News
Operation combining art and engineering on a massive scale fulfils dream of late artist couple
Shortly after the sun rose over central Paris, the first of the orange-clad rope technicians hopped over the top of the Arc de Triomphe and began to abseil down the landmark unrolling a swathe of silvery blue fabric that shimmered in the early light.
Someone clapped as the first abseiler went over the top – 50 metres from the ground – but most in the crowd of onlookers just held their breath. It was a slow and meticulous operation, requiring them to stop make adjustments to the folds in the material every few metres while avoiding touching the arch itself.
Continue reading...A look back at the milestones in the 18-year-old’s meteoric rise in tennis
Continue reading...Richard Groom’s 26-tonne buoyant artwork is back in the water following restoration project
Bobbing in the water in the Canting Basin, by the shiny crescent of the Glasgow Science Centre, the Floating Head remains impassive as a seagull lands on its broad forehead.
The seven-metre-long, 26-tonne buoyant sculpture could be a refugee from Easter Island, brought to the Clyde by the tide, only to have a bird peck at the moss covering its cheek and chin like a lopsided beard.
Continue reading...Hayward Gallery, London
Lisa Brice, Rose Wylie and Oscar Murillo are among the 31 UK-based artists united in this superb survey of painting’s deep connection to our times
A stunning image opens this show: of a small woman balancing on a towering stool to paint a substantial canvas on the wall. Look twice and you see that she is working on a picture of herself, larger than life and clearly made without any use of a mirror. Her shadow on the rear wall is larger still, and so gracefully painted by the South African artist Lisa Brice as to amount to a third portrait of this woman, namely the Dutch painter Charley Toorop (1891-1955), whose art has only recently received its due.
Brice’s triple portrait of Toorop, painted in hazy monotones, literally raises her up, enlarging upon her gifts, her self-knowledge and struggle. It is a highly intelligent hymn of praise, a spellbinding commemoration.
Continue reading...Novelist campaigns for statue of terrier experimented on by scientists to regain its place in a London park
An animal in peril can inflame British public opinion like nothing else. Nearly 120 years ago, the fate of one small brown dog caused rioting in the streets of London, to say nothing of the protest marches to Trafalgar Square and questions asked in parliament.
Now the astonishing, little-known story – involving anti-vivisectionist campaigners, an eminent doctor, a legal battle and a controversial memorial statue in a park – is the subject of a new book and of a fresh campaign to honour the lowly terrier at the heart of it all.
Continue reading...Wintringham primary academy, St Neots
You won’t find any little rows of government-sanctioned classroom cells at this new Cambridgeshire primary school, whose bright, timber-built design lets the outdoors in
It shouldn’t be controversial that schools should be well designed: that the spaces where much of everyone’s childhoods are spent should, as a minimum, be well lit, well proportioned and well planned; that there should be signs of care and glimmers of human spirit in their design and construction; that there might be reminders of nature in the materials and the views out. Even if narrow educational outcomes are your only concern, there’s evidence that these are helped by the quality of school environments.
This point should not be lost, in particular, on a government whose members, in many cases, experienced the handsome architecture of private schools and Oxbridge colleges. But lost it is. Ever since 2014, when Michael Gove was secretary of state for education, new school buildings have been subject to functionalist documents called Building Bulletins. These state, with as much aspiration and joy-in-learning as the instructions for a dishwasher, exactly how much floorspace is allotted per child, how much storage and other ancillary space, and what are the optimal layouts of zones.
Continue reading...Cartoonist Martin Rowson captured the giants of Westminster as they dined in the famous London restaurant. Now the 63 sketches that once adorned its walls are heading to the National Portrait Gallery
For nearly two decades a series of irreverent political cartoons graced an entire wall of the celebrated Gay Hussar restaurant in London’s Soho – a snapshot of Westminster life that delighted tourists and regulars alike.
From Michael Foot’s distinctive white tresses to a glowering Alastair Campbell, the 63 caricatures of leading political figures drawn over lunch are now to be shared with a wider audience, thanks to a joint gift to the National Portrait Gallery by their creator Martin Rowson and Corus Hotels, which ran the Soho establishment until its closure in June 2018. A new restaurant opened on the site in September 2020.
Continue reading...British photographer Bob Watkins captures a little moment of intimacy in the heat and noise of the Big Apple
Bob Watkins took this photograph of a couple in New York on his first visit to the city from England in August 1980. In the years before Mayor Giuliani’s zero-tolerance crackdown on crime, and the advance of gentrification, the city was a place of maximum tolerance, where anything could happen at any moment. For Watkins, who had specialised in photographing the ironies of Englishness and its traditions, this was both a challenge and a liberation.
