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A new exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris looks at how literary figures like Eliot, Conrad and Aeschylus shaped the painter’s work.

The Arts Council of New Zealand announced yesterday that Japanese-Samoan artist Yuki Kihara will represent the country at the Fifty-Ninth Venice Biennale. The news marks the first pavilion announcement

Saint Paul–based artist Angela Two Stars of the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate tribe has been awarded a commission by the Walker Art Center in Minnesota. She will create a site-specific public artwork for the

THIS SUMMER, New York was introduced to one of the most renowned avant-garde works of the Argentine ’60s: La Menesunda. The New Museum’s exhibition “Menesunda Reloaded” reconstructed all the outlandish

The Bakehouse Art Complex in Miami’s Wynwood district—a nonprofit that offers studio residencies and provides local creatives with access to classrooms; exhibition spaces; a photography lab; and ceramics,

San Francisco represents the far edge of colonial expansion, an apocalyptic end zone. The gold rush dwindled in the nineteenth century. The beats got jobs, the hippies bought houses, the artists had to

The exhibition’s detractors say that a man who derided museums as too feminine and politically correct may not be taking the right approach to overseeing the sensitive items on display.

The choreographer Madeline Hollander has devised simple looping steps, with names like “zigzag waltz,” in a piece that meets climate change with ritual.

The money will go toward preserving ancient artifacts that are in danger because of crises like war and climate change.

The San Diego Museum of Art has appointed Ladan Akbarnia its new curator of South Asian and Islamic art. Akbarnia will be responsible for managing the museum’s exhibitions and public programing; engaging

The Art Institute of Chicago has hired Fabrizio Barozzi and Alberto Veiga of the Barcelona-based architecture firm Barozzi/Veiga to overhaul the museum. Director James Rondeau told the

For their debut project in the city, Dimore Studio managed to transform a neglected 1960s-era house into a deeply contemporary take on Italian Modernism.

Visitors to Regent’s Park will see hovering ice slabs visible only through mobile app

First there was Pokémon Go. Now lovers of contemporary art can join the fun by tracking down shimmering, thought-provoking sculptures in a London park.

Frieze London art fair has installed its first augmented reality artwork. “No shipping, no installation costs,” said its director, Victoria Siddall. “It is interesting for us to be able to test the boundaries of what sculpture can be.”

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While all eyes are on Paris’s fire-ravaged Notre-Dame, New York’s St. John the Divine cathedral is dealing with the aftermath of a fire of its own.

On Tuesday, September 17, the Japan Art Association announced the winners of the 2019 Praemium Imperiale awards, which honor practitioners in the fields of painting, sculpture, architecture, music, and

It was meant to put the artist on a par with Picasso. But it was thrown into chaos by the suicide of his lover and muse. As Bacon returns to haunt the French capital, we recall a tragic, game-changing show

Last Tango in Paris, Bernardo Bertolucci’s controversial piece of 70s art cinema, begins with an oil painting of a man on a red bed wearing just a T-shirt, flashing fleshy legs as his face explodes in inky smears. He’s in a room with a green carpet and yellow walls. For a few moments, Bertolucci shows just this portrait – of Lucian Freud by Francis Bacon – then a sensual jazz score slowly starts, and the film’s opening credits roll alongside this unmoving canvas. It is succeeded by a brutally dissected female figure sitting on a wooden chair – another Bacon portrait, this time of Henrietta Moraes. Eventually, the two paintings are seen side by side. Then we cut to Marlon Brando in a camel overcoat on a Paris bridge, yelling: “Fucking God!”

Behind Bertolucci’s eerie use of these oil paintings is the shocking story of an art exhibition that gripped Paris, established Bacon as the great European artist he had always dreamt of being – and left a man dead in a hotel toilet. Bertolucci was so astounded by Bacon’s solo show at the Grand Palais – which opened in October 1971, just as he was preparing to make his film in the French capital – that he took Brando to see it. He urged the actor, he later recalled, to “compare himself with Bacon’s human figures because I felt that, like them, Marlon’s face and body were characterised by a strange and infernal plasticity”.

