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The Guardian
May 25 2019
Photographer Michael Peto visited Israel and his work illustrated an article by Nora Beloff on the young State’s growing pains.
If you are lucky enough to visit the “Promised Land” in this tenth anniversary year, you must not expect to be cosseted.
The excellent English-language tourist guide to Israel is prefaced with the statement from the Torah (the Jewish book of rules): “Whoever walks four cubits on the land of Israel is assured of a place in the world to come.” It wouldn’t do also to expect quick-service lunches or taps that don’t drip.
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May 25 2019
During National Stationery Week earlier this month, Neal Whittington, the founder of the cult London stationery shop Present & Correct, went on an online quest to find images of oversized art related to pens, pencils and erasers in the style of the artist Claes Oldenburg. Rather than just finding images of sculptures, he discovered public furniture inspired by office equipment: paperclip bike racks in Washington DC, a keyboard seating area in Russia, an eraser bench in Prague. “I like that these everyday objects have been blown up, but the form hasn’t changed and they obtain entirely new functions,” he says. “They’re eye-catching, they’re humorous: they make your day-to-day a little bit more enjoyable.”
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May 25 2019
For viewers of a certain age it is instantly recognisable. Botallack Manor, on the Penwith peninsula in western Cornwall, doubled as Nampara, the home of Ross Poldark and his family, in the original 1970s Poldark television series.
Today, the Grade II-listed house, built in the 17th century and boasting spectacular views of the Tin Coast, remains a magnet for Poldark fans, many drawn to this wild and remote location by the latest BBC adaptation of Winston Graham’s novels.
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May 25 2019
When the painter Jock McFadyen was 17 years old, a truck pulled out in front of his Matchless motorbike. He swerved, but collided. He still remembers his relief that his head remained attached to his body, but his leg was shattered. “When I tried to stand up to attack the driver, my knee went the wrong way and I fainted,” he told me. “My foot was facing me in the eye and my shoes were on the other side of the road.”
You could imagine a painting of this tragicomic moment, one like the cartoonish tableaux that made McFadyen a rising star in the age of punk, in the 1970s and early 80s. He depicted terrible things – a man’s head might get smashed by a falling ceiling, or one cowboy might casually decapitate another, and callous witnesses might stand indifferently by. The works were harsh, dark, but with a sliver of empathy, the feeling that the victim in the picture might as well be him, the painter, or you, the viewer.
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May 25 2019
Climate crisis, milkshakes, riots and the tears of a prime minister – the last seven days, as captured by the world’s best photojournalists
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May 24 2019
Nottingham Contemporary
The veteran video artist’s short films dismantle the status quo political narrative – and her work is only getting better
For years, the delivery of information about the outside world arrived via an unassuming black box, enthroned in the centre of the living room, flanked by furniture. The trusty TV still communicates a reliable picture of the most recent political disasters, that nail-biting football match, and the state of melting ice caps. Or does it? Artist Lis Rhodes isn’t convinced, so she has spent the past 40 years unpicking the structures behind moving-image media to uncover the hierarchies and inequalities perpetuated by narratives in the mainstream.
And yet, dotted throughout her first survey exhibition, Dissident Lines, at Nottingham Contemporary, we find living-room scenes with TV sets in the centre. The difference here is that these screens are playing one-minute films that Rhodes produced for Channel 4 in the 1980s. The shorts – collectively entitled Hang on a Minute – collage together images with poetic voiceovers. In Hang on a Minute/Swing Song, a photograph of the devastation of the Hiroshima atomic bombings is accompanied by reflections of a female survivor: “I can’t see any more / People run / I just follow / Voices cry / All calling names / So many voices.” Rhodes’s micro news bulletins replace the clear picture and monotone narrative usually associated with the communication of information, distorting delivery to disrupt expectations around what should be reported on.
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May 24 2019
Queen of splatter Lee Krasner shines at the Barbican, Billy Childish continues Margate’s artistic revival and the birth of British art connoisseurship – all in your weekly dispatch
Lee Krasner
One of the great abstract expressionist painters finally gets her due. Krasner gave a lot of herself to her difficult husband, Jackson Pollock, but here she shines alone.
• Barbican Art Gallery, London, 30 May-1 September.
