News

Fresh from sharing a major award with Grandmaster Flash, the violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter returns to Carnegie Hall with Lambert Orkis nearly 30 years after her debut there.

A fitting shrine for Basquiat: A trophy art museum shows off a painter who felt he had been commodified.

The architect synthesizes Western and Japanese influences without ceding to one style.

An exhibition in Paris showcases the work of a Chinese photographer whose career was meteoric, and tragically brief.

Melbourne artist Rone transforms a deserted Art Deco mansion called Burnham Beeches in his most ambitious takeover yet. The installation runs from 6 March – 22 April

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The Louvre thinks the great Renaissance master might be behind the charcoal sketch known as the Monna Vanna, and the sitter might not be a woman

Leonardo da Vinci’s studio was a fun place. When they weren’t playing music and trying on clothes, he and his young assistants – among them the good-looking pickpocket Salaì – enjoyed making rude jokes. For that is what the Monna Vanna is. This charcoal drawing of a naked woman, a nude version of the Mona Lisa posed just like his renowned portrait, goes on exhibition in Paris later this year for Leonardo’s 500th anniversary. The Louvre has detected Leonardo’s own hand in it – evidence of his subversive sense of humour.

The Mona Lisa, which Leonardo worked on obsessively for years and kept with him until his death in 1519, is a painting of veiled ambiguities. Lisa Gherardini del Giocondo, the Florentine woman who posed for it, wears a diaphanous silk headcovering almost too thin to see, and subtle mysteries resonate from her shadowed eyes to the distant riverscape. The Monna Vanna (it translates as “vain woman”) is a blunt travesty preserving Leonardo’s own sly interpretation of his masterpiece.

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Number of towers of 20 or more storeys that are planned or under construction hits new record of 541

London’s skyline continues to head upwards, with a record 76 tall buildings due to be completed this year, a three-fold increase from 2018.

The number of tall towers – more than 20 storeys high – planned or under construction has also hit a new record of 541, up from 510 in 2017, according to the latest research from the industry forum New London Architecture (NLA).

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The 87-year-old, known for his visionary ideas including an inflatable concert hall, wins architecture’s Nobel prize equivalent

He’s designed an inflatable concert hall, an underground sports arena and envisaged entire cities floating above the earth’s surface. Now, at 87 years of age, Arata Isozaki has been crowned the winner of the 2019 Pritzker architecture prize, an honour regarded as the Nobel prize of architecture.

Regarded as a visionary who helped foster an architectural dialogue between the east and west, Isozaki’s style has remained fluid for more than half a century of work. He first made waves with his futuristic 1962 City in the Air project, in which Tokyo’s Shinjuku district was reimagined with a new city suspended over the old one on tree-like structures. Though unrealised, the project was a taste of what was to come: among Isozaki’s best-known works are the red sandstone Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the twisting, metal Art Tower Mito in Ibaraki, Japan and the Palau Sant Jordi, a 17,000-person sports arena designed for the 1992 Summer Olympic Games in Barcelona, that sits partially below ground in order to draw focus to the surrounding hillside.

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As the 46th Pritzker Prize winner is announced, we explain why the award is considered architecture’s highest honor.

Wallace Collection, London
This exhibition invites you to compare the British artist’s work to antique armoury and Picasso – both show him up as slow, ponderous and complacent

Henry Moore should have been a teacher. He was, of course, a tutor at London art schools, like many artists are before they can afford to work in the studio full time. But he should have taught full-time and never gone near a chisel. That way his enormous erudition and civilised appreciation of art, history and mythology could have inspired generations of pupils – he was 88 when he died in 1986 – instead of becoming grist for his massive but mediocre artistic output.

The Wallace Collection gives a textbook demonstration (and it really is as thrilling as a textbook) of why knowledge is not the same as inspiration in its pointlessly scholarly exhibition of some of Moore’s silliest sculptures. It is a tragic encounter between fascinating historical sources and the woolly jumper he knitted from them.

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Restored with relish, the unhappy 1990s gallery is now proudly of its place. With eye-popping interiors inspired by a 1978 Habitat catalogue, this is a shining temple to Milton Keynes’ mythology

Home to Buckinghamshire’s leading collection of roundabouts and an army of mirror-clad retail sheds that seems to march for an eternity, Milton Keynes has long been the butt of sneering metropolitan jokes. A garden city dominated by roads, where pedestrians are shuffled through underpasses, it is the British experiment in modernity which proved that, unlike our mainland European cousins, we were never cut out to be modern.

