News

The artist’s brash riffs on the news have whipped up a frenzy of interest within the cryptocurrency scene.

A solar power plant currently in the works near Overton, Nevada, could occlude views surrounding Michael Heizer’s massive 1969 Land art work Double Negative, The Art Newspaper reports. Visitors to the

The Simpsons, Snoopy and the Smurfs are all here in a survey of the artist Brian Donnelly’s 25-year career.

Hanne Tierney has made her FiveMyles gallery in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, both a beacon and an anchor for the neighborhood.

Organised by the Mason Hut Foundation, the Frank Hurley photo awards were set up to honour the adventurous spirit of the Australian photographer James (Frank) Francis Hurley. The 2020 awards attracted more than 1,200 entries from 26 countries, with Australian photographers winning four of the five categories

• Rare pink flannel flowers bloom in Australia – in pictures

Continue reading...

Wire taps and surveillance were everyday facts of life for Sam Goldbloom and his family. Now, his daughter reimagines that period of their lives in a major survey exhibition

From an early age, Ruth Maddison knew her father, Sam Goldbloom, was being watched. “He used to tell us not to worry about the men sitting in the car in front of the house … we were aware the clicks on the phone meant ‘they’ were listening too,” the award-winning Melbourne-born photographer says.

“They” were the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation. In the 1940s, Goldbloom’s anti-fascist ideals drew Asio’s attention. He later joined the Communist party before becoming a major player in the World Peace Council. These associations made him a person of interest for more than 30 years.

Continue reading...

National arts nonprofit Creative Capital has announced that Christine Kuan will be assuming the dual roles of president and director of the organization. Kuan, who is currently CEO and director of

The New Britain Museum of American Art is pleased to present “Helen Frankenthaler: Late Works, 1990–2003,” on view through May 23. The first museum presentation dedicated to the exploration of works

The New York State comptroller’s office details the effects of the pandemic’s devastation and says a full recovery would be made only with government assistance.

“Threads,” a group show of textile art; Peter Sacks’s imposing “Republic”; Kazuko Miyamoto’s sculptures; and “K as in Knight”explores ambiguity.

The architect David Adjaye spurred a painstaking re-creation of a doomed artwork for its new home — and added a homage to the union’s place in social justice history.

Artist who played a key role in the emergence of a new kind of British conceptualism

One day in 1968, the American critic Clement Greenberg walked into an abandoned brewery in south London. This was the Stockwell Depot, taken over as artists’ studios the year before and already gaining a reputation internationally.

One of the Depot’s first residents, a 23-year-old sculptor named Gerard Hemsworth, newly graduated from St Martin’s School of Art (now Central Saint Martins), was out teaching that day. “But I did set up some work in my studio, in the hope that Greenberg would go in,” he said. That evening, he asked a friend how the great man had taken to his art. “He sort of hummed and hawed, so I said, ‘Tell me exactly how long Greenberg spent’,” recalled Hemsworth, who has died of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease aged 75. “He said, ‘Well, as long as it takes to walk into a studio and walk out again’.” Hoping to soften the blow, the friend added: “Yeah, Greenberg has got a trained eye.” “And I,” said Hemsworth, “thought, ‘fuck off’.”

Continue reading...

‘If you’re standing still on a New York street, you’re either lost or crazy. But on the shores of this lake, I saw real stillness for the first time’

I thought I knew Prospect Park. Living in Brooklyn, I had visited many times. It was always nice there but I never thought much about it, nor was it so interesting to me photographically. Then, one early summer evening in 2011, a friend invited me to join her on a boat ride on the lake for her birthday. I had no idea there was a lake, and I remember being disoriented and getting lost trying to find it. Finally on that boat, floating slowly through the dusk, what I saw was so good I had to pinch myself.

In New York, if you’re standing still on the street, you’re either lost or crazy. Maybe you’re waiting for someone, but even then you’re pacing. On that lake was the first time I’d seen real stillness in New York. It felt as if someone had stopped the clock. I realised the Long Meadow area of the park where I’d always gone was just one section – the homogenous, wealthier corner. But here at the lake was the world. On the shores was every kind of person – a patchwork of cultures, ethnicities and religions. All these different people were there, all perfectly equal, all perfectly at ease.

Continue reading...

Scène de rue à Montmartre has been part of same French family’s private collection for more than a century

A major Paris work by Vincent van Gogh that has been part of the same French family’s private collection for more than a century is to go on public display for the first time since it was painted in the spring of 1887.

Scène de rue à Montmartre is part of a very rare series depicting the celebrated Moulin de la Galette, on the hilltop overlooking the capital, painted during the two years the Dutch artist spent sharing an apartment with his brother Theo on rue Lepic.

