News

Ned Kelly’s little sister was as famous as the Kardashians in her day. So why do we ignore her story?

When I was a young person growing up in Forbes in the central west of New South Wales, my uncle told me that Kate Kelly, the younger sister to renowned bushrangers Ned and Dan Kelly, had lived in the town for a number of years. But it wasn’t until 2010 that I discovered that the teenaged Kate had ridden as a decoy for and delivered news and supplies to the Kelly Gang when they were on the run in north-east Victoria from 1878 to 1880. I was instantly intrigued, and jumped down the rabbit hole of research, hot on Kate’s heels.

I have long had an interest in the Kelly family. My creative practice has been visual art since the early 1990s, and in 2007 I produced a series of social commentary paintings that used Ned Kelly and other icons to ask questions about who we are as Australians. A painting from that series, Ned’s Burqa, was a finalist in the Blake prize. So when I was chasing Kate Kelly through my research, I knew I would paint her story, but I never thought I would end up writing it.

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The Guardian’s picture editors select photo highlights from around the world

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Portrait of Lenin and spy tools among items snapped up at auction by group planning UK exhibition

It depicts the Russian revolutionary leader in characteristically serious mood, staring across Red Square, perhaps, and rendered with more than a touch of kitsch.

But while a Soviet-era oil painting of Vladimir Lenin, which sold for nearly $2,000 at auction in the US, might capture the man as many know him, its buyers are not exactly Bolsheviks.

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Fetid canals, flowers and fresh linen... ahead of its forthcoming new show about smell in golden age art, The Hague’s Mauritshuis has created a virtual tour with a scent box. Our critic inhales…

Art is for the eyes, but what about the nose? Can it rouse our olfactory senses? I smell the musty fug of a secondhand bookshop when I look at the paintings of Anselm Kiefer. A friend with more pronounced synaesthesia gets the scent of stewed apples in front of a Manet. A fellow critic swore he detected the tang of urine drifting off one of Tracey Emin’s appliqued blankets, but the piece was all about bedwetting so perhaps the suggestion was already there. Still there are ways in which art may appeal to the nose.

But they are neither simple nor obvious, as a highly unusual new show at the Mauritshuis in The Hague makes clear. Odour is intangible; scent is invisible. Just painting an object with a familiar smell doesn’t necessarily evoke it. Nobody claims to be seduced by the fragrance of a lily so much as the way it is painted, say, by Georgia O’Keeffe. Nobody holds their nose before the glittering fish in Velázquez’s Christ in the House of Mary and Martha. And I’ve yet to meet anyone who claims to be able to smell even one of the immense range of cheeses in a Dutch still life.

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Campaigners will ‘shame’ mansion’s offshore owners into fully restoring national treasure or selling it on

A vast architectural gem, often nicknamed “the Welsh Versailles”, is crumbling into ruin despite its Grade-I heritage status and several unique claims to fame, much to the distress of the building’s many fans.

Now the sad state of Kinmel Hall, a mansion near Rhyl in Conwy and the largest surviving country house in Wales, has prompted the launch of a campaign to shame its owners, a property company based in the British Virgin Islands, into either explaining their intentions, fully restoring it or selling it on.

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For the Observer’s cartoonist, keeping a daily pictorial record of events was the only way to make sense of last year. He tells how a new book was the result

On 13 December 2019 I woke up and reached out for the “on” button of my bedside radio. I lay back and listened to the familiar voices of Radio 4’s Today programme tell me the results of the general election. As the interviews and analysis washed over me, I felt that mixture of emotions that had become all too familiar. Anger, sorrow, disbelief and helplessness. It was how I had felt when Nick Clegg became David Cameron’s useful idiot, when Boris Johnson and Michael Gove stood at the podium dumbfounded by their Brexit victory and when Donald Trump’s tiny hands grasped the reins of power and he became the leader of the free world. Now a bumbling buffoon had won a working majority and was going to “Get Brexit done”.