The Guardian
May 24 2019
As the PM steps down, we pick some of Steve Bell’s most striking snapshots of her short and ultimately doomed premiership
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May 24 2019
In our Guardian archive series this week, Frank Martin’s 1976 photograph captures a model on a skateboard in London in the latest jumpsuit leisurewear
This model looks a little unsteady as she wobbles towards Frank Martin’s lens, in a photoshoot for the Guardian’s fashion pages on 6 July 1976. The reason for the shoot, which took place in London’s Holland Park, was to showcase the latest “leisurewear”, dungarees, boilersuits and jumpsuits – a “practical, enjoyable look”, according to the writer, Angela Neustatter. If jumpsuits had taken hold, then skateboarding had not. “This crazy sport,” wrote Neustatter, “has, I am told, swept California and is about to take us by storm.” Over 40 years later, all-in-ones are having another moment, thanks in large part to the jumpsuit worn by Fleabag, AKA Phoebe Waller-Bridge. Proof that fashion is always cyclical.
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May 24 2019
The Japanese manga artist was at the forefront of a new ‘boys’ love’ genre, publishing the first issue in 1972
An ambiguous bromance between teen vampire boys sounds a bit like Twilight slash fiction. However, Hagio Moto’s manga classic The Poe Clan predated the YA craze for pretty bloodsuckers by three decades.
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May 23 2019
Jon Tonks’ Stories of Home is a study of central and eastern European communities living in the Sandwell district of the West Midlands, home to the UK’s biggest Polish population. Taken in the two years after the 2016 referendum, the series explores questions around home and identity
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May 23 2019
The awe-inspiring soldiers from China’s past are sharing the limelight with a modern artist’s soaring take on immortality
Sprawled out in front of me in a dusty hangar in Xi’an were rows and rows of soldiers: an army fit to protect the dead.
I first saw the Terracotta Warriors in 2010, when working as a journalist in China. The experience was overwhelming. Yet unlike the Great Wall – another legacy of China’s first emperor, Qin Shi Huang, which sends shivers down my spine to this day – the site itself was a letdown. Jostling with the crowds, I felt a stab of guilt: I knew I should be enjoying the experience more than I did.
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May 23 2019
Foundling Museum, London
This invigorating exhibition shows how the artist’s appetite for life bursts off the canvas and makes you see, hear and smell his time – don’t miss the soldier pissing against a wall or the one pinching an aromatic pie
When was the last time Britain was as broken in two as it is by now? William Hogarth has the answer. His masterpiece The March of the Guards to Finchley depicts the last war fought on mainland British soil – the Jacobite rebellion of 1745. The fact that it’s a hilarious, obscenely optimistic human chaos of a painting might give us cause for hope. Even with civil war on his doorstep, Hogarth finds joy in the down and dirty details of life.
He might not have found it so funny had he been Scottish. In August 1745, Bonnie Prince Charlie landed in Scotland to try and restore the exiled Catholic Stuart dynasty to the British throne. His army quickly reached Derby, only 100-odd miles from London. But that was their high point. They were chased back into Scotland, and on 16 April 1746, the last hardcore Highlanders were catastrophically defeated by the Duke of Cumberland’s army at Culloden.
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May 22 2019
New York’s Swann Auction Galleries is putting pioneering poster art, from the late 19th- up to the 21st century, on the block
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May 22 2019
The Guardian’s picture editors select photo highlights from around the world
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May 22 2019
An ambitious project is restoring areas of blanket bog in the heart of the Flow Country in northern Scotland that have been damaged by forestry planting
A commission to produce a series of visual, sonic and kinetic installations has been awarded to Cryptic, a Glasgow-based arthouse, as part of the Peatland Partnership’s Flows to the Future Project in conjunction with the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. The work will be shown in the gardens during the Edinburgh festival in August.
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May 22 2019
Serpentine Sackler Gallery, London
Marcel Duchamp massaged her feet and Leonora Carrington built her kids a house. But the work of the 98-year-old Venezuela-born painter is every bit as extraordinary as her life
For a period while living in Chile with her artist-husband Lee Mullican in the late 1960s, Luchita Hurtado painted inside a walk-in closet, standing there and looking down over her breasts and belly to her feet and the floor below. Sometimes a bar of light came in through the slats of the door. She included this in her painting, too. She looks down at the rug, or into a woven basket, that streak of light picking out the weave of the basket, momentarily brightening the pattern on the Navajo rug.
In one painting she drops a strawberry into a bowl on the floor. It hangs in mid-air in the half-lit gloom. Sometimes there seem to be two, three or even four people in there: eight feet on a gorgeous rug, green apples big as bowling balls, inexplicably huge and vivid against the dyed lozenges of the rug, every nub in the rug’s structure picked-out in paint. The painting evokes the feel of the rough texture against naked feet. In another it is all flat zigzags and pattern, interrupted by naked mellow skin.