Continue reading...

With public art collections closed we are bringing the art to you, exploring highlights and hidden gems from across the country in partnership with Art UK. Today’s pick: Bristol’s I Was There IV by Barbara Walker

A figurative portrait of a young Black man in a soldier’s uniform made in ink on tracing paper has been laid on to an archive photograph of a young white man, also in uniform. It’s the kind of photo probably made to send home – he stands in front of an alpine landscape, most likely a studio backdrop. The men look brave but vulnerable; we have become increasingly familiar with such images in these past years that have marked the centenary of the first world war.

Continue reading...

Collezione Maramotti, in collaboration with Museo Casa Mollino, is presenting “Mollino/Insides”, an exhibition that brings together paintings by Enoc Perez and photographs by Brigitte Schindler and

Leon Polk Smith, one of the most significant American artists of the 20th century, has been studied and celebrated through major exhibitions, publications, and scholarship over many years—and yet, a

It takes more than a few rolls of bubble wrap to safely transport 61 priceless masterpieces to Australia during a pandemic

Over the past two months, a discreet convoy of unmarked trucks has been traversing the 290km stretch of the Hume Highway between Sydney and Canberra.

They probably had an Australian federal police escort, but we can’t say for sure. The security arrangements for the transportation of the most priceless collection of artworks to reach Australian shores has been cloaked in secrecy.

Continue reading...

“We don’t know how long this period of extreme difficulty will continue,” the museum’s director, Adam Weinberg, said in an email to staff.

Six hundred advocates have banded together under the aegis of the American Alliance of Museums (AAM) to seek financial relief from the US government for the country’s ailing arts institutions, The Art

MARION VON OSTEN was a warmhearted punk who took punk’s contrarian and collaborative ethos to unexplored domains. She made it impossible to identify her role in any production process. If you wanted

For “Crystal Clear”—a group show inspired by philosophers Bruno Latour and Byung-Chul Han’s writings on the “climatic regime” and the false ideals of transparency, respectively—Elena Sorokina, curating

How should we memorialize those who’ve died from Covid-19? In Italy and Britain, artists and architects are beginning to come up with answers.

From cholera to AIDS, epidemics have given rise to landmarks around the world, be they sculptures, churches or feats of engineering. In this dire moment, their histories resonate.

Nick Meyer’s poetic images of his hometown in Massachusetts depict a crumbling waste land that remains full of charming idiosyncrasies

Continue reading...

Robert Blomfield’s stunning pictures of the Scottish capital were locked away for decades. Now his family want to share his talent with the world

Continue reading...

With public art collections closed we are bringing the art to you, exploring highlights and hidden gems from across the country in partnership with Art UK. Today’s pick: Stuart Williamson’s statue of Keats in London

The Romantic poet John Keats died 200 years ago today at the young age of 25. He has long since been celebrated for works such as Ode to a Nightingale and To Autumn. Less well known, perhaps, are the years he spent as trainee doctor before giving up medicine to focus intensively on poetry.

This statue of Keats sits in an alcove outside Guy’s hospital because he worked and studied there. He was only 14 (as was the norm in the early 19th century) when he was first apprenticed to a suburban apothecary, the equivalent of a GP. He later moved to Guy’s to undertake further training under the legendary surgeon Astley Cooper.

Continue reading...

Museums in the UK can begin reopening May 17 following Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s lockdown guide, with galleries beginning to reopen more than a month earlier, on April 12, The Art Newspaper reports.

Museums in England can begin reopening May 17 following Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s lockdown guide, with galleries beginning to reopen more than a month earlier, on April 12, The Art Newspaper reports.

Ai Weiwei and other artists say the investor Leon Black should step down as MoMA’s chairman amid revelations that he paid $158 million to Jeffrey Epstein.

Sicilian sculptor Arturo Di Modica died on February 19 in his hometown of Vittoria, Italy, at the age of eighty, following a years-long battle with cancer, his dealer Jacob Harmer confirmed. Di Modica,

Trevor Dannatt’s staircase at the Royal Festival Hall made a strong impression on Jeremy Lowe as a young architecture student, while John Page remembers a useful aspect of the banisters

How right you were to accompany Elain Harwood’s fine tribute to Trevor Dannatt (Obituaries, 19 February) with a good picture of the stairs in the Royal Festival Hall. As an architecture student 70 years ago, the experience of walking up these stairs expressed for me then the values I was trying to include in my own designs – social inclusivity, robust structure, high-quality materials, functional and elegant shaping of every part. They met the Vitruvian ideal: commodity, firmness and delight. Throughout my working life as an architect in public service, these stairs were a constant standard and an inspiration.
Jeremy Lowe
Cardiff

• I was surprised to read in the obituary of Trevor Dannatt that he thought the groove in his banisters for the Royal Festival Hall was to accommodate one’s thumb. I was lucky to be taken to the Robert Mayer concerts on Saturday mornings in the early 60s, when the wonderful building was still strikingly new and many fellow concertgoers knew they were for sliding a roll of Polos down. Spangles did not work.
John Page
London

Continue reading...

