Art

The Scream’s price tag should make us all despair

May 4, 2012
By

Jonathan Jones

The art market has reduced Edvard Munch’s harrowing insight into the human condition to a saleable plaything

I used to like The Scream. Its sky of blood and zombie despair seemed to say so much, so honestly. Munch is a poet in colours. His pictures portray moods, most of which are dark. But sometimes on a spring day on the banks of Oslofjord he can muster a bit of uneasy delight in the world. Right now, I would rather look at his painting Ashes, a portrayal of the aftermath of sex in a Norwegian wood, or Girls on a Pier, whose lyrical longing is fraught with loneliness, than at Munch’s most famous epitome of the modern condition…..

The Guardian


Iraq in Venice

May 4, 2012
By

Iraq in Venice, six exiled artists show their work on a world stage

IN A country where a litre of water costs more than a litre of fuel, it isnt hard to see why art isnt a priority.

The irony and Alan Yentobs latest film for the BBCs Imagine series was full of it is that Iraq was once the cradle of civilisation.

Dictatorship, destruction and despair, particularly in 35 years of Saddam Husseins rule, have squeezed the life out of people and out of their culture…..

The Examiner

Jean Cocteau’s Murals in Notre Dame de France, London

April 3, 2012
By

Battle to save Cocteau’s hidden legacy from vandals and decay

Restorers are working in a little-known French church in central London to save works of art by the celebrated filmmaker Jean Cocteau which are threatened by pollution and “vandalism”.

Cocteau, who died in 1963, was well known in the UK as a director during the 1950s for works including Beauty and the Beast and Orpheus. He also wrote poetry, novels and plays. But his paintings are little known in Britain.

The murals in Notre Dame de France, a Roman Catholic chaplaincy close to Leicester Square, are part of a series of five sets of works carried out by the director, and the only ones in the UK.

The church was rebuilt after the Second World War, and Cocteau agreed to paint the murals in 1960 following a request from the French ambassador…..

The Independent

Art museum news

March 30, 2012
By

 


Swedish museum opening delayed until May
The opening of Bildmuseet, the new art museum building in the northern Swedish city of Umea, has been postponed from March to 19 May. “It [has taken] longer to install all the necessary technical… MORE

More art museum news from The Art Newspaper

The restoration of Leonardo da Vinci’s last work Saint Anne

March 30, 2012
By

The Louvre uncovers restoration of Leonardo da Vinci’s last work Saint Anne.

The 18-month-long restoration of the painting that Leonardo laboured on for 20 years until his death in 1519 will go a long way to raising “Saint Anne” to its place as one of the most influential Florentine paintings of its time and a step towards the high Renaissance of Michelangelo.

The cleaning has endowed the painting portraying the Virgin Mary with her mother Saint Anne and the infant Jesus with new life and luminosity. Dull, faded hues were transformed into vivid browns and lapis lazuli that had visitors awestruck.

“It’s unbelievable, so beautiful. Now you have that same feeling as when you enter Michelangelo’s restored Sistine Chapel. Look at the blue!” one visitor, Odile Celier, 66, said on Wednesday.

The exhibit brings together some 130 preparatory drawings and studies by Leonardo and his apprentices – something curator Vincent Delieuvin likened to “a police investigation” – tracing the painting’s conception and revealing to experts today the entire development over the last 20 years of Leonardo’s life…..

The Telegraph

Brian Sewell – Tracey Emin

March 20, 2012
By

Emin’s skill has been usurped by celebrity

Brian Sewell

A scrupulous art critic must admit that it was with a groan that he greeted the first news of Tracey Emin’s exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, with a groan that he read the premature ejaculatory articles and with a groan that he wandered through this retrospective celebration of unmediated autobiographical relics and self-centred sentimentality.

In the years since Charles Saatchi brought her to the fore in his Sensation show at the Royal Academy in 1997, I have said very little of Miss Emin; at that he exhibited her Tent, to the interior of which she had patchworked the names of “everyone I have ever slept with”, a thing of puerile simplicity, and, two years later, he acquired the tumbled bed that was her notorious installation for the Turner Prize, a squalid relic of concupiscence and misery reconstructed in self-pity. Neither had much to do with art, both justified my contempt for the parading of herself that were the works of her earlier hang-out years, and I thought that even our insane contemporary art world would have enough common sense to let her fade into obscurity. She did not. She became instead, largely through the amused but sceptical interest of the popular press, a very public figure, cunningly exploiting ignorance, irascible emotion and raw sex to draw attention to herself…..

London Evening Standard

Sotheby’s

March 16, 2012
By

ALICE GREGORY

I spent the summer after graduation reading novels in McCarren Park. I had been warned that nobody was hiring and was secretly relieved because this meant it wasn’t entirely on me to have a legitimate job. I could copy-edit and babysit and transfer money from my savings account to my checking account in prudent but relentless $50 installments. It was fun so long as it was warm out, but by late September it was too chilly to read outside, and I was running out of money.

A classmate from college set me up at Sotheby’s, a company I knew little about. In my interview, I told my future boss that I had never been able to imagine an idea that could be best expressed by painting it. “But,” I added, making exaggerated eye contact, “appreciating art doesn’t mean you can send effective emails. I can write. I can make your job easier for you.” This is the best thing to say in an interview if you are young and unqualified to do anything other than maintain a personal blog. I started three weeks later…..

 N+1

A Lost da Vinci Masterpiece?

March 13, 2012
By

Have Art Experts Discovered a Lost da Vinci Masterpiece?

In 1505, the city of Florence commissioned its treasured artist, Leonardo da Vinci, to paint a sprawling fresco depicting the city’s victorious battle with the Milanese in 1440. Da Vinci, who was known to detest war, eventually abandoned the project, leaving the scenery of military men on horses to vanish forever. Or so they thought.

Teaming up with a few scientists, art historians are claiming that they may have uncovered evidence of da Vinci’s lost fresco, concealed by another painting in Florence’s city hall, Palazzo Vecchio, MSNBC reports. The project, known to some as “Lost Leonardo,” sparred debate in the art world over whether it still existed — and if researchers should drill holes into Giorgio Vasari’s historical fresco, “The Battle of Marciano,” to see if their theory could be proven right…..

Time Magazine

Damien Hirst and Money

March 10, 2012
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Damien Hirst: ‘I still believe art is more powerful than money’

Damien Hirst has gone from mouthy YBA to global brand over the past 25 years – and become the world’s richest living artist on the way. Here he talks about money, mortality and his first retrospective in Britain.

When Damien Hirst was looking though his archive recently, in preparation for his forthcoming retrospective at Tate Modern, he came across some film footage of an interview he did with David Bowie in the Gagosian Gallery in New York in 1996. “I’m sitting on a big ashtray talking bollocks,” says Hirst, laughing. “At one point, Bowie says, ‘So what about a big Tate gallery show, then?’ And I say, ‘No way. Museums are for dead artists. I’d never show my work in the Tate. You’d never get me in that place.’”

He grins ruefully and shakes his head. “I was watching it and thinking, ‘Jesus Christ, how things change.’ Suddenly, I’m 46 and I’m having what they call a mid-career retrospective. It doesn’t seem right somehow.”…..

The Guardian

 

New York exhibition reviews from ArtForum

February 21, 2012
By

New York Exhibitions

Artforum