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In constant motion between the art and opera worlds by way of popular culture, Joseph Keckler is best known for his vocal shape-shifting and his “faux arias,” which recount daily experiences with

A look back at the fortunes of England and Australia across the five Tests, as seen through the lens of Guardian and Observer photographer Tom Jenkins. Click or tap on the images to read the captions

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The first of a new Guardian Print Shop series featuring classic sports images from the likes of Gerry Cranham, Mark Leech and Tom Jenkins – yours to own for just £55 including free delivery

Frozen in mid-air and silhouetted against the distant floodlighting at White Hart Lane, this image captures Tottenham goalkeeper John Hollowbread jumping to keep warm during a third round FA Cup match against Chelsea in January 1964. Spurs were a powerhouse in the sixties: they won the double in 1961 – with Hollowbread, primarily the club’s reserve goalkeeper, making one appearance that season – as well as the FA Cup again in 1962 and 1967 and the Uefa Cup Winners’ Cup in 1963. White Hart Lane was demolished in recent years to make way for a new multi-million pound stadium, but this ethereal image captures the old ground in its pomp. The packed “shelf side”, comprising twin layers of terracing, housed close to 20,000 Spurs fans and produced an intimidating wall of noise. This historical photograph is one of the most recognisable frames by the renowned sports photographer Gerry Cranham.

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Fifty galleries from across China and beyond are heading to Shanghai to showcase the best contemporary photography in this year’s Photofairs Shanghai. Here are our favourites

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Set in the home of eccentric Americans, The Visitors is 64 hard-partying minutes of songs, cigars and sorrow. As it’s named the best artwork of the century, the artist relives its creation

• The 25 best art works of the 21st century

Rokeby is a crumbling 43-room mansion in upstate New York, where the descendants of the grand American families the Astors and the Livingstons – as well as their bohemian friends – participate in everything from puppetry to organic farming. On one gorgeous summer evening, they gathered on the terrace while nine Icelandic musicians, including members of Múm and Sigur Ros, each took over one of the house’s rooms, from the ballroom to the bathroom. Together, they played a song that went “Once again, I fall into my feminine ways” – over and over.

The result was The Visitors by artist Ragnar Kjartansson. Named after Abba’s final album and presented as a nine-screen video installation in galleries from London’s Barbican to the Broad in LA, The Visitors mesmerised viewers, most of whom stayed for its entire 64 minutes, moved to tears of euphoria and sorrow. As the New York Times put it, the effect is “alternately tragic and joyful, meditative and clamorous, and that swells in feeling from melancholic fugue to redemptive gospel choir”. A memorial to the end of Kjartansson’s marriage, a paean to the twilight of youth, a celebration of friendship, music and America itself, The Visitors is sumptuous and profound.

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Steve McQueen in bed, Ai Weiwei in trouble, Pussy Riot in church and Ragnar Kjartansson in the bath – they’re all included in our countdown of the best art since 2000

• An interview with the creator of our No 1 pick
• More of the best Architecture | Film | TV | Albums | Classical

Almost an hour long, Tacita Dean’s film is a summation of her work to date. Poet Anne Carson and actor Stephen Dillane move through the world on an imaginary day, as the sun is eclipsed. Set in multiple locations and weathers (Bodmin Moor, Yellowstone Park, Wyoming and Illinois), and with innovative technical manipulations (the entire film was edited in-camera), atmospheres and startling imagery, the whole thing is a delight. AS
Read the review.

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What effect did the artist’s 2018 salesroom prank have on his prices? A major sale at Sotheby’s looks set to reveal the impact.

Projects debuting this fall suggest that hard barriers between the designed environment and the natural one are softening — maybe for good.

The architecture of occupation: A planned cable-car network to Jewish holy sites bypasses Palestinians and furthers Israel’s claims over East Jerusalem.

A man who visited the Centre Pompidou in Paris on Thursday, September 12, was arrested after he attacked a painting by French modernist Daniel Buren with a knife,

Royal Academy, London
From its primordial gloop to the iron baby in the courtyard, Gormley’s show chronicles human progress. But is he really the right person to tell the story of us all?

