News
New exhibition at Compton Verney in Warwickshire will show Masterji’s photographs of city’s south Asian community
A photographer who received critical acclaim in his 90s for his work documenting the lives of south Asian immigrants over more than half a century is the subject of a new exhibition opening in February.
Maganbhai Patel, known as Masterji, died 15 months after his first solo show of portraits of people living in the West Midlands from the 1950s until the 2000s. The recognition of his work at the end of his life brought him “quiet happiness”, said his daughter, Tarla Patel.
Continue reading...Victoria and Albert Museum, London; virtual tour online
Charred aftermaths from the Amazon to Australia loom large in the latest global award for photography and sustainability
Photo-reportage is said to have begun with a fire – specifically the great fire of Hamburg in 1842. German photographers Hermann Biow and Carl Ferdinand Stelzner hauled their cameras up to the top of a high building to capture the devastation below. The equipment weighed as much they did and the daguerreotype process was too slow to catch the flames in action. But their images of burnt-out buildings were seen around the world: epochal news photography.
Fire is easy to start but historically hard to depict. Painting hardly manages it at all without freezing the flames, as it were. Of course there are exceptions – Turner’s wild watercolours of the Houses of Parliament burning down, dashed off in the scorching heat of the moment from a boat on the Thames – but even the two-dimensional medium of photography has some trouble recording fire’s spectacular speed, spread and volatility. Moving images generally hold the main advantage.
Continue reading...The Matt Black Barn is a “forklift-friendly” live-work space belonging to the renowned British sculptors, Laura Ford and Andrew Sabin. It sits between the villages of Emsworth and Bosham, just north of Chichester harbour. “To the south are trees, a field or two and then the sea,” explains Sabin. “To the north, some fields and then the South Downs.” It is a world apart from their previous live-work space – a converted pianola factory in Kentish Town, London.
Before the Matt Black Barn, there was (and still is) the Brown Barn – a beaten-up, 6,000sqft industrial barn that the couple bought in 2014. It served as a vast storage space for their collected works and was conveniently located between their London home and their family-owned holiday home in Selsey. “We just really started to enjoy working there,” recalls Ford. “We worked there more and more in the summer months, and found that it gave us a lot more freedom. We also just enjoyed the bits between work – having a cup of tea outside and looking at the birds. It was this completely different atmosphere.”
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...The freewheeling photographer captures the strangeness of everyday life in the United States
A couple of years ago, Alec Soth, the great road-tripping witness of American life, decided to retrace the path of the most famous funeral procession in his nation’s history: the train journey that carried assassinated President Lincoln’s 6ft 4in corpse from Washington DC to his home town of Springfield, Illinois. The steam-powered cortege was witnessed by millions of Americans, among them the poet Walt Whitman, who was moved to write his elegy, When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d. Soth set out on his journey with a line from Whitman’s poem in his head – “And what shall the pictures be that I hang on the walls, To adorn the burial house of him I love?” – and a notion “to mourn the divisiveness in [contemporary] America”.
Soth made his name as a photographer with Sleeping By the Mississippi, his landmark 2002 journey along the human margins of the storied river. He quickly found the polemical impetus of his Lincoln project too confining. He continued his journey but adopted another more freewheeling line from Whitman instead: “From this hour I ordain myself loos’d of limits and imaginary lines, Going where I list…” He followed his eye, rather than his head.
Continue reading...When studying the different art movements, Argentinian illustrator Juliana Vido became exasperated by the focus on male artists: “They’re always the known faces of art. Women only get recognition after decades of work, often in old age.” This was the spur for her series of illustrations honouring female artists in their studios.
Vido admires all the artists in the series, but admits her favourite is Lee Krasner : “I’m in love with her work, her use of colour and dynamic shapes. During her lifetime, she was in her husband, Jackson Pollock’s, shadow. She’s now getting a lot of recognition; too bad she’s not here to see it.”
