Category Archives: Art

Show me the mummy: the undying allure of ancient Egypt

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Paris’s Tutankhamun exhibition is a record-breaking hit – but scarabs, pharaohs and man-eating monsters have been thrilling us for centuries

Paris’s current mania for Tutankhamun should come as no surprise. The Grande Halle de la Villette exhibition of 150 objects found in the tomb of the ancient Egyptian pharaoh is now France’s most-visited exhibition ever, having attracted over 1.3 million visitors. Many of the objects on show – “wonderful things”, in Howard Carter’s words, including mini-coffins, a gilded bed and a calcite vase – have left Egypt for the first time for the Treasures of the Pharaoh exhibition, which will move to London’s Saatchi Gallery in November.

The exhibition’s popularity echoes the wave of “Tut-mania” that swept the west almost 100 years ago when Carter first discovered the boy-king’s tomb. Suddenly everyone seemed interested in Egyptology, evident in the fashions, arts, culture and advertising of the time, and most enduringly in art-deco architecture such as the Chrysler building in New York – especially its distinctive elevator doors – and the Carreras Cigarette Factory in London, with its line of sleek black cats guarding the entrance. US president Herbert Hoover named his dog King Tut, and there were calls for the extension of the London Underground’s Northern Line that linked Tooting and Camden Town to be named Tutancamden.

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‘Terrifying’ hand sculpture flies in to give Wellington nightmares

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‘Monstrous’ and ‘malevolent’ sculpture Quasi alarms office workers and divides opinion

A “terrifying” five-metre tall sculpture of a hand with a face has been flown in from the South Island to perch on top of a contemporary art gallery in the New Zealand capital of Wellington.

It fixes passers by with a disapproving expression. Meant to liven up the Civic Square that was damaged in a 2016 earthquake, the work has instead alarmed and terrified locals, who have described the work as “a Lovecraftian nightmare [that] has come to life”.

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UK and Ireland commemorate 1979 Fastnet race disaster

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Series of events include exhibition of portraits by Welsh artist Dan Llywelyn Hall, poetry and vigils

It was the summer storm that roared without warning into the Celtic Sea, unleashing monster waves that ambushed a fleet of 303 boats competing in the Fastnet race.

Instead of skimming along the south coast of the UK to the Fastnet Rock off south-west Ireland, sailors found themselves battling for life against howling winds and walls of water. Dozens of yachts capsized, trapping crews in their cabins and tossing others into the foam.

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UK art dealer jailed in US for defrauding clients of up to $30m

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Timothy Sammons used works by Picasso and Chagall as collateral for personal loans

A prominent British art dealer who defrauded his clients out of millions by using a scheme that involved masterpieces by artists including Pablo Picasso and Marc Chagall has been sentenced for up to 12 years in prison.

Timothy Sammons – a former Sotheby’s specialist who had offices in New York and London and who brokered multimillion-pound deals for the likes of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation – used art that did not belong to him as collateral to obtain personal loans between 2010 and 2015.

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Fantastique beasts: cult art from the Lalannes’ private collection to go on sale

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Surreal works from the home of François-Xavier Lalanne and his wife Claude expected to fetch up to £20m

For years, a giant brass and Sèvres porcelain grasshopper that could, if needed, double as a wine-cooler sat outside the royal apartments at Windsor Castle; a gift from French president Georges Pompidou to the Duke of Edinburgh during a state visit to France in 1972.

Across the Channel, an hour from Paris, the home of its late creator François-Xavier Lalanne and his artist wife Claude is full of such wonderful and whimsical creatures: a huge rhinoceros that transforms into a desk; a bronze cabbage on chicken legs; a herd of sheep that can be sat on, tables of enormous ginkgo leaves.

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Tattoos, tans and techno: the photographers capturing the unseen Beirut

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Ravers, semi-naked sun-worshippers, booming queer culture … we meet the photographers chronicling a new generation of Lebanese shaking off the trauma of civil war

‘Parties are a privileged place, a space for exploration, a time for fusion,” says photographer Cha Gonzalez. They’re also the focus of her series Abandon, which looks at the way some Lebanese people have used nightlife – and techno music in particular – as a release after the trauma of the country’s 15-year civil war, which ended in 1990. “I knew a lot of people who were either born during the war or in exile,” she says. “What was put aside during the day came to light – and their internal struggles surfaced.”