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May 21 2019
Niko J Kallianiotis travelled through the main streets of Pennsylvania to photograph ‘the silhouette of what once was’ now the coal industry has gone
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May 21 2019
Sorry Nigel Healey (Letters, 21 May) but Sir Cliff Richard is rightly that. He changed it legally in 1980.
Rod Warrington
Chester
• On Monday we had the good fortune to enter the east wing of the National Gallery of Art, in Washington DC, just as the gallery’s director was paying tribute to the building’s architect, IM Pei, who died recently. Almost her first words were to quote Andrew Saint’s obituary in the Guardian (18 May). Good to witness at first hand the international reach of our favourite newspaper.
John and Liz Kirkwood
Sheffield
The Guardian
May 21 2019
This museum in a bleak outpost has one of the world’s greatest collections of avant-garde art, rescued from Stalin’s clutches by an electrician. But now it needs a rescue of its own
I am sitting at a huge table at the Ministry of Culture in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, as officials explain what sounds like a wonderful opportunity. There’s currently an international call-out to find someone to run a gallery in the country, one housing the world’s second-largest collection of Russian avant garde art. What an amazing job, I think – raising the profile of a museum that could turn out to be the Louvre of central Asia.
But the dream job may not be quite so dreamy. The next day, at a godawful hour, I get up to fly to Nukus in northern Uzbekistan, where this “museum of forbidden art” is located. En route, I blearily note that even the guidebooks can find little to say about this “unappealing city”. It seems the only other reason people venture there is for a spot of “disaster tourism”. The Aral Sea, once the fourth largest inland sea, has shrunk because of Soviet irrigation systems and chemicals pumped into the water. All the fish are dead. There’s a horribly photogenic landscape of rusting boats on a dried-up seabed that looks like a lunar surface. Toxic dust blows through the area – there are high rates of infant mortality and cancer.
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May 21 2019
The revered architect and theorist is on a mission to explain why being a part of Europe is good for the national interest - and lovers of coffee
I was present in Britain when it became part of the EU and I’ve lived in London for a very long time since, so I can say that I’ve really experienced the incredible extent to which Britain has become a much better place.
This includes everything from the trivial, such as the quality of the coffee (which at the end of the day is not so trivial!) to huge things such as a vastly more collaborative and sophisticated local culture. As someone who experienced this transformation on a day-to-day basis I can only look at the decision to leave the EU with disbelief.
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May 21 2019
Huawei is China’s most valuable technology brand, whose global expansion has become controversial particularly in regards to 5G technology. Photojournalist Kevin Frayer was given access to Huawei’s Bantian campus in Shenzhen, China’s Silicon Valley, and shows us what it is like to work there
With annual revenue topping $100bn, and headquartered in the southern city of Shenzhen, considered China’s Silicon Valley, Huawei has more than 180,000 employees worldwide, with nearly half of them engaged in research and development. In 2018, the company overtook Apple as the second largest manufacturer of smartphones in the world behind Samsung Electronics, a milestone that has made Huawei a source of national pride in China.
Related: Google blocks Huawei access to Android updates after blacklisting
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May 20 2019
An ambitious ode to the first ever black congresswoman is set to launch in Brooklyn in 2020, with the two artists aiming to subvert expectations
When it was announced in December that Shirley Chisholm, the first black congresswoman, would get a statue in New York, many echoed the sentiment she stood for: “It’s about time.”
Related: ‘It’s about time’: Shirley Chisholm, first black congresswoman, will get a statue
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May 20 2019
Foam Talent are presenting 20 emerging artists who are lighting up the world of contemporary photography – here are some of the highlights
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May 20 2019
British Museum, London
It has moments of brilliance but asking us to compare today’s graphic artists with greats of the past is misguided. What’s next – Rembrandt meets Dennis the Menace?
One morning in June 1880, the Japanese artist Kawanabe Kyōsai drank several bottles of sake and started painting a 17-metre cloth spread out on a studio floor in Tokyo. It took him four hours to fill this giant scroll with grotesquely vivacious portraits of ghosts and demons. These fascinating monsters are a rare highlight of the British Museum’s blockbuster journey into Japan’s art. Kyōsai was the Jackson Pollock of caricature, turning actors in Tokyo’s kabuki theatre into these uncanny yet very real beings. His freely painted panorama of the supernatural shows exactly why European artists in the late 19th century looked to Japan for inspiration.
Kyōsai still looks like our contemporary. Even though his Shintomiza Theatre Curtain is now so fragile this may be the last time it is ever loaned to an exhibition, its rollicking energy and hilarity burst off the wall as if you were watching a film full of special effects and outlandish superheroes. For Japanese art looked like modern comics long before there were modern comics or movies based on them. You think Thanos is scary? Take a look at Tsukioka Yoshitoshi’s 1880s drawing of a mythic warrior swinging his enemy’s severed head around by its hair while he contorts his face into a snarling ecstasy of rage.