Antony Gormley’s retrospective at the Royal Academy ends in a moment of blissful release. After tottering through low, pitch-black metal tunnels and chambers, you emerge into a gallery filled with cool sea air and a briny tang. The floor of the final beaux-arts room is submerged beneath earth and seawater. This is Host, a work he’s created a number of times over the past three decades, nodding to primordial creation, the ocean that life originally crawled from and the squidgy stuff with which artists fashioned the first figures. Here, in the bastion of civilisation that is the Royal Academy, it also becomes a tacit doomy statement about climate change. It’s the beginning and the end. That’s one of the things about Gormley’s art: it goes for big statements, while being so open-ended that it can change with context, adapting to its viewers’ concerns.

This is a seriously handsome show with plenty of crowd-wowing art that aims to put “the visitor centre stage”, yet also underlines his project’s sticking points. In a recent interview, he bemoaned art’s waning ability to speak truth to power. Here, he reaches for the epic to tackle the Enlightenment dream of human progress that birthed the Royal Academy. It begins with an iron baby that he describes as a “bomb”, ripe with destructive potential but vulnerable, on the grand courtyard’s paving, framed by neoclassical walls and parked cars. No chronological retrospective, the exhibition evolves in beats, small to big, simple to spectacularly complex. Drawings track his lifelong interest in bodies and space, with a recurring solitary figure, either against the open landscape or framed by doorways, the womb, the tomb.

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Aimé Iglesias Lukin has been appointed the new director and chief curator of visual arts at the Americas Society, the New York–based organization dedicated to fostering an understanding of the political,

With companies racing to develop Shazam for art, we see what instant-identification apps really add to your experience in museums and galleries.

THE BERGEN ASSEMBLY marked my first trip to Scandinavia, and as a Henry James fan I hope I may be forgiven if I play here a bit of the wide-eyed American abroad, marveling at the tall Nordics with their

In 1980, philosopher Liang Shuming asked, “Will the world get better?” This group presentation—featuring contributions from Alston Watson, Mama Yoshi, Bettina Yung, Lu Zhang, and the queer footwear

After her famous portrait of Michelle Obama, the artist is bringing her new works to New York. “Every painting is a kind of communion,” our critic says.

An artwork by Italian provocateur Maurizio Cattelan—a solid 18-karat gold toilet worth about $5 million—was stolen from Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire, England, over the weekend. Titled America, the

Mexican artist whose work paid homage to the myths he imbibed growing up in an indigenous Zapotec family

The Mexican artist and activist Francisco Toledo, who has died aged 79, was best known for paintings, prints and ceramics that paid homage to the myths and stories he imbibed growing up in an indigenous Zapotec family, depicting a vast menagerie of real and fantastical animals, often on unconventional yet traditional grounds such as ostrich eggs and tree bark.

Playful depictions of monkeys were plentiful, but there was a darker side to his work, such as the red-stained ceramics he made in response to Mexico’s drug wars, Duelo (Mourning, 2015), and the overtly sexual, phallus-centered self-portraits he returned to throughout his career.

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Artists Mike Henderson​ and ​Angela Hennessy have won the 2019 San Francisco Artadia Awards. Open to visual artists who have lived in the Bay Area counties of Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, San Francisco,

Kenyan American Wangechi Mutu has become the first artist to fill Metropolitan Museum of Art’s alcoves with four eye-catching female sculptures

If you’re standing outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, there’s one small detail that’s often overlooked in the building’s grand architecture: the four alcoves that crown its entranceway.

These alcoves have been left empty since the museum was built over a century ago, but that’s about to change.

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One of British fashion photography’s biggest names explores museum artefacts

The show-stopping gown in a new exhibition at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum is a red silk number from Alexander McQueen’s infamous Horn of Plenty collection. Its billowing skirts are only partially visible, however, beneath a gauzy white conservational wrap, while its distinctive headdress is entirely hidden. This outer layer catches the light in what must be the first time a McQueen creation has been upstaged by its own dust jacket.