Abandon is a pertinent theme not only for Gonzalez, but for all of the 16 contributors to an exhibition in Paris called C’est Beyrouth (This Is Beirut), at the Institut des Cultures d’Islam. Gonzalez in particular seized on the city’s dance scene, and later continued the series in Paris, where she lives, because “there was something to say about countries that are very far from war as well. The war is inside us: how we feel useless, alone, bored, guilty, horny.”

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‘People think I’m very odd’: how Ibrahim Mahama brought Ghana’s past to Manchester

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From second-hand train seats to old school cupboards, the artist has transported discarded objects from his west African homeland to create a ‘parliament of ghosts’

‘We’re haunted all the time by ghosts of the past,” says Ibrahim Mahama as we sit on dirty old plastic second-class Ghana Railways carriage seats in Manchester’s Whitworth Art Gallery. Even these seats from an abandoned railway? “Especially these,” he says, smiling.

Mahama, a junkyard utopian whose art involves recycling stuff that’s lost its purpose, bought up rows and rows of these seats. He packed them into shipping containers and sent them on a 5,000-mile trip, from his west African homeland to the Whitworth, along with some school cupboards no longer fit for purpose, exercise books of children now grown up, and the minutes of Ghanaian parliamentary debates now deemed obsolete.

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Should museums return their colonial artefacts? | Tristram Hunt

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Europe’s museums serve a nuanced purpose and shouldn’t automatically bow to calls to return artworks plundered by 19th-century colonisers, writes V&A director Tristram Hunt

“I am from a generation of the French people for whom the crimes of European colonialism are undeniable and make up part of our history,” announced Emmanuel Macron to a crowded lecture theatre at Ouagadougou University, in Burkina Faso, in November 2017. “I cannot accept that a large part of cultural heritage from several African countries is in France … In the next five years, I want the conditions to be created for the temporary or permanent restitution of African patrimony to Africa.” In case anyone missed the significance of the French president’s remarks, the Elysée Palace was swift to spell out the new policy: “African heritage can no longer be the prisoner of European museums.”

The following year brought another notable intervention, this time from supervillain Erik Killmonger in the Marvel blockbuster Black Panther. Surveying the African collection at the “Museum of Great Britain”, Killmonger corrects the exhibition’s patronising white curator about the provenance of an axe: “It was taken by British soldiers in Benin, but it’s from Wakanda. Don’t trip – I’m gonna take it off your hands for you.” When the woman replies that the items are not for sale, Killmonger says: “How do you think your ancestors got these? Do you think they paid a fair price? Or did they take it, like they took everything else?” As the poisoned curator collapses, Killmonger deaccessions the artefact. Black Panther took just 26 days to reach $1bn (£784,000) in worldwide box office sales and, in one compelling scene, highlighted all the current controversies over museum collections and colonial injustice.

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Take me to the Boom Boom Room! Inside the risqué hotel for 24-hour party people

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America’s raciest hotel chain has turned a boring British office block into an Austin Powers-style crash pad complete with retro reception, leftie library – and rooftop baths. Groovy baby!

When the clerks of Camden’s highways department were issuing parking fines from their gloomy office in the 1970s, little can they have imagined that jet-setting hipsters would one day be supping cocktails in the public library below them before taking an al fresco dip up on the roof. Maligned for years as the concrete “egg box” of Euston Road, the old council headquarters have been reborn as the glamorous Standard Hotel, the first outpost of the risque boutique chain outside the US.

“People thought we were crazy to suggest open-air bathtubs in London,” says Shawn Hausman, the Los Angeles-based designer behind the Standard’s flamboyant interiors, who started out creating film sets for Saturday Night Fever. “But I think it’s always nice to have a bath outside, even in the rain.”

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Pride sale celebrates 50 years since Stonewall – in pictures

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To mark WorldPride and the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, Swann Galleries in New York is holding a Pride sale, which explores and celebrates the art, influence and history of the LGBTQ+ community. Books, manuscripts, photographs, archives, art and objects from the last two centuries will be auctioned

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‘They didn’t look old enough’: who filled a French art gallery with fakes?

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Last year, a museum dedicated to the work of Étienne Terrus revealed most of its paintings were probably not by him. How did it get there?

Odette Traby was dying. It was the summer of 2016 and the sun baked the terracotta roofs of her hometown, Elne, in the south of France, as she lay in bed. Weeks earlier, the 78-year-old had been diagnosed with stage IV cancer. This grande dame of Elne town life had refused all treatment and chosen to tough it out alone. “She was someone who wanted to grapple with, to face up to, death,” says Dani Delay, her niece.