As I shouted at the radio, I noticed the sketchbook next to it. I love drawing in sketchbooks. I have hundreds of them all over my house and studio in various stages of completion. My advice to all aspiring illustrators is to keep a sketchbook and draw in it every day. For two years, during my time as the children’s laureate, I drew a daily sketch charting my travels and posted the pages on social media. I found it therapeutic and cathartic in equal measure. Now, as the country woke up to the prospect of five years of Tory government, I stifled my shouts and reached for my sketchbook. I drew a troll in a nappy holding a spiked club and felt momentarily better.

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Campaigners call for historic sports venue in Madrid to become a world heritage site after its €38m restoration

Beneath a pale-blue late-winter sky, and behind an elegant but unassuming facade, one of Madrid’s great unsung survivors sits waiting, once more, for news of the latest in a long and improbable series of metamorphoses.

Since its inauguration 127 years ago, the Frontón Beti-Jai, built at the height of the Spanish capital’s love affair with the Basque game of pelota, has echoed with the crack of leather-stitched balls, with cheers, screams, the thrill of invention, the gunning of thirsty American engines and, most recently, the chirping of the birds who nested in its almost terminal decay.

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The gifted writer summons the eclectic travels of Albrecht Dürer with captivating passion, poignancy, pure wonder and a personal twist

Albrecht Dürer was the first great sightseer in the history of art, travelling Europe to see conjoined twins, Aztec gold, Venetian gondolas and the bones of an 18ft giant. He crossed the Alps more than once and voyaged for six days in the freezing winter of 1520 to see a whale on a beach in Zeeland. The ship was nearly wrecked, but somehow Dürer saved the day and they eventually reached the shore. The sands were empty. The great creature had sailed away.

This magnificent new book by Philip Hoare takes its title from that tale, but only as a point of departure. The narrative soon turns into a trip of another kind entirely, a captivating journey through art and life, nature and human nature, biography and personal memoir. Giants walk the earth: Dürer and Martin Luther, Shakespeare and Blake, Thomas Mann, Marianne Moore, WH Auden, David Bowie. Hoare summons them like Prospero, his writing the animating magic that brings the people of the past directly into our present and unleashes spectacular visions along the way.

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In 1974, Brian Griffin’s smuggled-out images of life in Moscow contrasted everyday vulnerability with the power of the state

In November 1974, Brian Griffin flew from Luton airport to Moscow on a three-night Thomson Holidays city break with his flatmates. Griffin, who had spent the first decade of his working life in factories in the Midlands, had not long graduated from Manchester Polytechnic as a photographer. An “ardent socialist” at the time, everything about Moscow both fascinated and troubled him. On the first morning of that trip a military parade passed the Intourist hotel where he was staying. Griffin squeezed through the barrier with his camera and joined the procession as it passed the Lenin mausoleum and the watching President Brezhnev. The parade was the last to feature nuclear missiles. “The whole atmosphere was painted with greyness,” Griffin recalls, in his new retrospective book, Black Country Dada 1969-1990. “It was inspiring.”

Over the following days, Griffin ducked out of the mandatory organised tours and wandered around Moscow, followed, he later realised, by KGB agents. He took this picture at the Monument to the Conquerors of Space, the 100m-high titanium sculpture that stands at the entrance to the Exhibition of Achievements of the National Economy. The image was made by the Muscovite trying to navigate his way down the rain-slicked base of the monument as if caught in the rocket’s backdraft – the defensive briefcase and crouch emphasising a sense that he is a man swept aside by fearful progress. Later in the trip Griffin was confronted by the agents who were tailing him, who demanded his camera and removed the film; the roll that contained this image was safely back at his hotel.

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“Living Smoke” was scheduled for April but the California venue withdrew after an activist said the colorful smoke display could harm the environment.

