Literary and artistic movement enjoying another golden age, with international events and exhibitions
A century ago in the ateliers of Montparnasse in Paris, surrealism was born from the gloom of the first world war that had engulfed and devastated Europe.
The cultural movement led by the French writer and poet André Breton would give rise to artists of international renown including Max Ernst, Joan Miró, René Magritte, Yves Tanguy, and Salvador Dalí.
Continue reading...Priceless treasures stolen by the French army over a century ago have finally been returned to the African nation. Our writer joins the emotional celebrations
At first glance, it seems to be just another day in Cotonou, Benin’s largest city. Motorbike-taxis are everywhere, filling the streets of the country’s economic capital with dust and noise. But inside the swanky presidential palace, something seismic is talking place: over a century after they were looted by the French army, 26 treasures that once belonged to the nation have gone on display to the public.
Art of Benin Yesterday and Today is more than just a stunning show of these ancient works, though. It segues from the looted 19th-century artefacts to work by 34 of the country’s contemporary artists. “This is a form of regained dignity,” says local art historian Didier Houénoudé, “and the culmination of a long fight started by African countries shortly before independence.”
Continue reading...Picture of Isabella Clara Eugenia, Infanta of Spain, is likely to be by Sir Anthony van Dyck, finds Courtauld’s report
As a leading art historian, Christopher Wright has uncovered several old master paintings in public and private collections over five decades. Now he has discovered that a copy of a painting by Sir Anthony van Dyck, which he bought for himself for £65 in 1970, may actually be an original by the 17th-century Flemish court painter to King Charles I.
“I bought it from a jobbing dealer in west London,” he said. “I was buying it as a copy, as an art historian. I took no notice of it, in a strange way. The syndrome is the cobbler’s children are the worst shod. So the art historian’s collection is the least looked at.” Wright estimated the painting might be worth around £40,000, although some Van Dycks have fetched seven-figure sums.
Continue reading...Housed in a custom space made from cast-offs, the Japanese artist’s cartoon girls blend fairytale lore with 60s-inspired protest, and have become more introspective though no less impressively wrought in cardboard and wood
“Stop the bombs” reads the angry red writing in the storm cloud thought bubble above the little girl in a pale blue dress. Like all the children in the Japanese artist Yoshitomo Nara’s paintings, she has puppydog eyes and a toddler’s outsized head, yet her posture is pure bruiser. There are tiny animal fangs at the corners of her mouth. Of the paintings, drawings and sculptures in Nara’s latest exhibition, she is the closest to the pint-sized characters with big dark feelings that he began making in the 1990s, some of contemporary art’s most recognisable creations.
Those early works, where tots sweetly clutched knives or took fag breaks, blended Japanese kawaii – cuteness – with mischief and menace. Partly thanks to Nara’s alignment with the pop art titan Takashi Murakami’s Superflat movement, he reached a global art audience and a wider public. Both artists mined the Japanese weakness for baby-faced adorableness, an infantilising that Murakami linked to the trauma of Hiroshima. Yet where Murakami’s trademark smiley acid-faced flowers and phallic mushrooms channel the surface sheen of a depthless mass-produced world of cartoons and commerce, Nara’s appeal has always been universal human emotion. “My works’ roots are my childhood, not pop culture,” he explains. “Around me there were orchards, sheep and horses; I read fairytales rather than comics.”
Continue reading...Rocco Ritchie, 21, has been selling his paintings for up to five figures under the mysterious pseudonym Rhed
He is a mysterious, up-and-coming artist whose work has been championed by the likes of Madonna and sells for up to five figures.
But there were raised eyebrows when it was revealed that “Rhed” was none other than the singer’s eldest son, Rocco Ritchie.
Continue reading...Auction house credits younger, tech-savvy collectors for highest annual sales in its 277-year history
Sotheby’s has sold a record $7.3bn (£5.5bn) worth of art and other collectibles so far this year – the most in its 277-year history.
The auction house said on Wednesday that an “influx of younger, tech-savvy collectors” buying luxury items such as handbags, jewellery, wine and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) during the pandemic had helped lift sales to the record high.
Continue reading...From railway signs to perfume bottles to Taiwan’s official passport stamp, the artist is giving ancient lettering a modern twist. How will her work go down at Hong Kong’s controversial new M+ gallery?
The most striking thing about Tong Yang-tze, sitting inside her modest Taipei studio residence, is her confidence, and the sense that she’s had it all along. Now in her late 70s and considered one of Taiwan’s foremost calligraphers and artists, Tong grins and jokes over cups of green tea and local sweets, belying her fame and cultural significance. “Of course I’m good!” she laughs at one point, recalling an offer early in her career from her former university to teach. “I said no, I don’t want a teaching job. At that time, everybody needed a job but I wanted to be an artist. No regrets.”