But a new £12m reboot of the city’s contemporary art gallery aims to celebrate the weird and wonderful quirks of the 1960s new town in all its undervalued suburban glory. The new-look MK Gallery is a shining temple to the curious mythology of the place, an unapologetic hymn to the land of big boxes and concrete cows.

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Sixteen years ago, 24 photographers agreed to document New Year’s Day for the following 24 years. Each was allocated one hour of the day to record what was going on around them and each moves forward one hour every year. Here is a selection of their work, which is displayed in Soho Square, London, until Tuesday 19 March

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Photographer Graeme Oxby’s book The Kings of England is a collection of portraits of Elvis impersonators taken from all over the UK. They can be seen in the exhibition Forever Elvis at Format Festival 15 March - 14 April 2019

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The shoe designer has financed the refurbishment of the Art Deco museum where signs inspired him to draw his first stilettos.

The winner of Sony’s Outstanding Contribution to Photography award says: ‘My pictures seek to expose the shadow and vulnerability that exists in all of us – and it is this vulnerability that I find so beautiful’

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The ArtCenter/South Florida, founded to provide affordable studios, is planning to build a $30 million, 40,000-square-foot art center in Little Haiti.

Readers respond to an article outlining two radically different plans for civic art collections; what inspired Hockney and where his work should be displayed; and the ‘lost’ Caravaggio

It is a sad irony that Hertfordshire county council should place the bulk of its art collection under the hammer (The big question: how many paintings can you fit on a wall?, 2 March) two days before an exhibition (Barbara Hepworth: artist in society 1948-53) opens in St Albans to celebrate her connection with the county.

Some of her works are at schools and colleges there, but now the council is flogging off her delightful sketch of a theatre nurse. This picture was owned by the county’s pioneering director of education, John Newsom, who gave it to the collection he established in 1949 for lending to the county’s schools. He would surely be dismayed by the philistine action of the current council.

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The dinosaur will always be the predator potentate. But let’s not forget all the other members of the royal family.

A show at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam brings together works by the contemporary British painter and the 19th century Post-Impressionist he so admired.

Palazzo dell’Arte, Milan
It’s the end of the world as we know it – and the design exhibition is showing artefacts which should ensure that the human race goes out on a high

As Europe basked in the hottest winter temperatures on record last week, the Milan Triennale opened with a suitably foreboding title – Broken Nature: Design Takes on Human Survival.

“We will become extinct,” said the show’s curator, Paola Antonelli, with the calm smile of someone who has already accepted our imminent armageddon. “That much is certain. But with this exhibition I’m promoting the idea of designing a better ending. How can we leave a more adequate legacy, so that the next dominating species will not think of us as total morons?”

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My mother, Mary Banham, who has died aged 96, was an artist, curator and a committed modernist.

She was the elder daughter of John Mullett, a London county council parks inspector, and his wife, Kathleen (nee Garrett). She was born and brought up in London, mainly in Blackheath. At school, she was interested in both arts and sciences and wanted to be a surgeon, but was told her maths was not good enough. Instead Mary went to Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts.

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The auction house says earnings were bolstered by $1 billion in private sales, though profitability was down, and that online-only sales were up.

Wallace Collection shows sculptures alongside the armour that inspired them

Henry Moore’s celebrated series of helmet head sculptures, which he made sporadically over three decades, will this week be exhibited together for the first and probably only time.

The group of seven works will go on display at the Wallace Collection in London for a groundbreaking exhibition that explores the artist’s fascination with armour and reveals how much how it fed his imagination and inspired his work.

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The former director of the Manchester international festival has a reputation for bringing diverse creative talents together. At Manhattan’s the Shed, he says, everything is up for reinvention

In 2014, Alex Poots, then artistic director of the Manchester international festival, was approached by a group of New Yorkers with a perplexing proposal. Would he be interested, they asked, in moving to Manhattan to run an as yet unbuilt arts centre, to which $75m (£57m) in public money had been committed but for which, at that stage, there were no offices, no staff, no website, no bank account and no mission, beyond that of creating something that was “unlike anything else in New York”? A blank space, in other words, and “terrifying”, says Poots, which is why his instinct was to jump and say yes. “There’s that quote: if you’re not in over your head, how will you ever find out how tall you are?”