Exclusive: The street artist’s latest work saw 60 people parade through Lake Cawndilla in NSW, holding aloft enormous portraits of local farmers and leaders as they fight to save Australia’s vital river system

The mood around Lake Cawndilla in north-west New South Wales on Saturday is funereal but defiant, as a procession of around 60 locals parade through scrub and sand around its banks.

They carry between them a series of 30m-long cloth figures: three local citrus farmers and prominent Baakandji artist William Badger Bates.

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Photography collective Oculi’s first group project gives a glimpse into the lives of 12 members and the people they share their lives with

Conor Ashleigh – photographer

Mazie Turner was more than just my creative mentor; she was a friend, an aunty, a collaborator and above all one of my greatest inspirations. Since passing away in 2014, Mazie has never been far away.

This January I made the most of a summer in Australia and headed north on a road trip. I visited Mazie’s two eldest granddaughters Mali and Lily, both of whom I had often photographed a decade ago as part of my project Baby in a Chapel. I was amazed to see how Mali and Lily had grown and flourished in the seven years since I saw them last. Mali was entering her final year of high school, and she had become a talented and articulate young woman.

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Many people are dedicated to protecting the forests of Victoria, spending days and nights sleeping under tarps and banners. Photographer Rachel Mounsey asks them why they keep returning

The word was out: a section of the unburnt forest on the edge of the scorched Errinundra plateau was set to be logged and the small nearby community of Goongerah in Gippsland’s far east were on alert.

Goongerah is nestled on the edge of the plateau. The ‘green’ town has a history of conservation and many of its residents settled there in the early 80s to blockade against the fast train that was set to pass through the region. Thanks to their efforts, the train line didn’t go ahead.

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Once known as the 20-year-old who survived cancer, Shelby Sherritt now has half-a-million TikTok followers who are more interested in her art

For years, Shelby Sherritt was known as the “cancer girl”.

“All my friends were like ‘Oh, she’s going through treatments’ or ‘That’s the girl from high school that got cancer’,” she says.

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CHEN CHENG MEI, who died last December at the age of ninety-one, will be most remembered as the woman behind the Ten Men Art Group. This loose collective of Singapore-based artists made work inspired

CHEN CHENG MEI, who died last December at the age of ninety-one, will be most remembered as the woman behind the Ten Men Art Group. This loose collective of Singapore-based artists made work inspired

Reed Wilson has a theory: that these days women start to paint when they are older, and carry on. Men hit their peak earlier and give up. She studied at Camberwell and Brighton in the 1980s, but it was considered ‘a bit lowbrow’ to paint still lifes, and she stopped. Until 18 months ago, when someone gave her some sweets. Watching light glint off their wrappers, she saw that each twist was slightly different, that these uniform objects had ‘their own little characters’ . Wilson also became fascinated by confectioners’ compulsion to turn sweets into cartoon creatures – prawns or snakes. Her other paintings – a ball of twine, an egg cup, a tea towel transfigured by light – make familiar objects look extraordinary and utterly themselves. Mostly acrylic on board, they are all small, and all marvels.

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The second world war veteran and NHS fundraiser extraordinaire was laid to rest in his home town of Bedford

• Captain Sir Tom Moore - in pictures

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Philippa and Grayson Perry, Fran Lebowitz, Hastings fishermen and Laverne Cox – the best photography commissioned by the Observer in February 2021

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Gaëlle Choisne’s exhibition—her first at this gallery named for its production of artists’ editions—feels at home here, as her work consistently addresses porous boundaries between original and copy,

The replica of Picasso’s famed painting depicting the horrors of war had hung outside the Security Council chamber since 1985, on loan from the Rockefeller family.