That summer, he recalls, in a monograph of his pictures from that time, “both the city and myself were out of money and there was a sense of danger on every corner. Emerging from the subway on to Fifth Avenue for the first time I was assaulted by the humidity, stench and magnitude of that canyon. It was like stepping into Springsteen’s Born to Run album. Garbage and broken people filled the streets as I walked the same sidewalks as my photographic heroes and drank Dr Pepper to replace the sweat.” There were moments where the energy of the streets coalesced – “Democratic Convention rallies and Iranian hostage demonstrations added extra visual opportunities,” Watkins recalls, but it was the unpredictability of those streets that he remembers most clearly.
Continue reading...Few buildings illustrated architecture’s power to be different things to different people at different times than the twin towers of the World Trade Center. To their architect, Minoru Yamasaki, they were “a living symbol of man’s dedication to world peace”. The terrorists who destroyed them made them symbols of conflict. To a generation of New Yorkers, they represented the faceless civic-corporate bodies who razed a thriving and diverse district called Radio Row in order to build the towers. When I studied architecture, they typified vacuous modernism – the “largest radiators in the world”, said one of my tutors.
Yet the Japanese-American Yamasaki was dismissed by his contemporaries for being “dainty”, “prissy”, “epicene”, “ballet school”, for example, on account of the slender gothic-looking arcades that ran around the bases of the towers. Now, looking at the old images republished with the 20th anniversary of 9/11, the towers look stately and graceful, magically capturing the changing light, serene counterparts to the frenetic city stretched out beneath them. Not to mention pillars of the world that changed for ever with their collapse.
Continue reading...‘It’s just one of those things,’ says the British celebrity snapper, 83, who is still busy with new work
David Bailey has revealed he has dementia, a life-limiting condition the British photographer described as a bore.
Speaking to the Times, Bailey, 83, said: “I’ve got vascular dementia. I was diagnosed about three years ago.
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The Taliban in Kabul, the removal of the statue of Robert E Lee in Virginia, Emma Raducanu in the US Open and the 20th anniversary of the September 11 attacks – the most striking images from around the world this week
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Chinese artist Cao Fei, whose work was described as gripping and prescient, wins one of the most prestigious prizes in photography
An artist who explores the modern obsession with technology has won one of the most prestigious prizes in photography, with judges saying her work is a perfect fit for a world adjusting to the Covid-19 pandemic.
The Chinese artist Cao Fei was awarded the £30,000 Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation prize 2021 at the Photographer’s Gallery in London. The judges called her work, which was made before the pandemic, “gripping and prescient”.
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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.
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A cross between a Disneyland castle and a chilling concrete block, the Humboldt Forum is set to teach visitors about Germany’s colonial era. But is the past being examined – or exalted?
A museum gift shop has never been such an ideological battleground. At one end of the store in Berlin’s new Humboldt Forum is a display of souvenirs adorned with the gilded silhouette of the Stadtschloss, the city’s former royal palace, which was bombed to pieces in the second world war. Racks of silk scarves and Christmas baubles hang above rows of candles in regal colours, emblazoned with an image of the stately Prussian pile.
At the other end of the shop is a rival range of merchandise, themed around the former East German parliament and leisure centre, the Palast der Republik, which was triumphantly built on top of the ruins of the palace in the 1970s. With its sharp white marble walls, bronze-mirrored windows and space-age chandeliers, it was designed to showcase the wonders of socialism. You can buy keyrings and enamel mugs in a retro Soviet style, as well as a model kit of the building in Formo, the East German version of Lego, for €250.
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Marguerite Bornhauser uses vivid colours, leafy shadows and ultra-obscure printing techniques to create her brave new worlds
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Images taken on Christmas Day 1977 include punk band dancing to Boney M and having a food fight
If the Sex Pistols look like they are having fun in these unseen Christmas Day 1977 photographs, it could be down to their afternoon involving a children’s party, food fights and getting down to Boney M.
The images will go on display at Photo London, the first photography fair to take place physically anywhere in the world since the pandemic started.
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‘A cop asked me: “How can you take photographs?” I told him: “I have to document this. It’s history”’
I was asleep when the first plane hit. At the time, I lived just four blocks from the World Trade Center, right next to a hospital, a fire station and the HQ of the New York police. The sirens woke me up. They were nonstop. I turned on the television and saw one of the towers on fire. As I watched the second plane hit the south tower on TV, I also heard it because I lived so close.
I was working for Associated Press (AP) as a photo editor. I knew, as their closest staff member, that I should go out and document it. I got dressed, threw some film into my camera bag, and ran out to the World Trade Center. A lot of photography is like muscle memory. Even in a situation like this, your body knows exactly what to do. I remember a cop asking me: “How can you take photographs?” I told him: “I have to document this. It’s history.”
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The Mexican artist Hugo Huerta Marin spent seven years photographing and interviewing creative women who span disciplines, nationalities and generations. These candid portraits and insights into the work of women as diverse as Tracey Emin, FKA twigs and Agnès Varda, are published in Portrait of an Artist: Conversations With Trailblazing Creative Women by Prestel
Continue reading...Featuring Malcolm X, Ronald McDonald and a turtleneck-wearing demon, Photo London returns in style with 88 galleries from 15 countries
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