Five years later, we are in the offices of what, this April, is going to open as the Shed, the largest new art space to have opened in New York since the Lincoln Center in 1962. Since being hired, Poots and his board have raised half-a-billion dollars in private funding and doubled the scale of the Shed so that, when it opens this spring with a programme of original commissions including works by Steve McQueen and Björk, it will be in a multistorey glass complex where the largest performance space can accommodate up to 2,000 people. There will be rehearsal and lab spaces for emerging artists, a pop-up bookshop and a 20,000 sq ft outdoor plaza for huge events. Behind all of this will be Poots who, at 51, has the kinetic energy of someone staring down an extremely short deadline and asks the central question of any public art space: “Who is it for?”

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Tate Modern; White Cube Bermondsey, London
A show full of surprises reveals Dorothea Tanning as so much more than the last surrealist, while Tracey Emin delivers a monotone lament in 100 works

A startling painting in this terrific survey of the American artist Dorothea Tanning (1910-2012) shows dinner time in some conventional midwestern home. The paterfamilias, with blinding spectacles and a hideous orange tie, towers above the proceedings. His daughter is much smaller; tinier still is a cook bearing a dish, who is not much bigger than the family dog. Each is portrayed according to their power. The daughter shoots us an urgent glance: home life really is as bad as it looks.

This tragicomic tableau is one of many surprises unleashed at Tate Modern. If all one knows of Tanning is the conventional tale – the girl from Illinois who made it to Paris, married Max Ernst and became the last surrealist, still at work in the 21st century – the show will be nonstop revelation. It gives us the artist whole, from the early self-portraits to the marvellous late visions of unbridled joy, and reveals her as extraordinarily original, quizzical and humorous, with a profound talent for probing the quick of our psyches.

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Competing plans for the world’s most famous bell foundry and the move from west to east London of three national medical institutions tell two sides of the same story

If there’s one thing you can say about Whitechapel it is that it has a lot of history, some of it of a certain flavour. Jack the Ripper and the Kray twins plied their trades round here. The Elephant Man was displayed in a freak show on the main street, before being taken to live in the nearby Royal London Hospital. The brown-coloured, second-cheapest neighbourhood on the original Monopoly board is the epitome of the East End, with its historic association with slums and crime. It is also where things were made, both objects and ideas, literature and progressive politics – the latter forged by the very extremity of the place.

All of which means that Whitechapel is high on the list of case studies of the global phenomenon whereby places of industry become places of art become places of property development and hipsterdom. To live in the area, as I do, is to hear the constant rush of old things disappearing and new ones arriving. Stories tend to run along similar lines: the multilayered fabric of the past is stripped out, and the complexity that makes it attractive to speculators is normalised by speculation. Places shaped by work become generic residential real estate.

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A favorite of corporations, museums and government, he was given wide leeway in expressing his restless imagination in refined but daring ways.

Gohar Dashti’s take on the aftermath of the Iran‑Iraq war captures her nation’s ongoing sense of trauma

The photographer Gohar Dashti was born in 1980 in Ahvaz, a city in south-west Iran, near the border with Iraq. For the first 10 years of her life, her home was a battlefield in the brutal war between the neighbouring states. She spent many childhood nights in an air-raid shelter and she looked on as the place that was all she knew was reduced to rubble. Dashti’s work has always focused on the legacy of conflict, a fallout that continues around Ahvaz both physically – the rivers are poisoned, the wheat fields barren – and psychologically.

From her earliest work a decade ago, Dashti has approached this post-conflict history not as a documentary photographer, but as a conceptual artist. She grew sick, she has said, of foreign photojournalism – women in chadors brandishing machine guns. Instead, she wanted to use her pictures to locate the more intractable insecurity that she recognised all around her. She started staging pictures that juxtaposed the expectations of normal life events – celebrations of weddings or birthdays – with the ever-present detritus of war.

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Fiona MacCarthy’s engrossing life of the Bauhaus founder reveals a passionate man whose reputation for coldness is largely undeserved

Maybe it started with his name: Gropius. Ugly, strange, hard to place, not even obviously German, more suited to a microbe or a medical condition than a person. Then Walter – a touch comical, archaic, swotty. It – that is, the development of the public perception of the famous architect – continued with certain serious-going-on-scowling photographs of the man, with Evelyn Waugh’s satire of him in Decline and Fall as the doctrinaire Otto Silenus, and with the unflattering memoir of his ex-wife Alma Mahler. A “tired twilight” was how she described their marriage.

For whatever reason, the image of Walter Gropius is generally that of a dry old stick, the name polemicists used to wield (for example, Tom Wolfe in From Bauhaus to Our House) when they wanted to berate modernist architecture for its soulless functionalism. It is a version of the man that Fiona MacCarthy wants to dispel.

