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi in a Naples flat and returned it to a museum that had no idea it had been stolen.
Officers said late Monday they had arrested the 36-year-old owner of the flat on suspicion of receiving stolen goods, after the painting was discovered in his bedroom cupboard.
Continue reading...The human form has inspired artists for centuries for both its beauty and challenges. Now a Brazilian septuagenarian sculptor has won a surprise newfound notoriety for his celebrity waxworks. Six years after it was filmed, a local TV story on an exhibit by Arlindo Armacollo has gone viral for the distorted depictions and the gushing reporter's commentary. Armacollo's work is the latest in an increasingly long list of celebrity sculptures that have gained fame for not quite nailing the brief
Continue reading...The horrific visions of the Spanish painter are about to go on display at New York’s Met. Americans should flock to this timely show – because no artist better captured collective delusion and mass fanaticism
The macabre art of Francisco Goya, the first truly modern artist, is due to be exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum in New York next month and there could hardly be a more urgent moment for Americans to look at his images. For, over 200 years ago, this Spanish artist perfectly captured the kind of collective delusion and mass fanaticism that swarmed the US Capitol last week. The mob of Trump supporters who assaulted the home of American democracy were as inflamed as the crowd who march with crazed eyes behind a manic musician in The Pilgrimage to San Isidoro, as dangerous as the hate-drunk crowd in The Second of May 1808, spellbound by their goat-headed charismatic idol.
And then there’s The Burial of the Sardine, in which a delirious crowd cavort around a huge banner of a madly grinning face. At first glance, it seems to be a joyous carnival scene, but look closer and the intensity of their rite becomes unsettling as you notice that face on the banner, their vacant lord of the dance. It has a definitive Trumpian air.
Continue reading...Guy Wildenstein and others face new trial after court annuls 2018 tax fraud acquittal
France’s highest court has ordered a retrial of members of the art-dealing Wildenstein family who were acquitted of tax fraud in 2018.
Guy Wildenstein, a close friend of former president Nicolas Sarkozy, and other family members, known in France as “les W”, were cleared of hiding an estimated €550m from the French tax authorities in offshore accounts in 2017 – a decision upheld on appeal.
Continue reading...In 1974, the German photographer set out to convey the truth about how people really lived in the communist GDR – depicting her fellow citizens with a ‘timeless coolness’
Continue reading...Exhibition presents torn paintings and grazed sculptures in a museum itself hit by explosion
Through the entrance is a version of Guido Reni’s 17th-century portrait of St John the Baptist, blown to shreds. Nearby, a chandelier lies splattered on the ground where it fell. Mirrors are cracked, paintings ruptured, and roofs in some rooms half-caved in.
Beirut is slowly rebuilding from the explosion on 4 August that destroyed much of its eastern seafront neighbourhoods and tore through galleries and hotel lobbies where some of Lebanon’s most renowned art was on display.
Continue reading...Juliana Notari’s hillside sculpture sparks clash between Bolsonaro-supporting right and leftwing cultural community
A 33-metre reinforced concrete vagina has sparked a Bolsonarian backlash in Brazil, with supporters of the country’s far-right president clashing with leftwing art admirers over the installation.
The handmade sculpture, entitled Diva, was unveiled by visual artist Juliana Notari on Saturday at a rural art park on the grounds of a former sugar mill in Pernambuco, one of Brazil’s most culturally vibrant states.
Continue reading...Gallery puts seldom-seen Divine Comedy sketches on display online to mark 700 years since poet’s death
Eighty-eight rarely seen drawings of Dante’s The Divine Comedy have been put on virtual display as Italy begins a year-long calendar of events to mark the 700th anniversary of the poet’s death.
The drawings, by the 16th-century Renaissance artist Federico Zuccari, are being exhibited online, for free, by the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.
Continue reading...As she prepares to ring in 2021 with a performance on screens at Piccadilly Circus, the punk poet explains why she’s optimistic amid the ‘debris’ of Trump’s years in office
Patti Smith talks about her first poetry performance – in 1971 at St Mark’s Church in New York’s Bowery – as if it were yesterday. “I remember everything,” she says over the phone from her home in New York. Smith was in her early 20s, working at a bookshop and living in the Chelsea Hotel with her then lover, the playwright Sam Shepard. She had attended poetry readings before, most of which put her into a deep sleep. “I wanted to do something that wasn’t boring,” she recalls. “Sam said that since I sang to myself all the time, I should try singing a song, or maybe do something with a guitar.” And so she called on the musician Lenny Kaye to provide “interpretative” noises on guitar while she half-read, half-sang her poems.
The show was an instant hit. “It seemed to make a big impression on people – which I really didn’t understand,” she says. The producer Sandy Pearlman approached her afterwards and suggested she front a rock band. She eventually took his advice, making the landmark album Horses in 1975, and an icon of American punk was born.
