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A hat belonging to Napoleon Bonaparte when he ruled the French empire in the 19th Century will go on sale at auction in Paris on Sunday.
The bicorne black beaver felt hat is valued between â¬600,000 and â¬800,000 (£525,850-£701,131).
Historians say the headwear was part of Napoleon's brand. Wearing it sideways made him recognisable in battle.
He owned around 120 bicorne hats over the years, with only 20 thought to remain - many in private collections.
The hat is being sold along with other Napoleonic memorabilia assembled by an industrialist who died last year.
But the auctioneers said for specialists, the hat is the true holy grail.
The emperor wore his hat with the corns parallel to shoulders - known as "en bataille" - whereas most of his officers wore their hats perpendicular to the shoulders.
Auctioneer Jean Pierre Osenat said: "People recognised this hat everywhere. When they saw it on the battlefields, they knew Napoleon was there.
"And when in private, he always had it on his head or he had it in his hand, and sometimes he threw it on the ground. That was the image - the symbol of the emperor."
The auctioneers said this hat comes with impeccable provenance, remaining throughout the 19th Century in the same family of the quartermaster of Napoleon's palace.
The hat being auctioned by Osenat auction house in Fontainebleau has a cockade that Napoleon fixed to his hat in 1815, during the crossing of the Mediterranean from his exile in Elba to Antibes, where he lead a brief return to power.
Other items being sold include a silver plate looted from Napoleon's carriage after his 1815 defeat at Waterloo and a wooden vanity case he owned, with razors, a silver toothbrush, scissors and other belongings.
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Art and Culture
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The fate of Joshua Reynolds’s Portrait of Omai, one of the greatest British portraits ever painted and the country’s first grand portrayal of a non-white subject, hangs in the balance. If this astonishing work is lost abroad – as it may well be – once a government-imposed export bar runs out next month, it will leave more than an empty space on the wall of the National Portrait Gallery, which is running a last-ditch fundraising campaign to acquire it.
It will also expose the 70-year-old system intended to save art and cultural objects for the nation as unfit for purpose, able to define “national treasures” but unable or unwilling to fight to keep them here.
The figures speak for themselves. Two out of every three precious objects deemed so historically or aesthetically important that are temporarily banned from leaving the country end up sold overseas anyway, never to return. In 2021-22, the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art and Objects of Cultural Interest – the independent body of experts that advises the government on national treasures – recommended ministers defer export licences on 16 artefacts up for sale: a mechanism that is supposed to allow a breathing space to raise funds to keep them in Britain.
Of the 15 that ministers opted to place under export bar, however, just three were saved, three are still under deferral – including Portrait of Omai, owned by the Irish businessman John Magnier – and the other nine, including a Cézanne judged “outstanding” by the committee, were or can be exported.
We cannot, of course, save everything. Art acquisition, like politics, is about choices and the aggregate value of the 15 deferred artefacts was a huge £113,829,831 – the third highest total in the last 10 years, albeit inflated by the exceptional £50m price tag on the Reynolds portrait. (That figure, representing a significant profit on the £10.5m Magnier paid for the work in 2001, has been corroborated by independent valuation at the government’s request.)
Arts funding has been slashed, and at a time of enormous economic hardship for many, throwing money at paintings (or, more accurately, their wealthy private owners) can feel insensitive to the point of obscenity. Caution over these views at least partially explains the low-key, almost apologetic, campaign run by the National Portrait Gallery to raise funds for Portrait of Omai, even though its director, Nicholas Cullinan, describes the painting as “amongst the most important acquisitions we, as a nation, could ever make, and will be remembered for generations to come”.
The missing piece in all this, I suggest, is public involvement. Reynolds’s Omai is a work of exceptional beauty and historical importance, shedding light on unknown narratives around Indigenous travellers to Britain, with its portrayal of a young Polynesian man who journeyed here as part of Captain Cook’s second Pacific voyage and became a national celebrity. Yet, until now, just weeks before it could leave Britain forever, almost no one has been aware of its story or its potential loss.
The Art Fund, the leading charity that secures artworks for public museums and galleries, has given its largest ever grant – £2.5m – to try to save the portrait. But ministers have barely spoken up for it, nor have others in the art world who could have given the National Portrait Gallery some cover as it sought donations in hard times. “The government has just been paying lip service,” according to one closely involved individual. “If there is no public outcry they can claim it [the portrait] won’t be missed.”
Britain is not alone in struggling to reconcile the desire of the state to preserve cultural treasures for public view with the power of the international art market. The Netherlands has recently produced new criteria for protected goods and established a national export licence system after losing a multimillion-euro drawing by Peter Paul Rubens, sold at auction by a Dutch princess.
In Italy, any culturally significant artwork that is at least 70 years old, created by a deceased artist and worth more than €13,500 now requires an export licence to leave the country, and – if designated as of national importance – may be blocked from departure and sold only to Italian residents or institutions, a policy some regard as too sweeping. The French government, too, is ready vigorously to block export, while its use of generous tax breaks makes British gallery heads green with envy. Just last month, the luxury goods conglomerate LVMH shelled out €43m to acquire Gustave Caillebotte’s impressionist painting Boating Party for the Musée d’Orsay and received a tax break of 90% of the purchase price, prompting criticism that the real donors were French taxpayers.
The National Portrait Gallery’s plan for Portrait of Omai, if it can save it, is a starring role in its refurbished galleries, reopening in June, and then a five-year programme in which it will go on loan to galleries around Britain, with a special focus on educational visits for children. Rightly, the aim is to ensure a work should be as accessible as possible to all, in perpetuity. But just as there should be public access, so there should be a public voice in deciding what to save, especially in straitened times.
Instead of delivering their report and falling silent, experts on the Reviewing Committee should advocate for key works, drawing together coalitions of interest and arguing their case loudly and in public. We should hear more about export-barred objects with more time left to act: through the media, in parliament, from galleries and museums hoping to acquire them. A Dragons’ Den-style televised national treasure-off might be a step too far (although I’d watch it), but more noise, more explanation of the stories of at-risk artefacts and why they matter must be better than silence.
Omai may yet vanish, partly because no one stood up early enough and fought for it. We need, and deserve, a more informed debate about what national treasures really mean to us and how far we will go to save them.
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Art and Culture
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This story was originally published on The Conversation and appears here under a Creative Commons license.
An extremely important 1-ton sculpture, sometimes referred to by archaeologists as an “Earth Monster” or Monument 9, was repatriated to Mexico from a private collection in Colorado in May 2023, according to an announcement from Mexico’s Consul General in New York. The monument features the head of a front-facing creature with a gaping mouth: a supernatural being that represented the living, animate earth to an ancient culture in Central America and Mexico.
This sculpture was reportedly found at the base of a hill at Chalcatzingo, an archaeological site some 80 miles (130 kilometers) south of Mexico City, and dates to roughly 600 B.C. Chalcatzingo is closely related to Olmec culture, one of the earliest in ancient Mesoamerica.
I am an archaeologist specializing in Mesoamerica: an area that encompassed present-day southern Mexico, parts of Costa Rica and all of Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, El Salvador, and Nicaragua. I have visited Chalcatzingo many times while researching the development of this rich cultural region.
Many scholars regard the Olmec as the “mother culture” of ancient Mesoamerica, a civilization where particular types of monumental architecture, sculpture and gods originated. Among the later Maya, for example, the gods of wind, rain and corn—or more precisely, maize—are clearly derived from the earlier Olmec culture.
The Olmec heartland was in what are now the Mexican states of Tabasco and southern Veracruz, along the southern coast of the Gulf of Mexico. Much of their influence was based on economic wealth from corn.
Of Olmec art that has survived the centuries, their carved heads are particularly striking and well known. By 1000 B.C., Olmec sculptors at San Lorenzo, Mexico, had fashioned no fewer than 10 colossal heads, all over 6 feet high. Archaeologists believe these are individualized portraits of rulers, each with their own specific headdress: depictions of specific people, which is quite rare in New World art.