Continue reading...The artist’s £3m Cotswolds pile, which has remained empty and unrenovated since 2005, has been described as an ‘eyesore’
When Damien Hirst bought a historic manor in the Cotswolds he had grand plans. The crumbling 19th-century Toddington Manor, which the world’s richest artist bought for £3m in 2005, would be restored to its former glory, turned into his family home and a spectacular gallery for his personal art collection.
But 17 years after its purchase, the property remains uninhabited and covered in scaffolding and tarpaulin. Locals have branded it an “eyesore,” a “white blob” and “a blight on the countryside”.
Continue reading...With pockets of varying depth over the years, our critic has built up a diverse selection of paintings whose value, to her, is in the delight they bestow on the viewer
Some people are art collectors. I’m not one of those. I’m not rich enough and, even if I were, I’m not interested in that kind of acquisition. I’m just someone who likes pictures a lot and who buys as many as I possibly can. Naturally, this depends – mostly – on my funds at any given moment. But not exclusively. When my passion first overcame me, after all, I was about as broke as it was possible for a salaried person to be.
It was 1992, and I was trainee reporter in Glasgow, where I rented one small room, from whose single bed I could see everything I owned, which was mostly a load of letters from my bank informing me that I was overdrawn. I can’t remember whether the idea of travelling to Jura to write about Julie Brook, an artist who was living and working in a cave on the uninhabited side of the island, was my idea or my editor’s but, either way, I was mad keen to do the story, mostly because I knew that it was there that George Orwell wrote 1984. Of my interviewee’s work, I had rather less knowledge. Apparently, she liked to build stone structures on the beach in which she would then set a fire, the idea being that, as the tide came in, it would briefly look as though flames were rising from the sea itself.
Continue reading...Christmas fashion, seasonal drinks and the faces of 2021 – the best photographs commissioned by the Observer in December 2021
Continue reading...The street photographer and highway safety officer on the shot that took two years to get
As director of the Massachusetts Highway Safety Division, Jeff Larason first noticed the two streaks of light from the window of his third-storey office. He would have been preparing for the day, nursing a morning coffee. He would watch as a cross formed on Stuart Street, Boston, at around 8am. It would hold for only a few minutes in the earliest spring weeks. The shape intrigued him, and he recognised its potential; alongside his main job, he had been photographing the streets of Boston for 40 years. Still, it took two years to get this shot.
Larason used his phone, which had a better zoom lens than his usual camera. “It was a lot of waiting, and watching people cross the street,” he recalls. “I didn’t mind. I’ve always been drawn to the way people hold themselves, and the story that tells. Do they have a bounce in their step? How are they holding their shoulders, tipping their head? How have the years of their life weighed on them?” The photo is entirely organic, the three men unaware of the serendipitous moment they’d created together.
Continue reading...Catching wildlife on film has taken our science editor from Shetland to Kazakhstan, but his photograph of a woodpecker in the garden of his London home gave him as big a thrill
Henri Cartier-Bresson had a simple maxim about the craft that he had mastered so completely. “Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst,” he would tell fledgling snappers. And as the years roll on, I have begun to find comfort in his advice. I began wielding a camera a very long time ago and I reckon I am now approaching Cartier-Bresson’s magic quota. By his arithmetic, I will soon step off the lowest rung in the ladder of photography and progress to the next-to-worst ranking. Things can only get better.
And I cannot deny I have taken many badly focused, clumsily framed images in my time. The blurred negatives in my files confirm that sad fact. However, as the years have passed, I have also managed a few decent photographs that have brought me a sense of fulfilment and, occasionally, the satisfaction of seeing my efforts in print. Mastering an acceptable image is a pleasing business, I have found.
Continue reading...Whether it’s Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest, a comprehensive show of printmaking or the debut album by Yard Act, our critics have your plans for the week covered
Licorice Pizza
Out now
Set in the San Fernando valley in the 1970s, Licorice Pizza (above) finds American director Paul Thomas Anderson (Phantom Thread, There Will Be Blood) in a playful mood, with a coming-of-age story of a teenage crush, as precocious high-schooler Gary Valentine develops feelings for a much older woman (she’s 25).