Traby had one consolation. She had spent the previous months trying to secure the future of her life’s work, the town’s art museum. It was dedicated to the work of the local artist Étienne Terrus (1857-1922), a friend of Henri Matisse who had been largely forgotten by the time Traby established the museum in the mid-90s. When nearly 60 Terruses came on to the market in 2015, Traby rallied two local historical associations to raise tens of thousands of euros, securing at least 30 of the works. As her life ebbed, at least Traby could tell herself that her beloved museum was closer to gaining the “Musée de France” status that would give it priority state funding and resources.

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UK rights advocate co-owns firm whose spyware is ‘used to target dissidents’

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Exclusive: Yana Peel co-owns NSO Group that licensed Pegasus software to authoritarian regimes

A leading human rights campaigner and head of a prestigious London art gallery is the co-owner of an Israeli cyberweapons company whose software has allegedly been used by authoritarian regimes to spy on dissidents, the Guardian can reveal.

Yana Peel, the chief executive of the Serpentine Galleries and a self-proclaimed champion of free speech, co-owns NSO Group, a $1bn (£790m) Israeli tech firm, according to corporate records in the US and Luxembourg.

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Hull works towards securing its City of Culture legacy

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Residents hope regeneration will continue long after funding runs out

“Change is happening.” You can’t miss the three-word slogan that is plastered over the bright green building hoardings near Hull’s Humber Street Gallery. It feels like an apt one too. Modern townhouses are being built in the area next to the city’s dockside, which is being sold as “Hull’s new modern and exciting regeneration development”. There are temporary gallery spaces, workshops and dance classes, and cheap artist studios are being built. It is the kind of arts-led regeneration that has come to urban areas like the Northern Quarter in Manchester, Williamsburg in Brooklyn and Chueca in Madrid.

But this is different. This is Hull. A place whose name alone supposedly conjures images of “unspecified post-industrial misery”, king of the so-called “Crap Towns” and the bete noire of property expert Kirstie Allsopp – who deemed Hull the UK’s worst place to live in 2005. But Humber Street is a sign of progress and a rebranded city: a place buoyed by successful, year-long City of Culture celebrations that happened in 2017. If Hull has its swagger back, there’s good reason.

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Naked protesters condemn nipple censorship at Facebook headquarters

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Demonstrators cover bodies with stickers to ensure nipples on display are ‘male’, in line with Facebook policy

Some were hairy. Some were pointy. Some were dark brown, some a pale pink. But the hundreds of nipples on display in front of Facebook’s New York City headquarters on Sunday were technically “male”, despite some being on female protesters.

More than 100 people lay nude on the sidewalk to call for a change to the company’s censorship policies. The action, called #wethenipple, was organized by the artist Spencer Tunick and the National Coalition Against Censorship.

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Shen Wei’s best photograph: a naked self-portrait on a Chinese stage

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‘Not knowing if anyone would walk in gave me energy and inspired my powerful stance’

On a trip through Jiangxi province in south-east China two years ago, my friend and I were wandering around one of the area’s many small villages. It was tiny and empty apart from a few old men and women sitting in front of their houses.

There was a single street which all the doors of the village opened on to. One had a normal black door with a sign above it that said something like “club” or “meeting hall”. It was the only indication of it being non-residential, so I pushed it open. We found an empty theatre with two raised stages. Chairs were stacked on one and on the other was this set: two chairs and a table, draped in red fabric. I instantly knew I had to take a photograph.

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Italy’s new ruins: heritage sites being lost to neglect and looting

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Overgrown and weathered, many historical monuments are disappearing as public funds for culture fail to match modern Italy’s inheritance

Legend has it that the grotto hidden among the craggy cliffs on San Marco hill in Sutera in the heart of Sicily holds a treasure chest full of gold coins. In order to find it, three men must dream simultaneously about the precise place to dig.

Treasure or no treasure, the grotto itself is an archaeological gem, its walls adorned with a multi-coloured Byzantine-esque 16th-century fresco depicting Jesus, the Virgin Mary and Saints Paulinus, Luke, Mark and Matthew.

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Extra-mural studies: why students should not look away from uncomfortable art

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The case of George Washington high school in San Francisco is mirrored by the covering of harsh images in Harlem. But such images must be seen

Even urging a “truer history”, Paloma Flores, a member of California’s Pitt River tribe, questions the validity of showing an image of a murdered Native American. She’s disturbed by the message of a mural at George Washington high school in San Francisco, where she works, that has been in place for 84 years.

Related: A school's mural removal: should kids be shielded from brutal US history?

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