The Olmecs were also masters in the carving of jade. I was involved in locating the original Olmec and Maya jadeite sources in highland eastern Guatemala, found in stone outcrops often located about 6,000 feet above sea level.
Artisans beginning around 900 B.C. carved life-size jade masks that almost look like molded plastic, but which must have been the result of a laborious process to grind and polish this extremely hard, dense stone.
All Olmec sculpture was created for a purpose, whether it be religious or political. In the case of Monument 9, it clearly pertains to the Earth, which in Mesoamerica was considered a sacred, living being.
The Olmecs existed at a time when maize agriculture had first developed, which stabilized and increased their economy—a transformative shift in the development of Mesoamerican civilization.
During this period, they developed an elaborate religious system that emphasized the sacredness of corn and rain, including a maize god. Quite frequently, this deity is depicted with an ear of corn emerging out of the center of his cleft head. In other cases, the head is sharply turned back, invoking growing corn. This form appears in Teopantecuantitlán, an archaeological site in highland Mexico, where there is a masonry court with four images of the Olmec maize god.
As a tall grass, corn needs a great deal of water to survive the summer, making rain all-important. Trying to please the rain god in return for rain was a vital part of Olmec religion.
The Olmec spread similar practices and beliefs across ancient Mexico and Guatemala, probably in part to engage other peoples more directly with their economic trade network. Rather than an empire of domination, the Olmec were a culture focused on agricultural abundance and wealth.
Sacred mountains were of extreme importance as well, as can be seen at Chalcatzingo and at a hill called Cerro El Manatí, located very close to the site at San Lorenzo. At this hill, there is a perennial spring with sweet freshwater that fills a pool below at the base. In this pool, the Olmec offered a huge amount of valued material, including rubber balls for ritual sport, as well as many jadeite axes. According to two scholars of Mesoamerica, Ponciano Ortiz and María del Carmen Rodríguez, this is the first clear example of a sacred mountain of abundance, which persists in Mesoamerican belief and ritual to this day.
Far to the west of the Olmec heartland, in the Mexican state of Morelos, is Cerro Chalcatzingo, the site where the Earth Monster monument originated. Here, the Olmec focus on the mountain as a provider of wealth and sustenance, portrayed in several sculptures as a cave.
Even before Olmec times, the idea of fertile caves was shown as a four-lobed motif resembling a flower – an important symbol that continued even into the 16th century with the Aztec.
The most famous Olmec bedrock carving at Chalcatzingo is called Monument 1 and features a woman in profile—probably a goddess—seated within the cave. This carving is directly above where rainwater pours down from the top of the mountain. Below are what archaeologists call “cupules”: cuplike holes carved in bedrock directly below to receive this water, and collected by priests and pilgrims. On the opposite side of the hill is another rock carving featuring the same cave in profile, facing Monument 1.
Sadly, Monument 9, which was recently returned to Mexico, was looted from the site, so its original context is unknown. In archaeology, it is important to understand not only when an object was made and who created it, but where it was placed. Nonetheless, Monument 9 portrays the same cave as two other sculptures at the site, which are carved directly into the rock surface of the mountain.
Monument 9 is significant, as it denotes the central Earth Monster cave, and unlike the other two Olmec carvings, it is face-on rather than rendered in profile. It probably was placed against a mound with its open mouth leading to a chamber inside, symbolizing a portal to the underworld.
That this highly sacred object is back in Mexico is of utmost importance for Indigenous Mexicans. To its creators, Monument 9 likely represented the source of life and abundance, as well as sacred rituals associated with them—ideas and practices that pervaded subsequent Mesoamerican civilizations.
Karl Taube is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at University of California, Riverside.
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Art and Culture
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Sudha Murty was conferred with the Padma Bhushan in the presence of her family- her husband Infosys founder NR Narayana Murthy, son Rohan Murty, daughter Akshata Murty, who is married to the UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and her sister Dr Sunanda Kulkarni. As it happens, Narayana Murthy was conferred with the Padma Vibhushan in 2008.
The Murthys are known to be humble and understated and it was no different at the Padma ceremony, Moneycontrol learns that Akshata Murty, wife of the UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak was initially seated in the middle rows with her family, with minimal fuss or security in sight.
Government officials later asked her to move to the front row and seated her beside the Minister of External Affairs S Jaishankar, as per protocol. President Droupadi Murmu presented the Padma Bhushan to Sudha Murty for social work. A philanthropist, renowned author and former chairperson of Infosys Foundation, she has initiated many projects in the fields of healthcare, education, art and culture, animal welfare and women's empowerment.
After receiving the Padma Bhushan, Sudha Murty said, “I owe this award to the people of India. I hope my recognition today inspires the younger generation to take up social welfare as a vocation. It is needed for the continuous development of our great nation. I always feel that generosity of a few is hope for a million.”
Murty, who was the chairperson of Infosys Foundation until December 2021, has been on a journey to social causes for more than 25 years.
Under her leadership, Infosys Foundation supported a number of initiatives that help the underprivileged members of society working in remote areas across India with a focus on education, healthcare, rural development, destitute care, art & culture, mid-day meal schemes and water projects.
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Art and Culture
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Drawn and Quarterly
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A page from the graphic novel Roaming.
Drawn and Quarterly
Imagine New York City, 2009.
It's spring break and you're exploring the big city for the first time with friends. There's tension. Drama. Fits of irrepressible laughter.
This is Roaming, the first adult graphic novel from the Caldecott-winning cousins Jillian Tamaki and Mariko Tamaki. The cousins' previous collaborations include the young adult comics Skim and This One Summer.
The story in Roaming spans just five days as old friends Dani and Zoe reunite on their first break from college. Tagging along is Dani's new classmate, Fiona — whose presence quickly threatens to upend the trip.
As a romance begins to blossom between Zoe and Fiona, Dani is thrust to the side and, momentarily, forgotten.
The Tamakis have such a talent for capturing the highs and lows of friendship and love. Consider Fiona, whose strong personality and lust for adventure quickly cause friction among the friend group.
"Okay, but for real. We're paying too much money to hang out in our damn hostel," Fiona says. "We are gorgeous. We are young. We are in New York City. Now put on your [f---ing] shoes."
The fourth character here is, of course, the city itself. Illustrated in spare pastel pink and periwinkle coloring, images of famous museums, crowded streets, giant pieces of pizza and mountains of garbage abound through the more than 400 pages.
Drawn and Quarterly
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A page from Roaming.
Drawn and Quarterly
But then, juxtaposed against the rainy days are flights of fancy, like when Zoe and Dani kiss at the Natural History Museum and are suddenly tumbling through a kaleidoscope of butterflies.
There's a magic to Roaming. And it's not just in the gorgeous illustrations, but the story itself.
Young Asian American and LGBTQ+ people are front and center here, experimenting with love, sex, identity and ambition.
Roaming takes its place beside Alison Bechdel's Fun Home, Maia Kobabe's Genderqueer and Alice Oseman's Heartstopper in the growing canon of great queer comics. (To which Mariko Tamaki's previous work, Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me, also belongs.)
Given the rise in the number books, often containing LGBTQ+ content, being challenged for removal from some American schools and libraries, I can't help but wonder whether a book ban lies in Roaming's future.
I sincerely hope not.
Messy, tender and teeming with life, Roaming is exactly the kind of story young people today should be reading. I couldn't put it down.
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Art and Culture
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The Tate Britain gallery on London has unveiled a complete rehang of the world's greatest collection of British art.
More than 800 works by over 350 artists span six centuries. Its director, Alex Farquharson, says they "want to show that art isn't made in a vacuum".
So what can the works in one of our national collections tell us about Britain and its history?