Eddie Martinez New Paintings 2 March 18 – May 15, 2021 Loyal, Stockholm

CHART is pleased to present “Haven,” an exhibition of new works by Shona McAndrew. Occupying both floors of the gallery, McAndrew will debut nine new paintings and seven new watercolors. With this

Deep cuts are expected to touch a number of departments at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum, considered to be the world’s top decorative arts museum, as the institution struggles to trim roughly $14

Protests in Spain and Myanmar, a swarm of locusts in Kenya, Mars seen from Nasa’s Perseverance rover and the enduring impact of Covid-19: the most striking images from around the world this week

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THE PRIZES WERE AWARDED a month ago, some very big deals have closed in recent weeks, and the Sundance Film Festival has closed its streaming platform, hopefully never to be used again—at least not as

Celebrity guests and talented members of public get creative as the hit series returns, with the irrepressible artist beautifully guiding us through their stories

Being irrepressible without making people want to kill you is a rare and valuable life skill, even under normal conditions. Under lockdown, it makes you a pearl beyond price. So praise the Lord and pass the clay and canvas that Channel 4 have found enough in the coffers to commission Grayson Perry for another series of Grayson’s Art Club. It essentially plays as a pandemic version of Take Hart, and has as much of a tonic effect as the name suggests.

Grayson (and his psychotherapist wife Philippa, no art slouch herself) create work responding to a different theme each week and a larger one over the course of the series. Celebrity guests contribute – mostly via online interviews – and the public in send their own submissions. Grayson interviews the creators of some of his favourite ones and puts them up in his equivalent of Hart’s gallery – an exhibition in Manchester. Or he will do, once Covid allows.

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My friend the American painter Philip Morsberger, who has died aged 87 of complications arising from coronavirus, played a significant role in the recent history of the Ruskin school of art in Oxford, now part of the department of fine art at Oxford University.

Born in Baltimore, Philip was awarded a scholarship to Maryland Institute College of Art in 1946, at the age of 13, before attending Baltimore City College. His father, Eustis Morsberger, was a newspaper man, and his mother, Mary (nee Burgess), taught English and French at local schools.

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

Prominent architects had criticized the order for seeking to impose a national style from above.

Photographer Tasha Hall creates what she calls ‘farmily’ portraits – featuring families and their animals. Hall, from British Columbia in Canada, says she got the idea after wanting to include all her furry friends in a family portrait. She now travels the world capturing other families with their livestock and pets

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Selling digitally isn’t the same, most agree. But that doesn’t mean that bricks-and-mortar exhibition spaces will all return to how they were.

Mark Rothko’s chapel turns 50, the British Museum examines the male and female lives of the Chevalier d’Éon and Britain’s favourite odd-couple artists capture the new normal – all in your weekly dispatch

Gilbert and George: The New Normal Pictures
Psychedelic hallucinations of the London streets in lockdown that capture the sheer strangeness of our time.
• White Cube online from 2 March (and later at White Cube Mason’s Yard)

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London and Dublin have been at odds for a century over last will of art collector Sir Hugh Lane

A new chapter has been agreed between Britain and Ireland in an acrimonious century-old dispute over the ownership of 39 priceless masterpieces by artists including Manet, Monet, Degas and Renoir.

In 1915 the Irish art collector Sir Hugh Lane was among nearly 1,200 people who died when the Lusitania, an ocean liner, was torpedoed by a German U-boat off the southern coast of Ireland.

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Documentary photographer Kirsty Mackay examines the causes of the ‘Glasgow Effect’ in a highly personal project. She looks at Glasgow’s excess mortality in comparison to the UK average and shifts the focus from the individual to government policy.

• The Fish That Never Swam will be published as a book later this year.

In Glasgow people’s lives are cut short: male life expectancy in Possil is 66, in Penilee three young people took their own lives within the space of one week this June, suicide in Glasgow is 30% higher than in English cities, male life expectancy is seven years short of the UK average and women’s is four years less. This is not isolated to areas of deprivation – Glaswegians across all social classes experience a 15% reduction in life expectancy.

We have known about the “Glasgow Effect” for more than a decade. However, the root causes for Glasgow’s excess mortality are not in the public domain. The explanation lies in government policy – not with the individual and their lifestyle choices. Local and central government policies created an environment where segregation, alienation, mass unemployment, the generational trauma that followed, poverty and deprivation constitute a public health concern. During the 1970s and 80s Glasgow was in a “managed decline”. Unbeknown at the time, the city was starved of funding from Westminster.