Protests in Kazakhstan, floods in Brazil, the aftermath of the volcano eruption in La Palma and snow in Kabul: the most striking images from around the world this week
Continue reading...Readers respond to Simon Jenkins’ article about dwindling congregations and the importance of preserving our built heritage
Simon Jenkins rightly derides the notion of the Church of England as “a national corporation of grandees”, for if the church exists at all, in any meaningful sense, it’s at the local, parochial level (Churches could double as banks, or even serve beer. We can’t leave them empty, 31 December). But this is where Jenkins wrongly, in my view, elides two similar terms: congregation and community. The local church “congregation” consists just of those who actively worship in the church building – and in rural contexts it’s often a very small number indeed.
The “community”, however, is the much wider population of the parish – the parishioners, all those who live within the parish boundary. Our task in the rural church – if we are to survive locally – is to help revive a sense of popular, community ownership, both of the church building and of the heritage of faith and values it represents.
Continue reading...The provocative artist has made a shocking new ‘immersive experience’ for the one year anniversary of the 6 January attack
Andres Serrano is not known as an especially political artist. The 71-year-old’s photographs are more accurately described as transgressive, perennially summed up with a singular point of reference: Piss Christ, his 1987 photo of a crucifix submerged in his own orange-tinted urine, which has over the years sparked multiple instances of national outrage. In the photographic series that followed, including The Klan (1990), The Morgue (1992), Shit (2007), and Nudes (2009), Serrano’s work has remained as provocative as it is aptly named.
“I like to make the kind of pictures where you don’t need much more than the title to tell you what you’re looking at,” the artist said over the phone. As for his perpetual association with a single, 34-year-old work of art, he doesn’t mind: “Piss Christ is a good soundbite – easy to remember and repeat.”
Continue reading...Pre-Soviet Kazakh culture goes on display, Turner steps in to bring fireworks to Edinburgh, and US painter and army veteran Marcus Jansen has a solo show – all in your weekly dispatch
Marcus Jansen
Visceral paintings of a world gone mad by this US army veteran.
• Almine Rech, London, from 13 Jan to 22 February
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...You might think the Observer’s architecture critic would surround himself with beautiful souvenirs from his travels, instead he accumulates objects that defy the rules of good taste
One day in Évora, Portugal, my travelling companions and I walked across a square hammered with 40-degree heat. A little delirious, having just visited a chapel decorated with human bones and the hair of young brides, we entered the apparent calm of a shop selling household items. Except our day of the macabre was not over. One of these items was a hat-rack made of four sheep feet, their still-grubby hooves varnished, bent at their joints into L-shapes, and fixed none too elegantly to a moulded piece of wood.
I bought it. I held on to it even after it became infested, in the style of a Dalí painting, with ants. I brought it back home to Britain. Only with great reluctance, and under duress from members of my family who found this increasingly dilapidated object for some reason disgusting, did I throw it away. I still mourn it, as if it were a missing limb. Much as a sheep might feel, indeed, whose feet had been made into a hat stand.
Continue reading...Mobile phone, TV, carmakers and other major players tout what’s new at the annual Las Vegas tech showcase
From colour-shifting cars to digital art TVs and stress-predicting watches, the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, which opened on Wednesday, offered its usual mix of wacky, visionary and desirable goods. Here are some of the highlights.
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Built in 1926 by a pharmaceutical company, the heritage-listed building has since become a hub for artists – who now fear it may be under threat. Culture editor, Steph Harmon, introduces Brigid Delaney’s story about eight of its past and present residents
You can read the original article here: ‘The only place like it in the world’: why the Nicholas Building is the creative heart of Melbourne
My father, Jack Clafferty, who has died aged 74, was the creator of a number of striking graphic images associated with the Troubles in Northern Ireland, most notably the familiar logo used by the Troops Out Movement, which featured a representation of a British soldier taking a club to the island of Ireland.