The story of British art is the story of Britain
Tate's galleries are still laid out chronologically, from the 1500s to the present day. But the works are now linked to great moments in Britain's social and political history (wars, urbanisation, migration, revolution). We learn in an early room called Court Versus Parliament 1640-1720 that the artists on show were thriving at a time of huge turbulence: civil war, the execution of Charles I and the birth of party politics.
Alongside the portraiture, there's now a new commission by Nils Norman that reflects the birth of protest from that time. You might have heard of the Ranters and Levellers, whose pamphlets adorn a wall - but did you know about the Adamites? Their main demand seems to have been for humans to go naked (to bring them closer to Adam and Eve's pre-fallen state).
More women artists
Tate Britain has been investing in art by women to redress the balance for modern times. The earliest works on display, by Joan Carlile, Mary Beale and Anne Killigrew, date back to the 17th Century.
Carlile was one of the first British women artists ever to work professionally. Only around 10 portraits by her have been identified. Beale's success as an artist made her the main breadwinner for her family.
Farquharson says women artists have been "unfairly marginalised". Other notable historic female artists highlighted in the collection include Emily Sargent (who painted alongside her more famous brother John Singer Sargent) and Annie Swynnerton. Half of the living artists on display at Tate Britain are now women, and there are also more works by artists of colour.
A 'more truthful' account of history?
Tate Britain came in for criticism for its labelling of a Hogarth show in 2021, which Sunday Times critic Waldemar Januszczak described as "wokeish drivel".
The new rehang aims to offer more context to the works to provide "a more truthful account of history", says Farquharson. George Stubbs' Haymakers from 1785 shows a beautiful scene of rural workers. Tate Britain's label now includes a reminder that such idealised images of labour "rarely depict its harsh realities".
A painting depicting Caribbean life in the 18th Century by Agostino Brunias shows enslaved and free women of African descent dancing.
Brunias, says the label, mainly painted appealing images of plantation life for plantation owners. "Any reference to the forced labour and violence underpinning this is erased, as are his patrons' roles in this oppression."
Farquharson says the painting is "deliberately misleading" and meant for propaganda because it presents a "highly idealised picture of slave-owning society".
Do Tate's labels offer greater insights or diminish the art on show? It no doubt depends on your perspective, but to me, they felt like an extra layer of history.
Art for the crowds
In Victorian Britain, art attracted huge audiences as the emerging middle classes began to have money and leisure time. It was an era when Acts of Parliament and wealthy donors helped open public galleries with free entry. Some paintings became world famous.
These include John Martin's apocalyptic The Great Day of His Wrath. Martin was originally a coach painter from the north-east of England who began creating art to supplement his wages. After his death in 1864, this painting - part of a triptych - travelled around the world, thrilling crowds from New York to Sydney. It was the blockbuster movie of its day.
Technical advances influenced art
Just as technical advances have had an impact on the art of today, we learn how they changed the art being made in the 19th Century. The invention of tubes of paint, as well as faster drying paint and collapsible easels, allowed artists to explore faster, more spontaneous ways of painting, often outdoors 'en plein air'. The expansion of the railway network also made it easier for people to get out into the countryside to paint.
In the 1870s, what was at that point a radical art movement - Impressionism - aimed to capture 'the painting of the moment' by observing the fleeting effects of light and weather.
Who's in, who's out?
The rooms are still stacked full of favourites, from Van Dyck, Gainsborough, Hogarth and Constable to Hockney, Rego, Bowling and Riley (and if you're missing Waterhouse's Lady of Shalott, it's on loan to Falmouth and will be back on display when it returns).
For those who associate Tate Britain with Turner, these rooms remain as awe-inspiring as ever. We learn that, having been picked out by art critics as "one to watch" in his late teens, he became the artist journalists loved to hate. Responding to his hazy landscapes, one explained that "he is the painter not of reflections, but of immediate sensations".
Ever committed to his craft, did you know Turner claimed to have asked sailors to lash him to a mast for four hours so he could observe the power and volatility of a storm for one of his paintings?
Choppy waters of now?
The final room - chronologically - is called The State We're In, 2000-Now. Artists of different generations have been working at a time of upheaval, whether Brexit, Covid, a cost of living crisis, the war in Ukraine or the social movements of Black Lives Matter and Me Too.
If Tate Britain is asking us, through its rehang, to reflect on the history of Britain through five centuries of art, what can we take away from these works?
Two vastly different works depict the sea - Wolfgang Tillmans' detailed photograph of the waves and Lubaina Himid's reworking of a James Tissot painting in which she has two black women gazing from the deck of a boat off the Portsmouth coast.
Are these at least a nod to Britain, an island nation, and the choppy waters of our times?
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Art and Culture
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Legendary writer Kurt Vonnegut cleverly explains how to write the 3 stories everyone loves
Notice anything similar?
To be a great fiction writer requires understanding basic story structures and being clever enough to disguise them so your audience doesn’t know they’re watching or reading something they’ve seen before.
Academics suggest that there are only a finite number of plots and structures, but that number varies based on who’s doing the talking.
Writer Kurt Vonnegut, best known for his satirical works on American politics and culture, including “Slaughterhouse-Five,” “Cat’s Cradle” and “Sirens of Titan,” was obsessed with the shapes of stories and summed up his views in one powerful sentence: “The fundamental idea is that stories have shapes which can be drawn on graph paper and that the shape of a given society’s stories is at least as interesting as the shape of its pots or spearheads.”
In the video below, Vonnegut explains why the shapes of three different types of stories, from “person gets into trouble” to “boy meets girl” to “Cinderella,” can all be summed up on two axes: the Y represents good and bad fortune, the X represents the beginning and end of a story.
The first question is where the main character or protagonist starts their journey. Are they in a state of good or bad fortune, and how does that change from beginning to end?
“Somebody gets into trouble, then gets out of it again. People love that story. They never get tired of it,” Vonnegut says with a smirk.
The video is an intriguing look into the mind of a highly original writer and gives excellent insights into the basics of storytelling.
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Art and Culture
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The Parthenon Sculptures, also known as the "Elgin Marbles" or "Parthenon Marbles" were taken from Greece in the early 19th century and have been displayed in Britain ever since – however, the debate over who rightfully owns these Greek artifacts continues to this day.
The British Museum and the Greek government are in the midst of talks over whether the museum will return the marbles.
The marbles were taken from the Parthenon between 1801 and 1805 by Lord Elgin, the British Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, according to the British Museum.
The museum says the Ottoman Empire was the governing authority over Athens at the time, and Elgin removed half of the remaining sculptures from the ruins of the Parthenon with the permission of Ottoman authorities.
Can a governing power such as the Ottoman Empire rightfully give away the artifacts of the cultural state it rules – like the Grecian marble sculptures?
The British Museum claims Elgin's transaction was done legally.
"His actions were thoroughly investigated by a Parliamentary Select Committee in 1816 and found to be entirely legal, prior to the sculptures entering the collection of the British Museum by Act of Parliament," the British Museum said.
However, Greek authorities disagree.
"The violent detachment of the Parthenon Sculptures from their physical context and the architectural setting that they were part of violated the laws, the common sense of justice and the established morals at the time," said the Office of the Secretary General for Greeks Abroad and Public Diplomacy in Athens in a statement to ABC News.
The Parthenon Marbles aren't the only cultural antiquity under debate.
Many museums around the globe, particularly those in imperialistic or colonialist countries, have been criticized for their massive collections of historically and culturally important artifacts that come from colonized countries.
Who owns the artifacts? Depends on who you ask.
Patrimony laws around the world protect cultural heritage by legally preserving antiquities, artifacts and to prevent international conflicts like the fight over the Parthenon Marbles.
However, these laws go as far back as 1891, with one of the first patrimony laws in Egypt, according to anti-racketeering group Antiquities Coalition. Many other countries around the world followed with protections of their own.
Anything taken before these protections were in place is where the argument of rightful ownership gets a bit complicated.
In some cases, it's up to the institution or museum to return an artifact that has been stolen, looted, or taken under precarious circumstances.
