Category Archives: Art

It’s a botch-up! Monkey Christ and the worst art repairs of all time

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As another religious painting restoration goes horribly wrong, we take a look at some of the finest examples of butchered statues, art installations and frescoes

In the latest instalment of the greatest genre of art news – and I write that as a lover of art – another restoration has gone awry. The word “awry” is being generous.

This is the revelation that a private collector, based in Valencia, paid €1,200 (£1,070) for a restoration job on baroque painter Bartolomé Esteban Murillo’s Immaculate Conception of Los Venerables. It is no longer immaculate. It now looks like an e-fit issued by a local police force, with those thin eyebrows popular in the 90s. What’s more, the restorer (who it turns out was a furniture restorer by trade) made two attempts – the second significantly worse than the first. That one, the e-fit one, has the Virgin Mary staring straight ahead, which isn’t even the same position as the original, which has Mary looking to the heavens.

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Van Gogh and Gauguin letter about brothel visit sells for €210,000

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‘Exceptional’ correspondence sent from Arles in 1888 is bought by Van Gogh Museum

A letter written by two of the greatest artists of the 19th century, Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, about their visits to French brothels has been bought for the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam for €210,600 (£189,000).

The correspondence, previously held in private hands, has been described as “exceptional”. The two painters entwine descriptions of their experiences living together in Arles, Provence, with claims of certainty that their work is leading a “great renaissance of art”.

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Color is not a crime: New York’s Black Lives Matter street art

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Across the US, artists have responded to the death of George Floyd and the ensuing protests with impactful and urgent work. In New York, artworks have appeared supporting the Black Lives Matter movement, and remembering the deaths of, among others, Breonna Taylor, Elijah McClain and Eric Garner

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Christie’s withdraws ‘looted’ Greek and Roman treasures

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Four antiquities pulled from auction after claims they came from illicit excavations

Christie’s has quietly withdrawn four Greek and Roman antiquities from auction this month amid allegations that they had been looted from illicit excavations.

The items were in the original brochure catalogue but later removed from the online site with no explanation.

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Bird figurine is earliest Chinese artwork ever discovered, say experts

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‘Refined’ 2cm carving found in Henan dates to palaeolithic period up to 13,000 years ago

A tiny figurine of a bird, carved from burnt bone and no bigger than a £1 coin, is the earliest Chinese artwork ever discovered, according to an international team of archaeologists. 

The carving, less than 2cm in length, has been dated to the palaeolithic period, between 13,800 and 13,000 years ago, which pushes back the earliest known date of east Asian animal sculpture by more than eight millennia. 

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Toppling Edward Colston’s statue is unlikely to be enough to stop public anger

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Few imperial icons, including Churchill, will escape the need to reappraise Britain’s past

The toppling of slaver Edward Colston’s statue has electrified a longer term – and already deeply polarised – debate among British historians and academics, with some celebrating a “moment of history” as others warned of dark consequences for society.

Inaction over figures such as Colston had bred anger that would be felt “all over Britain”, said Andrea Livesey, a historian specialising in the study of slavery and its legacies and who described the events in Bristol as “wholly justified”.

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‘It’s a big turning point’: is this the end of racist monuments in America?

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Protests across the country have led to the removal of many statues honouring racist figures – but hundreds still remain

Last week in Richmond, Virginia, protesters scrawled on a monument of the Confederate army commander Robert E Lee as an act of resistance against police brutality and racism. They wrote “Black Lives Matter”, “Blood On Your Hands” and “Stop White Supremacy” in spray paint, often in red.

At night, there was a projection of George Floyd’s face, bearing the words “No Justice, No Peace”.

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Christo: ‘His gorgeous abstractions made you gawp with disbelief’

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From a curtain across Colorado to the wrapping up of everything from the Sydney coast to the Berlin Reichstag, his grandiose art caused wonder all over the world

He changed cityscapes, landscapes, buildings, coastlines, lakes and islands, making us look afresh at our surroundings. At its most daring and spectacular, Christo’s work entered the collective consciousness, overturning our sense of scale and place in the world. At its best, his work was disruptive and transformative, leaving surprise and wonder in its wake. 

Christo’s is the kind of art that persists in the imagination, however temporary his projects have been (some lasted only a few days) and however few people encountered his theatrical interventions for themselves. Wasn’t he the one who wrapped the Reichstag in Berlin in a shroud, and a coastline near Sydney? His art became a kind of rumour, perhaps almost a myth. 

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Christo, artist who wrapped the Reichstag, dies aged 84

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Bulgarian creator of large-scale public artworks worked in collaboration with wife Jeanne-Claude

The artist Christo, known for wrapping buildings including Berlin’s Reichstag, and also swathing areas of coast and entire islands in fabric, has died aged 84. The news was confirmed on his official Facebook page, which said that he died of natural causes at his home in New York.

Born Christo Vladimirov Javacheff in Bulgaria, Christo studied in Sofia and then defected to the west in 1957, stowing away on a train from Prague to Vienna. Two years later he met Frenchwoman Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon, who would become his artistic partner and wife until her death in 2009.

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Berlin’s cultural capital in peril from exodus of billionaire art collectors

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Thousands of works will disappear from galleries as rent rises and a stand-off with city government take their toll

Home to some 400 galleries and an estimated 8,000 artists, Berlin has long aspired to be what its politicians call the cultural capital of Europe.