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A flying roof, a bamboo airport, a marooned galleon and a park in the sky … continuing our series, we pick the 25 greatest builds of the new age

• Interview with the creator of the No 1
• More of the best Art | Film | Albums | Classical | TV

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What was once a gloomy brickshed is now one of the most awe-inspiring art galleries in the world. As Tate Modern tops our chart, its architect reveals his trick: avoid glamour and keep it raw

• The best architecture of the 21st century

‘It is totally unimaginable now,” says Jacques Herzog, “but this was a huge chunk of the city that was completely excluded from public life, overgrown and set back behind high walls. It felt like Sleeping Beauty’s castle.”

The Swiss architect is referring to Bankside power station, the great brick hulk that he and Pierre de Meuron transformed into Tate Modern in the year 2000, turning it into a cathedral of art that is now officially the most popular attraction in the UK, receiving 5.9 million visitors last year. People don’t just come for the art, but to experience the most powerful architectural transformation of the century, and one of the most majestic indoor public spaces in the world.

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New York City is planning to build a new $15 million performing arts center dedicated to the American immigrant experience in the Inwood neighborhood of Manhattan. The cultural venue is being spearheaded

Maurizio Cattelan is right to enjoy the loss of his fully-functioning conceptual wonder. It makes his comment on art, money and Trumpian desire even more brilliant

It feels like a huge honour to have been, quite possibly, one of the last people to pee in Maurizio Cattelan’s golden toilet. If his artwork, the solid gold lav stolen from Blenheim Palace on Friday night, is not recovered soon, it may never be seen again. For it seems unlikely this crime was commissioned by an anally obsessed collector or planned by gangsters to use the loo as underworld collateral. “Don Corleone, to mark our deal, please accept this golden toilet.” Let’s face it, the thieves stole Cattelan’s conceptual wonder for the metal it is made of.

Related: Hitler in Churchill's birthplace more shocking than the golden toilet – Maurizio Cattelan review

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The most influential living photographer upon his death at age 94, he produced a book, “The Americans,” that changed the rules of documentary photography.

He helped create the fist-pumping soundtrack of a generation – now the Stone Roses guitarist paints pictures he makes on Snapchat. Will Ian Brown be coming to his show?

I’m in an enormous, concrete, box-shaped space. Alone, but the noise of men working nearby – drilling, talking – reverberates around the room. Literally an echo chamber. On the walls rest huge, colourful paintings, ready to be hung. Figures that are lifelike but messed with, so that bits are in the wrong place, or the background appears within the boundaries of the figures, a jigsaw forced together the wrong way.

The artist, John Squire, comes in quietly (he does everything quietly, he used to be much louder) and explains how he did it. It starts with a photo – perhaps one he’s found on Tumblr, or taken himself (this one is his wife, at the basin in the bathroom at home near Macclesfield) – which he then manipulates.

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Before her marriage to Paul McCartney, Linda McCartney (née Eastman) was known for her rock portraits: in 1968 she became the first woman to shoot the cover of Rolling Stone.

A new book showcases hundreds of Polaroid snaps from the early 70s to the mid-90s, offering an intimate glimpse into the life of a much-loved family

Linda McCartney: The Polaroid Diaries (Taschen, £40) is published on 18 September

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In conservative Turkey, she sought the same artistic freedoms that men were granted, championed art education for women and ultimately left for the United States to pursue her ambitions.

In a former coal station in Germany, a novel hybrid business is set to open: a renewable energy plant and art museum in one.

Barely Fair in Chicago will feature miniature contemporary works in shoe-box-size booths.

Public light spectacles by artists like Bruce Munro herald a movement that infuses culture in valleys of viticulture (and blazes new trails in cities, too).

The artist and serial prankster Maurizio Cattelan denies stealing 18-carat loo entitled America from Blenheim Palace

The artist who made a solid gold toilet reportedly worth £4.8m has denied orchestrating its theft in a Banksy-style prank.

The 18-carat working loo was ripped from a wood-panelled room at Blenheim Palace, the birthplace of Sir Winston Churchill, in the early hours of Saturday.

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Devolved Parliament expected to sell for £1.5m-£2m, potentially becoming most expensive Banksy sold

Banksy’s withering view of the UK parliament, showing a Commons chamber packed full of chimpanzees, is to appear at auction for what could be a record amount of money.

The artist painted Devolved Parliament in 2009, when the word Brexit would have baffled people.

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