"A lot of people would think it's morally right, ethically right to return these objects," said Leila A. Amineddoleh, an attorney specializing in art, cultural heritage, and intellectual property law. "Some of them, like the Benin Bronzes, were taken under very violent and brutal circumstances … human lives were lost, and people were massacred.
The Benin Bronzes were stolen from Nigeria during a British raid in 1897 on Benin City, according to the Smithsonian Museum. The Smithsonian's Board of Regents voted to return the bronzes in June 2022 under the museum's new ethical returns policy.
"Not only was returning ownership of these magnificent artifacts to their rightful home the right thing to do, it also demonstrates how we all benefit from cultural institutions making ethical choices," said Lonnie Bunch, secretary of the Smithsonian, in a statement at the time.
Even so, a group of Nigerian Americans are suing to keep the Benin Bronzes in the U.S. They have accused the Smithsonian of a "breach of trust for failing to protect the interests of United States citizens descended from enslaved people" who could learn about their culture through the bronzes.
The question of morality in cultural preservation is an issue that's not black and white.
"The Parthenon is a symbol of Greece in ancient Athens," Amineddoleh said. "I don't really understand how the British Museum can continue to argue that they're keeping the work safe if, in fact, those objects were removed and destroyed the site [of the Parthenon.]"
What responsibility do museums have?
The Metropolitan Museum of Art has experience . The Met has recently returned works to Nepal, India and Nigeria in partnership with officials from each country.
Through the Met's own researchers and outside sources, the museum sometimes learns a work should be returned to its country of origin based on its policies or the laws of the country in which it originated.
"The Met has a long and well documented history of responding to claims regarding works of art, restituting objects where appropriate, being transparent about the provenance of works in the collection, and supporting further research and scholarship," Met officials told ABC News, saying it is one of the few institutions in the field to do so.
Those in favor of returning objects, like professor of political science at the University of South Africa Everisto Benyera, say it's a "form of reparation and restorative justice."
"What was stolen here are not mere artifacts, but they were important aspects of a civilization," Benyera said.
"While to some they are beautiful artifacts, to their owners – who are the victims of this theft – they are the missing link in connecting with those in the other realms of life such as the living dead, commonly known as the ancestors."
Grace Ndiritu, an artist and advocate for "de-colonizing" museums, told ABC News ancient art signifies the creativity and invention of a culture.
"Not only do [artifacts] show the mythologies and spiritual beliefs, they also show the innovation and the power of different tribes and different societies," said Ndiritu.
Ndiritu's work centers on "healing" museums, which she believes often perpetuate a colonizer mindset – that of taking stolen prized possessions from one nation and profiting from it or removing it from the context of the origin country's culture.
"Usually, objects were seen as prizes or possessions and not actually valued for their spiritual context or the cultural context," said Ndiritu.
Others, like the British Museum, argue that a diversity of these artifacts from around the world offer "wider cultural context and sustained interaction with the neighbouring civilisations."
"The collection is a unique resource to explore the richness, diversity and complexity of all human history, our shared humanity," the British Museum says on its website. "The strength of the collection is its breadth and depth which allows millions of visitors an understanding of the cultures of the world and how they interconnect – whether through trade, migration, conquest, conflict, or peaceful exchange."
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Art and Culture
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"Please don't touch the artwork".
Now and then, we are reminded as to why these signs are still needed in galleries around the world.
Art lovers in Miami looked on in horror on Thursday night, when a collector accidentally knocked a $42,000 (£34,870) sculpture by US pop artist Jeff Koons to the ground.
She had tapped it with her finger, witnesses at the event said.
The statue - one of Koons' iconic Dog Balloons - smashed into tiny shards, and had to be swept into dustpans by gallery staff.
The accident happened during the exclusive VIP-only opening night of Art Wynwood, a contemporary art fair held annually in Miami, Florida.
Local artist Stephen Gamson told the Miami Herald he was admiring the sculpture, when an "older woman" tapped it, knocking it off its pedestal.
At first he wondered if it was part of a performance piece (Banksy, anyone?) but quickly realised it had been an accident.
"When this thing fell to the ground, it was like how a car accident draws a huge crowd on the highway," Mr Gamson told the paper.
Luckily for the woman, the piece is covered by insurance, Bénédicte Caluch, an art advisor with Bel-Air Fine Art galleries which represents the sculpture, said.
"It was an event!" Ms Caluch told the Miami Herald. "Everybody came to see what happened."
She added that the woman who caused the damage, who has remained unnamed, was an art collector.
"Life just stopped for 15 minutes with everyone around," Cédric Boero, who also works for Bel-Air Fine Art galleries, told the New York Times.
He added that a colleague spoke to the woman, who said she was "very very sorry" and "just wanted to disappear".
The sculpture was part of a limited edition which has now shrunk from 799 to 798.
"That's a good thing for the collectors," Mr Boero told the Times, laughing.
Despite being shattered into thousands of pieces, there is still interest in buying the destroyed sculpture.
Jeff Koons, 68, has not made any comment on the incident.
His range of Balloon Dog sculptures are among the most iconic works of contemporary art, and have sold for tens of millions of dollars.
Some are enormous - as high as 10ft (3m) - but this ill fated one was just a puppy, at 16 inches (40cm) tall.
They have graced galleries around the world, and were further iconised by Jay-Z in 2017 when the rapper worked directly with Koons to create a 40-foot inflatable Balloon Dog for a stage prop.
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Art and Culture
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The Parthenon Sculptures, also called the Elgin Marbles, were crafted by ancient Greeks 2,500 years ago to decorate the outside of the Parthenon temple in Athens. Now housed at the British Museum in London, they, like many old sculptures, are a muted mix of white, gray and beige.
But a new study reveals that the famous sculptures' hues weren't always so drab — in fact, they were once painted with vibrantly colored and intricate patterns.
Bright Egyptian blues, whites and purples once covered the statues depicting deities and mythical creatures guarding the fifth-century-B.C. temple. The colors were used to represent the water that some figures rose from, the snakeskin of a mysterious sea serpent, the empty space and air in the background behind the statues, and figurative patterns on the robes of the gods, the researchers wrote in the study, which was published Wednesday (Oct. 11) in the journal Antiquity.
"The Parthenon sculptures at the British Museum are considered one of the pinnacles of ancient art and have been studied for centuries now by a variety of scholars," study lead author Giovanni Verri, a conservation scientist at the Art Institute of Chicago, said in a statement. "Despite this, no traces of colour have ever been found and little is known about how they were carved."
As paint often doesn't last long on marble and the sculptures' surfaces weren't prepared to enable adhesion from substances like paint, archaeologists long assumed that ancient Greek artists intentionally left the statues white. This even led historical restorations to remove past traces of paint found on the sculptures, the researchers said.
To investigate the statues' past, archaeologists used luminescent imaging, a technique that causes trace chemical elements from hidden paint on the sculptures' surfaces to glow. The team quickly discovered hidden patterns emerging on the statues' surfaces, revealing floral designs and smudged figurative depictions.
Four pigments were primarily found: a blue that was first created by the Egyptians and was the main color used by ancient Greeks and Romans, a purple tint made according to an unknown recipe (most purple was made with shellfish from the ancient Mediterranean, but this one wasn't), and two whites likely derived from the mineral gypsum and bone white, a pigment made from bone ash.
It's likely that these colors were "as visually important as the carving," the researchers wrote in the study, as "it was what the viewer saw."
"The elegant and elaborate garments were possibly intended to represent the power and might of the Olympian gods, as well as the wealth and reach of Athens and the Athenians, who commissioned the temple," Verri said. The researchers found traces of paint on the backs of the sculptures, meaning they were "certainly contemporary to the building" and likely were painted first and then placed on the temple.