Two-metre-long painting in Western Australia dated by analysing wasp nests and is the oldest work still in its original place

Scientists have confirmed that a painting of a kangaroo in a sandstone rock shelter in Western Australia’s remote Kimberley region is about 17,300 years old, making it the oldest known rock art in Australia.

The faded image, which is about two metres long, was dated using a radiocarbon technique that analysed wasp nests that were underneath and on top of the ochre-based paint.

Continue reading...

Assembled by the late collector Howard Karshan, the ‘revelatory’ collection is hailed as important beyond its size

A collection of modern drawings that the head of London’s Courtauld Gallery says push the boundaries of what the art form can be has been gifted to the gallery.

It said the set of 25 works by artists including Cézanne, Kandinsky and Klee was one of the most significant gifts of art it had received in a generation. They were assembled by the collector Howard Karshan, who died in 2017, and presented in his memory by his wife, Linda, an artist herself.

Continue reading...

Inside an early Art Deco building, the designer Martin Brûlé has created an understated homage to New York’s vibrant past — and his own pioneering vision.

Free speech protests have continued since the jailing of musician Pablo Hasél last week for exalting terrorism in his lyrics

• Angry words: rapper’s jailing exposes Spain’s free speech faultlines

Continue reading...

My brother, Robert Blomfield, who has died aged 82, was a family doctor who practised in Wrexham then Hebden Bridge. The website robertblomfield.co.uk shows that he was also an outstanding photographer.

Around the age of 13, Robert started using his father’s Leica and Contax cameras. He soon mastered them, showing a natural flair for photography, spending many hours coaxing prints from special paper immersed in bowls of chemicals under the filtered light of his father’s makeshift darkroom. Later, at Repton school in Derbyshire, the headteacher, recognising his talent, gave him free rein; from then on he was rarely seen without a camera.

Continue reading...

With public art collections closed we are bringing the art to you, exploring highlights from across the country in partnership with Art UK. Today’s pick: Joan Eardley’s Two Children, in Glasgow’s Kelvingrove Gallery

Two Children carries immense poignancy. It was left unfinished on the easel of Glasgow artist Joan Eardley when she died of breast cancer in 1963 aged 42. As a female artist in postwar Britain, a lesbian who didn’t conform to gender norms, her premature death came just when she was breaking through into the London art scene with an exhibition and a single-artist show, and the year she had finally been made a full member of the Royal Scottish Academy.

A huge painting, Two Children is a striking example of the painterly energy of Eardley’s mature work, firmly grounded in place. From 1950, she had split her time between two very different locations, the picturesque north-east coastal village of Catterline and poverty-stricken Townhead in the East End of Glasgow whose tenement slums were facing imminent demolition.

Continue reading...

As the Mexican city has grown into a creative epicenter, architects have built on the legacy of Luis Barragán, constructing residences that encourage introspection.

Inscription on painting that has been subject of debate has been reattributed to the artist himself

It is an image that has intrigued the art world for more than a century and become synonymous with existential angst, and recently inspired its own emoji, but now some graffiti has added a new layer to the story of Edvard Munch’s most iconic painting, The Scream.

A tiny pencil inscription in the top left corner of one of the four versions of the painting, which reads, “Can only have been painted by a madman”, has been the subject of debate over who wrote it – it was originally thought to be by Munch, but was later attributed to a vandal – but new analysis by experts at the National Museum of Norway suggests it is indeed in the hand of the artist.

Continue reading...

The authorship of the tiny inscription, “Could only have been painted by a madman,” was disputed. Curators in Oslo say the artist definitely wrote it himself. (But why?)

It began with one dot. Then it grew to nearly half a million. A graphic on Sunday’s front page depicts the totality of Covid’s devastation in the country.

The postponement last year of an exhibition of the artist’s work led to a fraught debate over race and culture. His daughter Musa Mayer fears his complex images are being misrepresented

Musa Mayer has been “holed up” in Woodstock, upstate New York, which she describes as “a liberal community in the midst of Trump land”, since the beginning of lockdown in March of last year. She is staying in a house she inherited from her parents and nearby is a building that was once the art studio of her father, Philip Guston. It is now the Guston Foundation, which she established in 2013 to promote his work and further his legacy. Of late, she has had her hands full.