Continue reading...Christmas day sweet sighting in Corona Heights park attracted visitors who took pictures and even took a bite
Like the other monoliths that have mysteriously appeared across America and the world in the waning weeks of 2020, the one that popped up on a California hilltop on Christmas Day seemed to come out of nowhere.
Also like the others, it was tall, three-sided and it rapidly attracted crowds of curious visitors before an untimely destruction.
Continue reading...Kim Logchies-Prins tells how employees gathered around canvas, sold for £1.5m, to give thanks
The owner of an art museum in Amsterdam who sold a prized Banksy painting for £1.5m to avoid laying off staff during the coronavirus pandemic has told how her employees gathered around the canvas to give thanks.
Kim Logchies-Prins, co-founder with her husband, Lionel, of the Moco museum of modern, contemporary and street art, said she joined 20 of the office staff to pay respects and say goodbye to Banksy’s Monkey Poison, following its sale to an anonymous US buyer at an auction in New York.
Continue reading...They are a Christmas card staple – the three kings who followed a star to the baby Jesus. But one of them caused a revolution in art. We unravel the mystery of the Magi
They came bearing gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. This description of the Magi, the three kings or wise men who followed a star to the newborn Jesus, has always given artists plenty of scope to depict ornate boxes, cups and vessels. Paintings show them followed by pages, servants, soldiers and pack animals – an entire royal retinue. Dressed in their finest, making their way across deserts and over mountains guided by a light, these pilgrims to the lowly stable always look magnificent.
Although the Gospel of Matthew does not give individual names to this regal trio, we know them as Balthasar, Caspar and Melchior, thanks to a Greek manuscript from AD500. It was in the middle ages, too, that they were promoted from astronomers to kings. And a text attributed to the Venerable Bede, the historian monk from Northumbria, makes Balthasar black. Despite Bede’s assertion, there are very few images of a black Balthasar before 1400, possibly because medieval Europeans had so little concept of Africans. It was only with the dawning of the Renaissance that Balthasar’s colour began to be emphatically depicted. In fact, the trumpeting, joyous festive subject of “the adoration” inspired some of the richest portrayals of black people in European art.
Continue reading...Experts say ‘incredible discovery’ is the earliest known version of the early 17th century artist’s Holy Family works
A painting that hung for decades in a municipal building in Brussels has been authenticated as the work of Flemish master Jacob Jordaens.
After analysis including dendrochronology – dating works from the wood panels they are painted on – experts determined that it is the oldest known version of The Holy Family by Jordaens, painted in the early 17th century.
Continue reading...Heirs of Jewish art dealers bring case over Guelph Treasure that defence lawyers say could open floodgates
A 12-year wrangle over a rare collection of medieval ecclesiastical art sold by Jewish art dealers to the Nazis in 1935 will arrive in front of the highest court in the US on Monday, in a landmark case defence lawyers say could open the floodgates for restitution battles from all over the world to be fought via the US.
The supreme court will hear oral arguments on whether the dealers’ heirs can sue in US courts to retrieve the church reliquaries, known as the Guelph Treasure or Welfenschatz, from Germany.
Continue reading...For many following the story of the monolith, crucial questions remain unanswered: who made it? What was it for?
In a year of uncertainty and peril, one three-sided mystery metal structure provided a glinting moment of distraction, or even hope – and then it was gone.
Before the public had moved on from the monolith, the monolith had moved on from us.
Continue reading...Astonishing rock paintings discovered in Colombia hold a lesson for today’s rainforest
In the past week, remarkable images of ancient cave art have hit the headlines: rock paintings made in South America around 12,000 years ago. The art, created on rock faces in the Serranía de la Lindosa, on the northern edge of the Colombian Amazon, is a riot of ochre-coloured geometrical pattern, handprints, and images of animals and humans. Until recent excavations, the works of art had been unknown to the international community. Their exuberant creativity will soon be revealed to a broad audience in the UK thanks to the Channel 4 series Jungle Mystery: Lost Kingdoms of the Amazon.
The people who made these works of art were, it is believed, among the earliest humans to occupy the region, after migrations across what is now the Bering Strait some 25,000 years ago. Preliminary study of the iconography of the art has led scholars to speculate that among the deer, tapirs, alligators, bats, serpents, turtles and porcupines, long-extinct megafauna are also represented: mastodons, American ice-age horses, giant sloths, camelids.
Continue reading...A new mysterious metal monolith has appeared atop a mountain in California, just a week after a similar structure captured the imagination of the world when it was discovered in the deserts of Utah – before disappearing. Amid mounting international attention of the mystery, a similar structure was reportedly found in the mountains of Romania - before it disappeared as well
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