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May 20 2019
Once regarded as too niche for the west, Japan’s comic genre has become a global phenomenon, generating billions of dollars. So why is it still so misunderstood?
What is it about manga that makes it so compelling? Once a cult concern, the distinctive Japanese comics and graphic novels have now truly infiltrated the mainstream. From James Cameron producing a Hollywood movie of the cyberpunk fantasy Battle Angel Alita to Gucci creating a fashion range from Ide Chikae’s 70s girls’ volleyball series – manga is no longer the preserve of geeks. Last year, Japan’s home market officially totalled 441.4bn yen (over £3bn), while North America chalked up the best sales in a decade with over $1bn. A new exhibition at the British Museum, entitled Manga, traces the art form’s emergence as a global phenomenon.
Yet despite its rocketing popularity, manga remains misunderstood. Ever since it arrived in the west with 1987’s samurai epic Lone Wolf and Cub and the thriller Mai the Psychic Girl, there were sniggering headlines: “Grown Men in Japan Still Read Comics and Have Fantasies,” reported the Wall Street Journal. That prejudice lingers today – Oxford University Press’s Advanced Learner’s Dictionary still defines manga, wrongly, as “a Japanese form of comic strip, often one with violent or sexual contents”. There is much more to manga than these descriptions suggest. In fact, manga offer an ever-growing diversity of characters, subjects, styles and even genres – thanks largely to the high percentage of women who work on them.
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May 20 2019
Marina Abramović, Elmgreen & Dragset and Bernard-Henri Lévy are just some of the big names involved in United Artists for Europe. Here’s why they’re taking a stand
Bernard-Henri Lévy, French philosopher
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May 20 2019
My husband, Derek Codling, who has died aged 80, was an architect who designed housing and industrial projects for new towns in the 1960s before going on to set up his own practice.
Born in Kingston, south-west London, to Robert Codling, a Salvation Army officer, and his wife, Olive (nee Gooch), Derek was single-minded about wanting to be an architect even from an early age. While still at Surbiton County grammar school in Surrey he travelled up to central London to listen to evening lectures given by the architect Reyner Banham at the City Lit adult educational college.
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May 20 2019
Glittering cast of 1920s and 30s bohemians will be subject of National Portrait Gallery show
The wild and hedonistic world of the Bright Young Things is to be explored in an exhibition bringing together photographs by Cecil Beaton.
The National Portrait Gallery on Monday announced details of a show next year that will tell the stories of a dazzling cast of often beautiful and extravagant bohemians who partied their way through the 1920s and 30s.
Continue reading...The New York Times
May 20 2019
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May 20 2019
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May 19 2019
Instagram-ready backdrops at every turn, 15,000 makeup buffs preen and purchase their way through Sydney’s three-day beauty festival
On a stage carpeted in hot pink, two young women race to apply lipstick while balancing on wobble boards. With seconds left on the clock, they make their way to a camera in the wings and pose for photos that are displayed on a large screen to the gathering crowd. The game is So You Think You Can Glam, and precision under pressure is the criterion though which, with shouts and applause, one of the women will be crowned the champion.
Related: Estée Laundry: the Instagram collective holding the beauty industry to account
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May 19 2019
To coincide with World Bee Day, we are giving readers the opportunity to purchase an exclusive edition of Gethings’s bee photographs
• Own one of the edition by Gerrard Gethings
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May 19 2019
Book offers ‘voyeuristic glimpse’ into the two artists’ lives with hundreds of Warhol’s images and diary entries
A “voyeuristic” glimpse into the world of two of the late 20th century’s greatest artists is to be revealed in a book that finally brings to light some of the 130,000 photographs that Andy Warhol took to document every aspect of his life.
More than 32 years after Warhol’s death, hundreds of his photographs are set to reveal the minutiae of his friendship with fellow artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, capturing many moments together – whether partying, getting their nails painted, or even, for Basquiat, while in the depths of depression facing suicidal thoughts.
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May 19 2019
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May 19 2019
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May 19 2019
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May 19 2019
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May 19 2019
The Guardian
May 19 2019
My friend and colleague Felix Clay, who has died aged 44 after a long illness, was a respected photographer and film-maker, gifted with creative insight, intelligence and a talent for putting people at their ease.
An outstanding portrait photographer, he took images of subjects including Stephen Hawking, Patty Smith, Jo Brand and Vicky McClure that are witty as well as technically brilliant.