The 17 sculptures, once part of a 525-foot-long (160 meters) marble frieze depicting classical Greek myths, were brought to the U.K. in the 19th century after being ripped from the walls of the Parthenon by Thomas Bruce, the seventh Earl of Elgin and Britain's ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. His involvement initially gave the sculptures their "Elgin Marbles" nickname.
Bruce sold the statues, which constituted roughly half of the surviving sculptures, to the British government in 1816. Now kept in the British Museum, the sculptures have been the subject of a formal repatriation controversy between the U.K. and Greece since 1983.
As the marbles are primarily fragments, the story they tell isn't completely clear. But they include sculptures of gods reacting to the birth of Athena, who is said to have burst from Zeus' swollen head after a mighty blow from the axe of Hephaestus, the Greek god of blacksmiths.
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Ben Turner is a U.K. based staff writer at Live Science. He covers physics and astronomy, among other topics like tech and climate change. He graduated from University College London with a degree in particle physics before training as a journalist. When he's not writing, Ben enjoys reading literature, playing the guitar and embarrassing himself with chess.
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Why Is The UN Screening Kantara Today At Its Geneva Office?
Rishabh Shetty attends the Kantara screening at UNHRC session in Geneva while addressing the crowd about environmental protection.
Rishabh Shetty’s Kantara, an Indian Kannada-language film that was released on September 30, 2022, went on to become one of the biggest hits of 2022. It was not only a huge hit in India but across the world as well. Now, Kantara is all set to be in the limelight once again as it gets screened at the United Nations office in Geneva, Switzerland today, March 17, 2023.
Kantara will be screened at the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) session being held at the UN office in Geneva on March 17, 2023. The movie will be screened in Hall No 13 at the Pathe Balexert theatre, post which, Rishabh Shetty, the director and lead actor of Kantara will also be seen addressing the gathering.
According to a tweet shared by the non-profit organisation, Centre for Global Affairs & Public Policy (CGAPP) in India, Rishabh Shetty will be seen talking about “Indian Cinema's role in fostering discussions on environment, climate, and conservation” at the UNHRC Session in Geneva. While taking Indian stories to the world stage, the Actor-Director also met the Director of CGAPP, Anindya Sengupta, and exchanged a few thoughts.
Rishabh Shetty also shared a tweet regarding his participation in the UNHRC session that read, “Proud to represent ECO FAWN in submitting Oral Statement at UNHRC. The significance in promotion of cultural rights of forest dwellers and protection of forests in Kantara is deciphered at the international forum.”
Environment Conservation Organization - Foundation for Afforestation Wild Animals and Nature (ECO-FAWN) is an NGO based in India. Rishabh Shetty is representing ECO-FAWN at the UNHRC session in Geneva. In the Oral Statement shared by the actor, he says that he believes environmental sustainability to be the need of the hour and wishes to do his part by impacting at the grassroot level via his films.
The actor also stated that he believes that cinema can hold a mirror to “environmental consciousness” and plays an important role in showing what the actual state of the world looks like. “The film explores local environmental protection, the role of government, and the importance of communities in solving environmental problems,” read Shetty’s statement while talking about Kantara, the film.
Why Is ‘Kantara’ Being Screened At The UN Office In Geneva?
Kantara, a Kannada film starring Rishabh Shetty in the lead role, talks about the ongoing struggles and conflicts between man and nature. The film also delivers an important message about environmental conservation.
According to a tweet shared by CGAPP, “Kantara greatly inspires people to be aware of environmental challenges and positively respond to challenges of conserving local ecologies by appealing to their emotions.”
The NGO also pointed out that the “Indian civil society and individuals have taken the lead in protection of local ecology and biodiversity & Indian films have created a space for engagement on critical issues of INDIGENOUS land rights, biodiversity and conservation.” Hence, Kantara is being screened at the UN office in Geneva as a part of the UNHRC session, to spread more awareness about environmental conservation and its significance.
More About Kantara, The Film
Kantara is a film which was initially shot in Kannada and was later dubbed into multiple languages resulting in multiple releases of the film. The plot of the film revolved around Bhootha Kola, a traditional ritual performed for the deity of the forest called the Panjurli Daiva. It beautifully portrays the deep-rooted struggle between man and nature. Kantara is now available to stream on Amazon Prime and Netflix in multiple languages.
Director Rishabh Shetty also features in the lead role in the film while Kishore, Achyuth Kumar, Sapthami Gowda, and Pramod Shetty play prominent roles. After the massive success of Kantara, a prequel to the original film is also being planned which is anticipated to release in the theatres in 2024.
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A sculpture mistakenly demolished during roadworks in Stoke-on-Trent must be rebuilt, a museum boss has urged.
Made from bricks, the statue of local pottery magnate Josiah Wedgwood has been in Festival Park since 2009.
However Stoke-on-Trent City Council admitted on Thursday it had been knocked down by contractors during road-widening work.
Victoria and Albert Museum director Dr Tristram Hunt said it deserved to be rebuilt, even if it was relocated.
The local authority said an investigation had been launched and it was speaking with contractors to understand what had gone wrong.
Dr Hunt, a former Labour MP for Stoke-on-Trent Central and biographer of Josiah Wedgwood, said the sculpture was an "important part of the kind of landscape of Wedgwood" in the city and "needs to be rebuilt".
Created by sculptor Vincent Woropay for the National Garden Festival in 1986, before its move to Festival Park, Dr Hunt said it "aligns the industrial with the aesthetic".
"This was a story of great kind of industrial might, manufacturing, factories and you see that in just the kind of raw brutality of the sculpture and the brick," Dr Hunt told BBC Radio Stoke.
"Then also I think the beauty of the eye, the beauty of the hair, the sort of sense of vision connected to him, the sculpting and shaping of the bricks, so in this one sculpture you have this very, I think, attractive and engaging story of Josiah Wedgwood."
While he said there was a strong case for the sculpture to be sited in Festival park, possibly near Etruria Hall, it could also go to the V&A Wedgwood collection in Barlaston or installed outside the museum.
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SHELBURNE, Vt. -- A Vermont museum has acquired a more than 200-piece collection of Native American art and is planning to construct a $12.6 million facility to house the pieces that make up a rare national collection in the Northeast.
The collection donated to the Shelburne Museum is comprised of late 19th and early 20th century pottery, beadwork, clothing and weavings predominantly from Plains and Southwest communities, and combined with its existing Native American collection represents nearly 80 tribes, the museum said.
"Together, the two collections are over 500 items and that's a center of gravity, which is fairly important for northern New England," said museum director and CEO Thomas Denenberg.
The 9,750-square-foot (906-square-meter) building — called the Perry Center for Native American Art — will be designed by Adjaye Associates, an internationally known firm that designed the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. The building is slated to open in the spring of 2026 and "planned to be a highly sustainable pavilion designed to support the culturally appropriate interpretation and care of Indigenous material culture," the museum said in a statement.
Museum officials have consulted on the project with the leaders of the four bands of the state-recognized Abenaki tribes in Vermont.
“The museum’s collaborative approach to stewardship of the Native American collection and construction of the Perry Center for Native American Art is commendable,” Don Stevens, chief of the Nulhegan Band of the Coosuk Abenaki Nation, said in a statement. “Like the museum, we see this project as an opportunity to bring more people to Shelburne and the region from across the country and internationally to study, learn about and experience Native American art and material culture.”
Some of the pottery is currently on display at the museum in an exhibition that opened last week. The pieces include water jars, grain storage vessels and big bowls, painted with geometric and other patterns. They, along with the rest of the 200-piece collection, were donated by Teressa “Teri” Perry in memory of her late husband Tony Perry, a noted businessperson in Vermont with a deep connection to the region, according to the museum.
“Tony was always drawn to the multi-dimensional nature of Native American art," Teri Perry said in a statement. “He appreciated that this material not only surrounds you in beauty and history, but it also invites a sense of contemplation and spirituality.”
John Stomberg, director of the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, who visited the current exhibit, called the pieces “stunning.”