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Composer offered a handsome price, according to dealer Bill Acquavella, ‘but Lucian said his face was too soft’

Lucian Freud was one of Britain’s most significant artists, responsible for some of the most coveted paintings of the 20th century. But the process of sitting for a portrait by him was no easy business, according to the man who acted as Freud’s dealer for almost 20 years.

For one thing, not everyone made the cut. “He had to like something about the person before he would work with them. Plenty of people he turned down,” Bill Acquavella said.

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Forty years ago, three men set up a photography studio on the street in the Birmingham suburb of Handsworth and invited passersby to take their own pictures

• Read an interview with photographers Derek Bishton and Brian Homer, and some of the Handsworth residents
  
• Handsworth Self Portrait: 40 Years On runs at MAC Birmingham from 23 March to 2 June
  

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In 1979, Derek Bishton, Brian Homer and John Reardon put a pop-up outdoor photography studio in the Birmingham suburb where passersby could take their own pictures

• View a gallery of the Handsworth self-portraits

On 18 August 1979, Kanta Korotania and her twin sister, Amerjit, got wind that something unusual was going on just down the road from where they lived in the Birmingham suburb of Handsworth. Outside the terraced house at 81 Grove Lane, three men had hung a plain white photographic backdrop from the front window. A few metres away, fixed to a tripod, was a motor-driven 35mm Nikon camera with a long cable release. The men said they wanted to make a big community family album for Handsworth and were inviting people who lived in the area to take their own picture.

“My siblings and I – there were eight of us – went over with great excitement and decided to take a photo,” Korotania recalls nearly 40 years on. When it was her and Amerjit’s turn, the two 11-year-olds in their matching shalwar kameez turned their backs to the camera, showing off waist-length pigtails. Kanta clicked the cable-release button, triggering the shutter, and in unison they spun round to take another picture facing the camera. Then they walked off, laughing.

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The paintings of the 18th century social critic are to be brought together for the first time

With subjects ranged from political corruption to loveless marriages, drunkenness to sexually transmitted diseases, Hogarth delighted and disgusted his 18th century contemporaries with some of the most biting satirical paintings ever produced.

Now the full power of his surviving series of painted masterpieces of corruption, greed and vanity are to be brought together for the first time for a major London exhibition.

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Don McCullin, Frank Gehry, Jorja Smith and The Specials - the best photography commissioned by the Observer in February 2019

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Kim Jong-un’s summit with Donald Trump in Vietnam, demonstrations at the border between Colombia and Venezuela, and Paris fashion week – the week captured by the world’s best photojournalists

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This week in our series of classic Guardian photographs, Denis Thorpe captures the Dance Theatre of Harlem rehearsing in Manchester

In 1968, at the height of the civil rights movement, Arthur Mitchell and Karel Shook founded the Dance Theatre of Harlem in New York. Years later, they toured Britain for the second time, which is where Guardian photographer Denis Thorpe captured them rehearsing at Manchester’s Opera House in the summer of 1976. Thorpe, who knew the dancers by reputation, recalls how he knew he wanted to freeze the moment when they were all off the ground. He developed the resulting under-exposed picture for far longer than usual, which gave it its high-contrast graphic quality. “I was completely blown away by their energy and physical perfection,” he says. “You can see how hard they’re working.”

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Christie’s said a Hawaiian sculpture that it sold in 2017 was about 200 years old. But some experts aren’t convinced.

Irish folk, Yiddish sounds and the blues will be featured. And more than 100 events by other organizations are being held in conjunction with the festival.

A gallery exhibition in Manhattan gives the truest picture of the artist, at 88, who is continuing to work and innovate.

Yukultji Napangati’s multilayered cartographic canvases; Erik van Lieshout’s show, awash in beer; and “The World According to …,” a group show anchored by a David Hockney video installation.

A shrinking map of the UK, xenophobic graffiti, a white flag … here is the depressing, defeated art of a country on the precipice of a historic mistake

So this is it: March. Month of mad hares and parted ways. Maybe, after all, 29 March will come and go and Britain will still be in the EU by parliamentary vote and, who knows, a delay could produce a second referendum. But as things stand, this is officially the last month of Britain belonging to the community of European nations. And a sad exhibition at one London gallery muses on the miserable stupidity of it all.

Related: 'I went loopy': the photographer who walked 1,200 miles from Wales to Poland

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Renaissance art exposed, Henry Moore goes rococo and what happens to British art after we leave the EU – all in our weekly dispatch

The Renaissance Nude
Some of the greatest artists in history, including Titian and Bronzino, portraying bodies of both sexes with unparalleled sensual poetry … what’s not to like?
• Royal Academy, London, 3 March-2 June.