Last September Mayer answered a call from Matthew Teitelbaum, the director of the Museum of Fine Art in Boston, one of four galleries (including Tate Modern in London) that had agreed to host Philip Guston Now, a much anticipated touring retrospective of her father’s work. It had been scheduled to open in Washington DC in July, but had been pushed back to 2021 by the pandemic. Now, to Mayer’s astonishment, Teitelbaum informed her that he and the other three museum directors had decided to postpone the exhibition until 2024. (They have since announced it will go ahead from May 2022.)

Continue reading...

The man who helped revitalise New York with a linear park on a disused elevated railway hopes to do the same for the UK capital

New York was revitalised by the High Line, a ribbon of parkland floating above Manhattan on a disused elevated railway that has become one of the city’s biggest tourist attractions.

Now the High Line’s designer hopes to give London its own green thread, after being chosen to create the Camden Highline.

Continue reading...

Victoria Miro, London; available online
Cobalt, indigo, ultramarine; the colour of sadness and a summer’s day… in this uplifting virtual show, works by 19 artists, including Paula Rego, Chris Ofili and Chantal Joffe, have one thing in common

Ancient Greek has no word for blue. Latin comes closer, with the etymology of our modern term cerulean, though the relationship between hue and word is precarious. Certain Celtic languages make no verbal distinction between blue and green, and the Himba people of Namibia apparently do not perceive one at all. What colour is blue?

Artists, who might be expected to have an open-minded attitude, can be oddly dogmatic. For Renaissance painters, the Virgin’s robes are ultramarine. Picasso’s Prussian is the colour of grief, while for Kandinsky pale blue is the transcendent infinity of heaven.

Continue reading...

Despite the inanity and cost of the ‘Boris burrow’, the prime minister is wedded to plans for a tunnel under the Irish Sea

Beware the combination of Boris Johnson, significant bodies of water, and expensive engineering. He seems to find something so inflaming about a virgin stretch of river or sea that he has to transfix it with steel and concrete. As mayor of London, he backed a barely-used cable car over the Thames, the notorious failure of the garden bridge and “Boris Island”, which was an abandoned plan to relocate London’s main airport to the Thames estuary. Now he’s pushing the “Boris burrow”, a tunnel connecting Scotland to Northern Ireland. This, to paraphrase the Daily Telegraph’s report on the project, would be one in the eye for the meddling Brussels bureaucrats who have imposed checks on trade across the Irish Sea.

The head spins at the inanity of this idea, that the best way to address a botched trade deal is to tip billions of pounds into a hole in the ground, one on which those cunning Eurocrats could presumably also impose checks. And which would look like a foolish call on the United Kingdom’s exchequer should Scotland become independent. The great architect Cedric Price was fond of pointing out – contrary to the assumption of many of his peers – that building something was not always a necessary or useful response to problems in life. His ghost should have a word with the prime minister.

Continue reading...

€47m building will feature a church, a mosque and a synagogue all linked to a central meeting space

On the site of a church torn down by East Germany’s communist rulers, a new place of worship is set to rise that will bring Christians, Jews and Muslims under one roof – and it has already been dubbed a “churmosquagogue”.

The foundation stone of the House of One in Berlin will be laid at a ceremony on 27 May, marking the end of 10 years of planning and the beginning of an estimated four years of construction, and symbolising a new venture in interfaith cooperation and dialogue. The €47m building, designed by Berlin architects Kuehn Malvezzi, will incorporate a church, a mosque and a synagogue linked to a central meeting space. People of other faiths and denominations, and those of no faith, will be invited to events and discussions in the large hall.

Continue reading...

After decades of off-the-shelf design, Australian playgrounds are becoming more sophisticated, more nature-based and more appealing to adults

There is something about the blinding whiteness of Nubo, an indoor play space in Sydney, that feels transgressive. The curved white walls. The white metal hot air balloon suspended above the miniature circular amphitheatre of a library. The light wood stairs winding around to a white climbing frame above a slide to an all-blue ball pit. This is nothing like the playgrounds of my childhood.

“When I was growing up I would be playing on the street with the neighbourhood kids,” says Nubo founder Mollie Li. “We didn’t have fancy facilities to play with. We played with what we had on hand.

Continue reading...

More than nine thousand Cubans have signed a Change.org petition calling for the resignation of the country’s culture minister, Alpidio Alonso, who on January 27 was one of a number of government