In northern New England, the origins of the Native American collections at the Hood Museum and the Abbe Museum in Bar Harbor, Maine, tend to be more related to anthropology and archeology, Denenberg said. They can also be more local while this collection is national, he said, comparing it to the 116-piece Charles and Valerie Diker Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
“In both cases these major gifts have transformed the museum in a way that it tells the story of North American art and culture. They share that. The Perry collection is a top notch collection,” Stomberg said.
The new building in Vermont will be the 40th at the 45-acre museum of American Art and Material Culture. The gift was announced in May.
“Bringing these collections together presents an opportunity to collaborate with Tribes in the study of both historical and contemporary Indigenous material culture and art in a manner accessible to students, scholars and visitors,” Denenberg said a statement.
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Archaeologists Digging Along a Train Route in Mexico Have Found an Extremely Rare Statue of a Maya Deity
The statue is one of only three known in the world.
Archaeologists excavating construction sites along the new Maya Train route in Mexico have found a rare statue of the Mayan god K’awiil. The work is part of a recovery mission ahead of the railroad’s construction to ensure that the area’s ancient artifacts and monuments are not accidentally damaged.
The stone idol is dedicated to the Maya god of power, abundance, and prosperity, and is typically identified by his large eyes, upturned snout and a stone celt sticking out of his forehead.
Though this particular pre-Hispanic deity has more often been seen represented in paintings, relief sculpture, and the Dresden and Maya codices of Mexico, in this case his rare three-dimensional image was found on top of an urn.
“This finding is very important because there are few sculptural representations of the god K’awiil so far. We only know three in Tikal, Guatemala, and this is one of the first to appear in Mexican territory,” said Diego Prieto Hernández, general director of Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History.
The discovery was made in section 7 of the Maya Train, an intercity railroad that loops around the Yucatán Peninsula and is expected to be completed next year. It has not been without its critics who say it is disruptive to the local environment, culture, and communities.
Other finds that have been made on the archaeologists’ previous rescue missions in sections 1-5 of the railroad include vessels, pottery fragments, bones, and the foundations of ancient structures belonging to Mesoamerican Mayan civilization. These objects are now being cleaned and classified in a dedicated lab in Chetumal.
“All this work should give rise to the analysis of the vast information, the preparation of academic reports and a great international research symposium on the Mayan civilization, which will be organized for this year,” said Prieto Hernández, who has also promised the construction of a new museum in Mérida to house the precious discoveries.
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The burial mound of a Bronze Age girl unearthed in Kazakhstan contains a plethora of grave goods, including dozens of animal bones that may have been used for ceremonial purposes and a carving of a frog on a bronze disc.
Since 2017, researchers have been working at this site, located in Ainabulak (also spelled Aynabulaq or Aina-bulak), a village in the eastern part of the country. Since then, they've discovered more than 100 burial mounds dating to the Bronze Age, including this one, which they found on Aug. 2, according to The Astana Times, an English-language news outlet in Kazakhstan.
Although researchers know little about the girl's identity, the wealth of artifacts in her burial reveal clues about her role within her community during the Bronze Age, which in Central Asia lasted between 3200 B.C. and 1000 B.C., according to Oxford Academic.
She was "buried on her left side, bent over," Rinat Zhumatayev, an archaeologist who led the excavation and heads the Department of Archaeology, Ethnology and Museology at Al-Farabi Kazakh National University in Kazakhstan, told Live Science in an email. "There were small wire earrings in both ears and beads around her neck."
Radiocarbon dating of the skeleton revealed that the girl was between 12 and 15 years old when she died. Archaeologists also discovered that she was buried with 180 astragalus (ankle) bones — likely from sheep or cattle — as well as three shoulder blades from cows, several metal pommels (the butt ends of swords), a mirror and a bronze bowl.
But another grave good stood out to archaeologists: a bronze disc carved with the likeness of a frog at the center. This finding marks the first time that such an object has been discovered in Kazakhstan.
"The image of the frog has [had] different meanings among many peoples since antiquity," Zhumatayev said. "It's associated with the image of a woman in labor and the cult of water … but requires more study [to determine its true meaning]."
Researchers were also intrigued by the sheer number of animal bone fragments interred in the burial mound. While they had seen other graves containing animal remains on the Eurasian steppe, often in child and adolescent burials, the multitude of bones buried with this individual was extravagant.
Some scientists think that the burial of astragalus bones was part of a "cult practice" and that the bones were used during meditation. However, other researchers view the bones as "symbols of well-being" and "good luck" that served as a "wish for a successful transition from [one] world to others," Zhumatayev said.
In addition to this burial, archaeologists made a "groundbreaking" discovery of a pyramid with a hexagonal base in the Abai region north of this site, according to The Asana Times.
All of these findings "have an important historical and cultural significance for the study of the early stages of the Bronze Age," Zhumatayev said.
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Jennifer Nalewicki is a Salt Lake City-based journalist whose work has been featured in The New York Times, Smithsonian Magazine, Scientific American, Popular Mechanics and more. She covers several science topics from planet Earth to paleontology and archaeology to health and culture. Prior to freelancing, Jennifer held an Editor role at Time Inc. Jennifer has a bachelor's degree in Journalism from The University of Texas at Austin.
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Unseen portraits taken by Paul McCartney in the early 1960s as the Beatles were catapulted to international stardom will go on show at the refurbished National Portrait Gallery in the summer.McCartney thought the photographs, taken between December 1963 and February 1964, had been lost, but he recently rediscovered them.The exhibition, Paul McCartney Photographs 1963-64: Eyes of the Storm, “will provide a uniquely personal perspective on what it was like to be a Beatle at the start of Beatlemania,” said Nicholas Cullinan, the NPG’s director.“The photographs taken in this period captured the very moment that John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr were propelled from being the most popular band in Britain to an international cultural phenomenon, from gigs in Liverpool and London to performing on The Ed Sullivan Show in New York to a television audience of 73 million people.“At a time when so many camera lenses were on the band, these photographs will share fresh insight into their experiences, all through the eyes of Sir Paul McCartney.”‘Self-portraits in a mirror’ by Paul McCartney. Photograph: Paul McCartney/The National Portrait Gallery/PAThe Beatles star approached the NPG in 2020, said Cullinan. “He said he’d found these photographs that he remembers taking but thought had been lost. We sat down with him and began going through them. [It was] extraordinary to see these images – which are unseen – of such a well-documented, famous and important cultural moment.“They’re taken by someone who was really, as the exhibition title alludes, in the eye of the storm looking outside at what was happening.”McCartney plans to publish a book of the photographs to coincide with his 81st birthday in June. The 275 photos in the collection were taken on a 35mm camera in New York, Washington, London, Liverpool, Miami and Paris.McCartney’s family includes three celebrated photographers. His first wife, Linda McCartney, was the first woman to shoot a Rolling Stone cover. The couple’s daughter Mary McCartney is an acclaimed photographer and film-maker and his brother Mike has published books of images of the Beatles.Detail from ‘Vivien Leigh’ by Yevonde (1936, printed 2022-3). Photograph: Yevonde/The National Portrait Gallery/PALast year, McCartney published The Lyrics, in which he traced his life story through the lyrics of his songs. The book became a bestseller.The NPG, a Grade I-listed building in central London that houses the world’s largest collection of portraits, has been closed for a major refurbishment since March 2020. During its closure, it loaned works to galleries and museums all over the world.The gallery will reopen to the public on 22 June with an exhibition that explores the life and career of Yevonde, the 20th-century photographer who pioneered the use of colour photography in the 1930s. It will include portraits and still life works that the artist produced throughout her 60-year career and will reflect the growing independence of women at that time, while focusing on the freedom photography afforded Yevonde.In the autumn, the NPG will restage an exhibition, David Hockney: Drawing from Life, that opened just 20 days before the gallery was forced to shut down due to Covid in March 2020. The exhibition explores Hockney’s work over the past six decades through his intimate portraits of five sitters – his mother, Laura Hockney, Celia Birtwell, Gregory Evans, Maurice Payne and the artist himself – in a range of mediums and styles, from pencil, pen and ink and crayon to photographic collage and iPad.Detail from David Hockney self-portrait. Photograph: Jonathan Wilkinson/The National Portrait Gallery/PAThe 2023 show will also show for the first time new portraits of friends and visitors to the artist’s Normandy studio between 2020 and 2022.In February 2024, the gallery will mount an exhibition of contemporary African diasporic artists working in the UK and US, curated by the former director of the Institute of Contemporary ArtEkow Eshun.The Time is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black Figure will include works by Hurvin Anderson, Michael Armitage, Jordan Casteel, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Noah Davis, Lubaina Himid, Claudette Johnson, Titus Kaphar, Kerry James Marshall, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Amy Sherald, Henry Taylor and Barbara Walker.As well as examining how artists depict the Black form, it will address the absence of Black presence within western art history.The NPG has unveiled a new logo intended to “better reflect its role as a gallery that is of people, for people, telling the story of Britain’s past, present and future through portraits”, and a redesigned website in advance of its reopening.Cullinan said: “Our programme of exhibitions for our first year [after reopening] presents some of the world’s best known artists in a fresh light, contains extraordinary and never-before-seen images, uncovers the work of remarkable innovators, charts important cultural terrain and showcases the greatest contemporary portraiture.” Paul McCartney Photographs 1963-64: Eyes of the Storm will run from 28 June to 1 October 2023.Yevonde: Life and Colour will run from 22 June to 15 October 2023.David Hockney: Drawing from Life will run from 2 November 2023 to 21 January 2024.The Time is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black Figure will run from 22 February to 19 May 2024.