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With public art collections closed, we are bringing the art to you, exploring gems from across the country in partnership with Art UK. Today’s pick: Joshua Reynolds’s Kitty Fisher as Cleopatra in Kenwood House, London

Catherine Maria “Kitty” Fisher was the most celebrated courtesan in England in the 1760s and was one of the first celebrities to be famous simply for being famous. Her career as a high-class prostitute allegedly began after she was seduced then deserted by a young army officer. Using her wit, charm and beauty, she rose to fame through high-profile liaisons with wealthy and powerful men. London society was both scandalised and fascinated by her behaviour, and she cultivated her celebrity status by collaborating with writers and artists to promote her public image.

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The recent sale of a cast for £12,500 is a testament to the Romantic poet’s enduring legacy, on the bicentenary of his death

There’s no mention of John Keats’s name on his tombstone – in fact you might accidentally pass right by it while strolling through the Cimitero Acattolico in Rome, were it not for its distinctly dour epitaph. “Here lies one whose name was writ in water,” is the bitter description, etched at Keats’s dying request, the final sentiment from a poet who believed his words would fade into oblivion.

When Keats died from tuberculosis aged 25, on 23 February 1821, the furniture in his room – now a museum – was burned. But his face was shaved and prepared, so a plaster cast could be applied to preserve his likeness. Now, 200 years on, two versions of Keats’s death mask produced by two castmakers circulate galleries, auctions and private collections for large sums. Their value is a testament to Keats’s enduring appeal; Where the Wild Things Are author Maurice Sendak owned one and would reportedly take it from its box next to his bed to stroke its forehead.

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Lois Dodd (b. 1927), whose career spans over seventy years, paints contemplative examinations of the quiet, clean brilliancy of everyday subjects in Maine, New York and the Delaware Water Gap.  In 1952,

“Between the Sky and the Water” is a mid-career retrospective of Janaina Tschäpe (b. Munich, Germany 1973). Tschäpe’s wide-ranging oeuvre is visually connected by a lexicon of forms that array across

David Goldblatt: Strange Instrument Curated by Zanele Muholi In Collaboration with Yancey Richardson Gallery. February 26 – March 27, 2021 “David Goldblatt: Strange Instrument” brings together

Titled after an eponymous 2017 work by Paula Rego, “The Sky was Blue the Sea was Blue and the Boy was Blue” presents blue works by nineteen Victoria Miro artists and explores the colour’s broad symbolic

A French appeals court has upheld a 2018 Paris High Court ruling in favor of fashion photographer Franck Davidovici, who in 2014 accused Koons of plagiarizing a magazine ad he had designed. The 1985

“There is no economic recovery in our area unless a working creative engine is driving it,” said Representative Karen Bass of California.

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.

Curators and conservators said to be in line of fire, ‘hollowing out the expertise of the museum’

Vast cuts at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) are feared to be imminent, with curators and conservators in the line of fire, the Guardian understands.

Details of the museum’s “recovery strategy” were briefed to unions on Thursday. Staff are expecting to hear news of redundancies within days.

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The government of president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has stepped up its campaign against cultural philanthropist Osman Kavala, on February 5 declining his request for release from prison—where has been held

No barriers. No texts. No heavy gold fabric. At the museum’s two-year sublet of the Breuer building on Madison Avenue, it’s just you and the masters.

They hung themselves from meat hooks, pelted their audience with offal – and blazed a trail for radical queer performance in Australia

Sylvia and the Synthetics – Australia’s audacious drag provocateurs and underground LGBTQ pioneers – burned brightly and chaotically for the short two years of their reign.

In 1972, Morris Spinetti, the group’s “founding mother”, was performing as a mime artist with Australia’s first female rock star, Wendy Saddington, when the concept was dreamt up with Paul Hock and Denis Norton.

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