Last week Tong’s calligraphy with a modern art twist greeted visitors to the hotly anticipated M+ museum in Hong Kong, an ambitious decade-long project to create what has been dubbed Asia’s Tate Modern. The 33-gallery space, in a harbourside building designed by “starchitects” Herzog & de Meuron in collaboration with TFP Farrells and Arup, opened last week.
Continue reading...In this extract from a book compiling artworks made by Donwood and Yorke for Radiohead, the pair discuss how alienation with Cool Britannia saw them retreat into landscapes, labyrinths and inadvertently inventing Twitter
Stanley Donwood I can’t believe the innocent world we lived in when we were making this work. It was before 9/11, before the “war on terror”, before the conjoining of the police and the military – all of the social changes that have led towards the position we now find ourselves in. It wasn’t possible to know what was going on around the world in the same way that it is now, when news has become a sort of surrogate entertainment.
Thom Yorke Everybody involved felt like we’d been in some weird circus for quite a while, after OK Computer. Personally, I mentally completely crashed, as did Stan. We all did, in a way. Rather than immersing ourselves in this congratulatory atmosphere around us, we felt the total opposite. There was this fierce desire to be totally on the outside of everything that was going on, and a fierce anger, and suspicion. And that permeated everything. It was completely out of proportion, deeply unhealthy – but that’s where we were at.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.”
Continue reading...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).
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...Rijksmuseum says change in focus prompted by renewed interest in wake of Black Lives Matter
The two earliest portraits of men of African descent in the history of European art are being exhibited together for the first time in their 500-year history, reflecting a change of focus championed by the Black Lives Matter movement, curators at the Rijksmuseum have said.
Among more than 100 portraits by Renaissance artists being showcased by the museum in Amsterdam from Tuesday are Albrecht Dürer’s 1508 sketch, discovered in the German painter’s workshop at the time of his death, and Jan Jansz Mostaert’s portrait, dating from about 1525.
Continue reading...Is the $450m Salvator Mundi a fake? This film – featuring tearful sycophants, sneering experts, dodgy dealers and a secretive superyacht – may finally settle the great da Vinci controversy
It is almost exactly 10 years since Salvator Mundi was unveiled, this “lost Leonardo” instantly triggering astonishment around the world. Since those giddy days, the work has had a turbulent time. As well as becoming the most expensive painting in history, going for $450m (£326m) at auction, Salvator Mundi was denounced by many as a fake and subsequently vanished from view. The painting is now the subject of The Lost Leonardo, a documentary by Andreas Koefoed that opens in cinemas this week.
“I would be surprised,” says Luke Syson, “if I went to see this documentary.” Syson is the curator who, back in 2011, first displayed The Saviour of the World, as its title translates, at the National Gallery’s Leonardo da Vinci blockbuster. Syson is probably making a wise choice. He’s in the film and the way he clams up mid-interview makes him look like the archetypal embarrassed expert caught out on screen.
Continue reading...Paintings commissioned by East India Company in 18th and 19th century up for sale at Sotheby’s
Remarkable paintings of the flora and fauna of India, including a work once owned by Jackie Kennedy Onassis depicting a stork eating a snail, are to go on sale in the first auction dedicated to Company School art.
Sotheby’s has announced details of a sale that shines light on overlooked Indian artists today regarded as forgotten masters.
Continue reading...Study says pigments on cave stalagmites were applied through ‘splattering and blowing’ more than 60,000 years ago
Neanderthals, long perceived to have been unsophisticated and brutish, really did paint stalagmites in a Spanish cave more than 60,000 years ago, according to a study published on Monday.
The issue had roiled the world of paleoarchaeology ever since the publication of a 2018 paper attributing red ocher pigment found on the stalagmitic dome of Cueva de Ardales to our extinct “cousin” species.
Continue reading...Agustín Ibarrola’s 1977 version was painted as part of campaign to get the original returned from New York
The grief-snapped mother is still there, cradling her dead child 84 years on, as is the fallen soldier with his stigmata and the horse with its silent screams.
However, the Guernica now on its way to a museum in the Basque country is not Pablo Picasso’s monochrome howl of anti-fascist fury but a retelling of the work intended to help bring the original to the market town whose agonies beneath waves of German and Italian bombers inspired its creation – and to denounce the subsequent horrors of the Franco dictatorship.
Continue reading...