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From Richard Rogers to Habitat and Ikea, the influence of the Bauhaus school is everywhere. So why is its charismatic founder, Walter Gropius, still so widely misunderstood?

Arrogant and charmless, obsessed with his own image, even phoney – this is how Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus, the most influential of all art schools, is remembered. He is the rigid disciplinarian, the architect unable to draw. In the five years I’ve spent writing about Gropius’s life, I have often been treated as crazy for taking on such an unsympathetic subject. The architectural historian Joseph Rykwert described Gropius as someone “who seemed to have fewer redeeming features than many of his kind … his pinched humourless egotism was unrelieved by sparkle”. But these received ideas need to be challenged. Why have people got him so wrong?

Why, for instance, has he been regarded as an unromantic figure? In Ken Russell’s 1974 film Mahler he is a dullard. The source of this reputation is found in the self-serving memoir of his first wife, Alma Mahler, And the Bridge Is Love (1959). Here she portrays Gropius as a nonentity in comparison with her other husbands, Gustav Mahler and Franz Werfel, and makes the Bauhaus movement seem like a tedious non-event. Gropius was in fact a charismatic figure, as we can see in records of his later affairs with two particularly interesting women, the artist Lily Hildebrandt and poet Maria Benemann. His love letters are filled with an ardour that will surprise those who imagine that he lacked passion.

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Tribunal rules 27 ‘sacked’ guides were not freelancers, as London gallery claimed

Art lecturers and educators who claim they were sacked by the National Gallery have won the right to be recognised as workers in one of the first public sector gig economy cases.

The 27 claimants, who worked in the building overlooking Trafalgar Square in London, should have been classified as workers rather than freelancers, an industrial tribunal has ruled.

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A damning new report details an attempted erasure by Azerbaijan of its Armenian cultural heritage, including the destruction of tens of thousands of Unesco-protected ancient stone carvings

The 21st century’s most extensive campaign of cultural cleansing to date may not have happened in Syria, as you might assume, but a largely ignored part of the Transcaucasian plateau.

According to a lengthy report published in the art journal Hyperallergic in February, the Azerbaijani government has, over the past 30 years, been engaging in a systematic erasure of the country’s historic Armenian heritage. This official, albeit covert, destruction of cultural and religious artefacts exceeds Islamic State’s self-promotional dynamiting of Palmyra, according to the report’s authors, Simon Maghakyan and Sarah Pickman.

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With over 100 performances to come in his long goodbye tour, Elton John returns to New York City this month to play four nights.

Science fiction has predicted everything from the internet to mobile phones. Could it help us create concrete-free cities of the future?

• Find the rest of our Guardian concrete week pieces here

Science fiction loves its future cities: utopian visions of gleaming steel and glass, as in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), and grimly exciting dystopian labyrinths as in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982). But SF visionaries have rarely specified the materials from which their visions might actually be made.

The original Futurama, an exhibit at the 1939 New York World’s Fair designed by Norman Bel Geddes, wowed audiences with its towering apartment blocks and sweeping automated freeways (it was sponsored by General Motors). But though the design was mind-boggling, the proposed materials were still concrete and steel. New visions, but old materials.

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Tory-run Hertfordshire to auction most of its hoard but Labour-run Rochdale will display every work it owns

It is a tale of two civic art collections, one in the north, one in the south, both containing well over a thousand paintings and sculptures. But while Hertfordshire county council has decided to auction or give away most of its hoard later this month, Rochdale in Greater Manchester is attempting to put every single work it owns on display.

On 21 March, an auction house in Cambridge will sell some of the gems from the Hertfordshire collection, which includes a pastel work by the Scottish artist Joan Eardley that has an estimated value of £12,000–£18,000.

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The English goldsmith known for creating portrait miniatures captures the ethereal beauty of his sitters

Sixteenth-century England had Shakespeare and the metaphysical poets. But when it came to the visual arts, its contribution was, literally, tiny. The era’s pioneering artists adapted the skills of manuscript illuminators to miniature portrait painting or “limning”.

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The Chicago artist’s work is the subject of three exhibitions examining his life’s work to bring dignity to his community

In the 1930s, African American artist Charles White, a teenager in Chicago, raised his hand in high school. He stood up to his white teacher and asked why black history wasn’t in the school curriculum, curious as to why figures like Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner and Frederick Douglass were being ignored. It got him scoffed at, ridiculed and deemed an embarrassment by his fellow black classmates.

“When I spoke up about these ignored great figures,” he said, “I would be told to sit down and shut up.”

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