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Learning more about the materials used on historical paintings—paints, pigments, varnishes, and primers used to prepare canvases—is critical to ongoing conservation efforts. Apparently, many artists of the so-called Danish Golden Age used beer byproducts from local breweries to prime their canvases, according to the results of a proteomics analysis described in a recent paper published in the journal Science Advances.
A number of analytical techniques have emerged over the last few decades to create "historical molecular records" (as the authors phrase it) of the culture in which various artworks were created. For instance, studying the microbial species that congregate on works of art may lead to new ways to slow down the deterioration of priceless aging art.
Case in point: scientists analyzed the microbes found on seven of Leonardo da Vinci's drawings in 2020 using a third-generation sequencing method known as Nanopore, which uses protein nanopores embedded in a polymer membrane for sequencing. They combined the Nanopore sequencing with a whole-genome-amplification protocol and found that each drawing had its own unique microbiome.
And just last month, researchers examined mysterious black stains on a folio of Leonardo's Codex Atlanticus and confirmed the presence of starch and vinyl glues in the affected areas. The glues were most likely applied during an earlier restoration effort some 50 years ago. The researchers also identified a likely cause of the dark stains: nanoparticles of a mercury sulfide called metacinnabar in the protective paper holding the folio, although it's unclear how this unusual black crystalline phase might have formed. The mercury salts had been added to protect the codex from mold growth.
Mass spectrometry-based proteomics is a relative newcomer to the field, according to the authors, and is capable of providing a thorough and very detailed characterization of any protein residues present in a given sample, as well as any accumulated damage. The technique is so sensitive that less sample material is needed compared to other methods. And unlike, say, gas chromatography-MS, it's also capable of characterizing all proteins present in a sample (regardless of the complexity of the mixture) rather than being narrowly targeted to predefined proteins.
For instance, the three most common protein-based materials used as the sole standards for other analyses are egg, animal glue, and milk. "The presence of proteins originating from sources outside this group of arbitrarily preselected standard source materials will not be detected, potentially leading to false-positive results and inaccurate interpretations," the authors wrote.
For their own study, Fabiana Di Gianvincenzo of the University of Copenhagen and collaborators selected 10 paintings from two artists prominent during the Danish Golden Age: Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg, often deemed the "father of Danish painting" and an instructor at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, and his student Christen Schiellerup Købke.
The authors selected paintings produced in the 1820s and 1830s, when both were at the academy. "Since the Academy is known to have provided artistic materials for professors [Eckersberg] and students [Købke], this sample set allowed for a direct comparison of canvases that were most likely prepared by the Academy's craftsmen and those prepared outside the institution," the authors wrote. Their analysis included three paintings that Købke completed after leaving the Academy to make that comparison.
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A small piece of Melbourne is set to become a mini-Acropolis, with a replica of the Parthenon to be installed at the National Gallery of Victoria this spring and covered with large-scale murals by local artists.The Temple of Boom was recently announced as the NGV architecture commission for 2022, an annual series that invites Australian architects to create temporary structures for the gallery’s garden.Last year, a pink pond was installed for visitors of the gallery to wade through. In previous years there has been a tower, an amphitheatre, an open-air maze and a pink car-wash inspired playground.A reimagining of the Parthenon on the Acropolis in Athens is the NGV architecture commission for 2022. Photograph: Adam Newman/ Kelvin Tsang.As with its predecessors, Temple of Boom will host a summer-long program of performances, live music and other events at the NGV. The name Temple of Boom was inspired by the vibrations of music.Created by artists Adam Newman and Kelvin Tsang, the Temple of Boom is about a third of the size of the Parthenon, the ancient temple that sits atop the Acropolis in Athens, Greece. Sign up to receive an email with the top stories from Guardian Australia every morning Melbourne artists will be invited to paint murals on the structure, taking inspiration from the vibrant colours and artistic embellishments that were a feature of the Parthenon more than 2,000 years ago.Victoria’s minister for creative industries, Steve Dimopoulos, said the installation would “breathe new life” into the Parthenon.“There is something very special and moving about visiting the Parthenon but fundamentally, it’s a museum piece,” he said.“This will be something quite different and I would say equally special, where you can interact with it, you can walk through it, have a drink nearby on a nice summer night and Melbourne and Victoria can represent itself on its facade.”The NGV director, Tony Ellwood, described the Parthenon as one of the most famous examples of classical architecture.“[It] is often viewed as a potent symbol of western art and culture,” he said. “This thought-provoking work by Adam Newman and Kelvin Tsang invites us to consider how we create and imbue architecture with meaning, as well as how this meaning can shift across time periods and cultures.”Melbourne is home to the largest Greek population outside Greece. The NGV Architecture Commission 2022: Temple of Boom will be on display from 16 November at NGV International, Melbourne
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Scottish Ballet is retelling the story of the classic fairytale Cinderella - with a man in the lead role.
Audiences attending the production of Cinders will not know until the curtain goes up whether the main character will be a man or a woman.
One version will be traditional - with a female Cinderella being swept off her feet by her Prince Charming.
But in the other, a male Cinders will be rescued from a life of drudgery by his princess.
The princess who falls in love with the male Cinders will wear the same sparkling dress that the female Cinders will wear to the ball in her performances
The ballet company claims the break in tradition is a world first.
The ballet, set in a draper's store at the turn of the 20th Century, will feature an art-nouveau inspired set with the traditional score by Sergei Prokofiev.
While there will not be an LGBTQ+ coupling for Cinders, Scottish Ballet said there would be a gay love story blossoming in the background for some of the other characters.
Scottish Ballet's artistic director and chief executive, Christopher Hampson, said: "I'm delighted to be bringing this fresh approach to such a well-known fairytale. I have always believed Prokofiev essentially composed a love story, yet full of wit and humour, which underpins this new production.
"I'm enjoying the playfulness of searching for who guides the narrative and who drives the dream. Collaborating with Elin Steele [designer] and the ever-adventurous dancers; we are coming together to deliver a classic Cinders for today."
Principal dancer Bruno Michiardi said swapping the roles of the Cinderella leads made the ballet fee "different and new".