Yet in the coming year, thousands of works by artists including Joseph Beuys, Louise Bourgeois, Bruce Nauman and Gerhard Richter are set to vanish from its galleries, as the city debates what lengths it should go to to protect art collectors from the sharp edge of a property boom.

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Hockney invites budding artists to find joys of spring in lockdown

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Artist provides inspiration for competition to lift spirits during the coronavirus crisis

Locked down in France, the British artist David Hockney has been sitting in the garden of his Normandy home drawing the blossoming of spring. The cherry and other fruit trees, the hawthorns and blackthorns, all feature in his works, famously created on his iPad.

Now Hockney, 82, is the inspiration for a competition to encourage young and old to create an image that captures the season and to lift coronavirus lockdown spirits.

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‘Colour allows us to understand in a deeper sense’: Hitler, Churchill and others in a new light

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The story of global conflict is all the more powerful when it isn’t seen in black and white. Artist Marina Amaral explains her latest work

On a stretcher lies a patient; his ashen face protrudes from under a green blanket, eyes closed. Two uniformed women carry the stretcher, wearing face masks. It looks as if it’s a lovely day: the sun is shining, the shadows dark, the sky blue. But this is not a happy picture. Is the casualty even alive, or has he already been taken by the killer virus that has wrapped itself around our planet like a python, squeezing the life from it?

The photograph was taken at an ambulance station in Washington DC. Within the past couple of months? It could have been, if it weren’t for the uniforms (I don’t think today’s nurses wear lace-up leather boots) and the stretcher. In fact, it was taken more than a century ago, in 1918, during the Spanish flu epidemic, which killed so many millions. The photographer is unknown, forgotten. But the black and white picture was recently “colourised” by Marina Amaral.

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Sex and sensibility: the photographers capturing a new American youth

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Peyton Fulford shot LGBTQ+ teenagers in the deep south; Sabine Ostinvil explores nascent black masculinity in pictures that cast a new light on US youth culture

When Peyton Fulford looks at her photograph Backbend, she sees gender fluidity in motion. A body arches over a bag of pink grapefruit, the white underwear and bare legs curving across the golden landscape in a defiant pose that is both playful and strong – yet also ambiguous.

“I wanted to tell a story and for people to question the figure in the image,” the 25-year-old photographer says from Atlanta, Georgia. “Whether it’s a man or a woman or a non-binary person.”

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The bittersweet story of Marina Abramović’s epic walk on the Great Wall of China

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In 1988 Abramović and Ulay trekked from opposite ends of the wall to meet in the middle, but this act of love and performance art was doomed from the start

From the moment in 1976 that Serbian and German performance artists Marina Abramović and Ulay (Frank Uwe Laysiepen, who died last month aged 76) clapped eyes on each other they were inseparable. Ulay found Abramović witchy and otherworldly; she found him wild and exciting. Even their initial encounter was propitious: they met in Amsterdam on their shared birthday of 30 November.

The pair began to perform together, describing themselves as a “two-headed body”. For years they lived a nomadic lifestyle, travelling across Europe in a corrugated iron van and performing in villages and towns. Their artistic collaborations matched their personalities: they focused on performances that put them in precarious and physically demanding situations, to see how they and their audience would respond. In one, called Relation in Time, they remained tied together by their hair for 17 hours. They explored conflict, taking their ideas to extremes: running full pelt into each other, naked, and slapping each other’s faces until they could take no more.

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‘Beginning of a new era’: how culture went virtual in the face of crisis

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The rise of Covid-19 has forced cultural institutions to explore alternative digital spaces with online exhibitions and a rise in virtual reality

It’s a terrible time for going out. Since the emergence of Covid-19 and resulting self-quarantine, thousands of museums, cultural institutions, festivals and global happenings have temporarily shuttered operations, leaving behind empty streets and a restless public. In a sector that thrives on in-person connection, the loss of an audience is disastrous, yet resilient performers, institutions, galleries, even entire art fairs, are moving to the digital arena, using streaming services and virtual reality, manifesting live concerts on the gaming app Twitch, organizing Instagram dance parties and launching online-only spaces.

During his popular 2015 Ted Talk, the immersive artist, entrepreneur and director Chris Milk suggested that virtual reality could someday become the “ultimate empathy machine” but despite an initial burst of interest in 2015 during the launch of the Oculus Rift headset, immersive media have primarily remained niche. Now, with social distancing, the technology is experiencing something of a renaissance.

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Van Gogh painting stolen from Dutch museum

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Thieves have stolen the £5m Parsonage Garden at Neunen in Spring by the famous artist from the Singer Laren museum

A painting by Vincent van Gogh with an estimated value of up to £5m has been stolen from a Dutch museum currently closed due to the coronavirus pandemic.

The thieves took Van Gogh’s Parsonage Garden at Neunen in Spring after smashing through the front glass door of the Singer Laren museum, in Laren, at around 3.15am on Sunday morning. No other art is believed to be missing.

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Covid-19 prompts all major British theatres to close doors

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Fifty London theatres and 250 throughout UK to close, says industry body

All major British theatre will cease and several cultural institutions will close or postpone shows as the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the UK’s arts and culture sector grows following the government’s call for “drastic action” to halt its spread.

The Society of London Theatre (Solt) and UK Theatre, the industry body that represents nearly every British theatre, announced that, as of Monday night, all its members would close their doors. The groups represent about 50 London theatres and almost 250 others throughout the UK.

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