Jack, who moved to London from Ireland in the mid-1960s, made his images – from the early 70s onwards – as a result of a keen interest in the political situation in the north of Ireland at the time, but particularly triggered by the introduction of internment in 1971 and Bloody Sunday in 1972.
Continue reading...My friend Simon Lewty, who has died aged 80, was an artist who inscribed words and images on layers of tissue paper, creating a richly enigmatic body of work. Typically his paintings depicted surreal city chimneys, mandrake roots and figures that might have escaped from some infernal Punch and Judy show, floating amid arcane symbols and inscriptions of dreams.
In the late 1980s and early 90s, when his works appeared like timeworn maps of hinterlands haunted by ancestral voices, the environmental charity Common Ground invited him to contribute to its nationwide Parish Maps project. At the turn of the millennium, as the figurative and cartographic elements of his work disappeared, rogue letters, runes, flecks and dashes of colour infiltrated great blocks of text.
Continue reading...Artist says she wants to create 30 studios, with strict no-smoking rules and a requirement for students to display their work
Tracey Emin has said she is launching her own “revolutionary” art school in Margate as part of her broader plan to transform the seaside town into an “artist’s haven”.
The school, named TKE Studios – after her full name, Tracey Karima Emin – will be housed at a former bathhouse and mortuary five minutes from her studio. Emin said she wanted to redesign the location into 30 studios for future art students.
Continue reading...Grant Shapps leads calls to change law limiting prosecution of people who damage memorials
Britain is not a country where “destroying public property can ever be acceptable”, a cabinet minister has said, as Conservative MPs vented their frustration at four people being cleared of tearing down a statue of the slave trader Edward Colston.
Grant Shapps, the transport secretary, said the law would be changed to close a “potential loophole” limiting the prosecution of people who damage memorials as part of the police, crime, sentencing and courts (PCSC) bill.
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Tamsin Calidas left the city behind for the rugged beauty of a Hebridean island – her images capture this life-changing experience
Continue reading...John Salt, who has died aged 84, was a pioneer of photorealist painting, a genre that emerged in late 1960s America, in part, like its predecessor pop art, as a response to abstract expressionism. The paintings were of photographs of random subjects, enlarged and rendered in such detail that they themselves could be mistaken for photographs.
John was British but, while living in the US, and painting photographs of cars and trailer homes, he became identified with the American photorealist movement. Like other artists around the same time, John chose the photograph as his subject matter because there was no preconceived idea of how it should be represented. When looking at one of John’s paintings it is not his picture of a car, but his picture of a photograph of a car, that we see. The more photograph-like the painting, the more essential it is to view the painting itself, rather than a reproduction, in order to assess, for instance, scale, colour and texture.
Continue reading...Loan deal could renew pressure on Britain to repatriate ancient Parthenon marbles to Athens
Italy is returning a fragment belonging to the Parthenon’s eastern frieze to Greece in a breakthrough deal that could renew pressure on Britain to repatriate the 2,500-year-old Parthenon marbles removed by Lord Elgin in the early 19th century.
The marble fragment, which depicts the foot of a goddess, either Peitho or Artemis, peeking out from beneath an elaborate tunic, is currently held at the Antonino Salinas Regional Archaeological Museum in Palermo, Sicily. It was originally bought by the University of Palermo from the widow of Robert Fagan, the British consul for Sicily and Malta, after his death in 1816.
Continue reading...‘It was clear that these two had each other in their lives, and that was pretty much it’
In the 1970s I lived in SoHo in New York, which is not far from the Bowery, but the two districts were like separate universes. SoHo was full of artists and creative types but the Bowery was known as the place where you ended up when you were at the bottom of the barrel. There were a lot of flophouses and a lot of alcoholism and drug use. It was the darkest place in New York City for a long time.
The Bowery Mission is a Christian rescue centre for homeless people. Only men are allowed to stay overnight but it feeds anybody. I used to go there around Thanksgiving and Christmas time to help serve dinner. The face-to-face contact and interactions I had with people meant that I always felt a real connection with them, and it also made me grateful for what I had in my own life.
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