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May 19 2019
E-Werk Luckenwalde will offer workshops and studio space for artists squeezed out of Berlin
When the Luckenwalde coal power plant in east Germany closed down soon after the collapse of communism, the locals were both relieved and concerned. “Finally people could hang out their laundry without it getting covered in soot,” said Bernd Schmidl, one of the plant’s senior employees.
Worries about jobs were soon allayed when the workers were given better-paid employment elsewhere, he said. But fears remained that the listed building, with elements of art deco and art nouveau, would fall into disrepair. “Who was going to find a long-term use for an old building spanning 10,000 metres over four floors?”
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May 19 2019
The Guardian
May 19 2019
From Victorian men in black to modern good-time girls, a tremendous history of seaside photographs reveals how Britons do love a day on the beach
The photograph is small, and grey as seaside mist. It shows a large family in Victorian clothes on a beach. The men are in black, the women wasp-waisted in their corsets, parasols artfully arranged before them on the sands. Only the baby is allowed the freedom of bare feet.
To their right, and perfectly conspicuous, is a man holding what looks like a large flag above the proceedings. He is the photographer’s assistant, spreading the glare with a primitive diffuser. In a minute, the sitters will stand up, brush the sand off their clothes and wait for the magic promised for the price of a few pennies. And it will happen: an image of themselves will appear on a scrap of metal almost with the speed of a Polaroid – even though this ferrotype was way back in 1880.
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The Guardian
May 18 2019
For many, the enduring image of Queen Victoria is of a monarch in mourning, stern-faced and bereft in her black gown and white headpiece after the death of her beloved husband, Albert.
Very few pictures capture the young, vibrant woman she had been – when she ascended the throne in 1837, aged 18, photography had barely been invented. But such images do exist, and to mark the 200th anniversary of her birth this Friday, the Museum of London has unveiled exclusively for the Observer two rare photographs never before seen by the public.
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May 18 2019
Over the past three years, London-based photographer Mark Neville has been travelling around Ukraine to work on several wide-ranging projects: one about holidaymakers in Odessa, another about people at worship, and an extensive series depicting the 2 million people in the country displaced by conflict on the eastern front. His latest project saw him documenting folk songs, often sung by internally displaced Ukrainians. “What happens when a country is at war is that people tend to identify more directly with the symbolism of what their country culturally stands for,” he explains. “So that means a lot of people returning to things such as national costume, a focus on the core elements of being Ukrainian.”
Neville arrived in Orikhovo-Vasylivka last autumn, where Lina’s grandmother was putting on a folk song recital in town. Her parents then invited him to their house for tea and in their back garden he spotted Lina gathering plums in a traditional costume. “The photograph is a kind of cocktail of Ukrainian symbols,” he says. “Ukraine is a hugely abundant, fertile country; it has all sorts of minerals, vegetables, oil, sunflower fields, the most amazing pumpkins you’ve ever seen.”
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May 18 2019
Sophisticated swimwear, relaxed tailoring and a sprinkling of Australiana – Australian fashion week reveals what you’ll be wearing next summer
Controversial shows are as de rigeur at Australian fashion week as editors in ridiculous heels. Think rats on the catwalk, pythons paired with diamond encrusted bikinis and bloggers playing the piano. With its cheesy dancers, lengthy delays and questionable seating arrangements, this year’s contender Jonathan Cassin didn’t get the memo to keep the focus on the clothes but it made for good headlines among all the election 2019 coverage.
Still, beyond the madness, there were plenty of covetable, wearable clothes on show during this year’s resortwear collections. Here are 10 of our favourite shows.
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May 18 2019
“To me, the seaside is heady and joyous all year round,” says photographer Rob Ball. “We have memories of family holidays or time spent by the coast, so we all have a connection to it.” Ball has published three books of coast-based photos since moving to Whitstable on the north coast of Kent more than a decade ago. His latest, Funland, captures more than 35 British coastal communities, from Arbroath on Scotland’s North Sea coast to Torquay on the English Riviera. “I like how seafronts have visually rich, brightly coloured signs and buildings, alongside the coffee shops and rubbish bins,” Ball says. He is committed to documenting their evolving look, he says: “Our seaside heritage is vulnerable and it’s important to record it before it changes.”
Funland by Rob Ball is published on 23 May by Hoxton Mini Press (£30)
Continue reading...The New York Times
May 18 2019
The New York Times
May 18 2019
The Guardian
May 18 2019
Conflict in Syria, shocking pink fashion at Cannes, and a seal pup making a splash – the last seven days, as captured by the world’s best photojournalists
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