He said: "We all know and love the classic story of Cinderella, but this new version means we're suddenly working in this amazing upside-down realm, where the male part - previously a more traditionally stoic character - is a complex mixture of vulnerability and resilience, and the female role - usually quite timid and downtrodden for most of the original ballet - is empowered and full of charisma.
"I'm excited at the prospect of exploring this further and sharing that with the audience."
'New twist'
Guest principal dancer Jessica Fyfe added that she had found working on the production "very exhilarating".
"To give this new fluidity to the leading roles means exploring ways in which the character Cinders, traditionally the 'poor' Cinderella, can be a person of grit, determination and strength, which ultimately leads to them creating their own happy ending.
"I hope the audience enjoys this new twist on a beautiful classic, which now highlights how anyone can have a hand at shaping their own future. It's not just for fairytales."
Scottish Ballet, which was founded in 1969, will begin its tour of Cinders at Glasgow's Theatre Royal on 9 December, before heading to Edinburgh's Festival Theatre, Her Majesty's Theatre, Aberdeen, Eden Court Theatre, Inverness, and ending at Newcastle's Theatre Royal on 10 February.
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Kenneth Anger, the shocking and influential avant-garde artist who defied sexual and religious taboos in such short films as “Scorpio Rising” and “Fireworks” and dished the most lurid movie star gossip in his underground classic “Hollywood Babylon,” has died. He was 96.
Anger died of natural causes on May 11 in Yucca Valley, California, his artist liaison, Spencer Glesby, told The Associated Press on Wednesday.
Few so boldly and imaginatively mined the forbidden depths of culture and consciousness as Anger, whose admirers ranged from filmmakers Martin Scorsese and David Lynch to rock stars such as the Clash and the Rolling Stones.
He was among the first openly gay filmmakers and a pioneer in using soundtracks as counterpoints to moving pictures. Well before the rise of punk and heavy metal, Anger was juxtaposing music with bikers, sadomasochism, occultism and Nazi imagery. When the Sex Pistols and the Clash appeared on the same bill at a 1976 concert, clips from Anger’s movies were screened behind them.
Anger had his greatest commercial success, and notoriety, as the author of “Hollywood Babylon.” Scandal and Hollywood practically grew up together, and Anger assembled an extraordinary and often apocryphal family album, whether pictures from the fatal car crash of Jayne Mansfield or such widely disputed allegations as actor Clara Bow having sex with the University of Southern California football team.
Completed in the late 1950s and originally published in French, “Hollywood Babylon” was banned for years in the U.S. and was still adult fare upon formal release in 1975, when New York Times reviewer Peter Andrews labeled it a “306-page box of poisoned bon bons” written as if a “sex maniac had taken over the Reader’s Digest Condensed Book Club.”
“If a book such as this can be said to have charm, it lies in the fact that here is a book without one single redeeming merit,” Andrews concluded.
Like a studio head trying to build a franchise, Anger released a sequel, the less popular “Hollywood Babylon II,” in 1984. He had said he was working on a third book in recent years, with a chapter dedicated to Tom Cruise and Scientology.
A balding, dark-eyed man with a frozen stare and a “Lucifer” tattoo across his chest, Anger made films for much of his life and knew everyone from the poet Jean Cocteau to sexologist Alfred Kinsey. He was close enough to Keith Richards that the Rolling Stone would claim that Anger called him his “right hand man.” Mick Jagger and Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page wrote soundtrack music for Anger, who in turn helped bring about a Rolling Stones classic by lending a copy of Mikhail Bulgakov’s satanic satire “The Master and Margarita” to Marianne Faithfull. Faithfull passed the novel along to her boyfriend, Jagger, who cited it as the basis for “Sympathy for the Devil.”
Anger himself rejected Christianity in childhood, saying he preferred reading comics on Sunday. He later joined Thelema, an occult society which urges members to “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. Love is the law, love under will,” and for a time he lived in the house of Thelema founder Aleister Crowley, a friend and mentor.
Born in Santa Monica, California, Anger was the son of aircraft engineer Wilbur Anglemeyer and cited his grandmother, a costume designer, as an early source for prime Hollywood dirt. He was a child actor who, to much skepticism, claimed to have played the Changeling Prince in a 1935 adaptation of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
Anger also began making movies as a boy and was a teenager when he completed “Fireworks,” a noirish 13-minute silent starring Anger as a young man who fantasizes — in sexually graphic detail — that he has been beaten by a pack of sailors. By this time, the filmmaker had shortened his last name to Anger.
“I knew it would be like a label, a logo. It’s easy to remember,” Anger told The Guardian in 2011.
Among the film’s early viewers was Kinsey, who liked it enough to purchase a copy for $100 and ask Anger to help with his landmark research on sexual behavior.
Anger’s best known works included the surreal occult short “Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome” and “Scorpio Rising,” a 28-minute production from 1963 in which footage of motorcyclists is accompanied by such hits as Bobby Vinton’s “Blue Velvet” and Elvis Presley’s ”(You’re the) Devil in Disguise.” In one especially provocative sequence, the Crystals’ hit “He’s a Rebel” is played to images of Jesus and his disciples from Cecil B. DeMille’s silent epic “King of Kings.”
“Like many people, I was astonished when I saw Kenneth Anger’s ‘Scorpio Rising’ for the first time,” Scorsese once wrote. “Every cut, every camera movement, every color, and every texture seemed, somehow, inevitable, in the same way that images of the Virgin in Renaissance painting seem inevitable.”
Scorsese would emulate Anger’s style in “Mean Streets,” “Goodfellas” and other movies, and Lynch featured Vinton’s drowsy ballad in the 1986 cult favorite “Blue Velvet.” John Waters would praise Anger as one of the directors who “dirtied” his mind.
Death preoccupied Anger and he was a frequent visitor to Hollywood Forever, the burial site for everyone from Judy Garland to Johnny Ramone. Actor Vincent Gallo, a friend of Anger’s, told the filmmaker that he had purchased a plot for him next to Ramone’s.
“They’re peaceful,” Anger said during a 2014 interview with Esquire when asked about his affinity for cemeteries. “They’d better be...”
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Art and Culture
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This is an excerpt from BuzzFeed News' culture newsletter, Cleanse the Timeline! You can subscribe here.
The Widow’s Children by Paula Fox
Desperate Characters, an immaculate short novel about two married gentrifiers living in Brooklyn in the late ’60s, is Paula Fox’s most famous work, thanks in part to the advocacy of Jonathan Franzen. I reread it recently and was awed again at its quiet mastery and the feeling of nebulous dread it conjures. A New Yorker retrospective about the author informed me that The Widow’s Children, which came out in 1976, was in fact her masterpiece. And so I decided to check it out.
It’s certainly a masterclass in compression. Five people meet in a hotel room to fête Laura Clapper, né Maldonada, and her husband, Desmond, who has an alcohol addiction, before the two head on a tour of the African continent. Among those five is Clara Hansen, Laura’s daughter, who yearns so desperately for her mother’s approval, an approval Laura instinctively withholds. We learn early in the novel that Clara is the result of an unwanted pregnancy after Laura’s four abortions: “She had, she told herself, thieved her way into life.” There’s also Laura’s brother, Carlos, a congenial gay man and their mother Alma’s unabashed favorite, and Laura’s old friend Peter, an editor who is fed up with his tedious life. Over the course of a night, we watch tensions bubble over, during drinks, dinner, and finally, a moving third act in which the adult Maldonada children — there’s a brother named Eugenio as well — grapple with a death in the family.
What’s most remarkable about this novel is how many perspectives Fox inhabits seamlessly: We flit between all the characters; we see their desires and failed ambitions, how particularly painful the loss of wealth and status is for the Maldonadas (of Spanish heritage, they owned a plantation in Cuba that they lost during the Spanish–American war), and all their hateful prejudices (Laura is antisemitic and racist, even though there are hints that the Maldonadas have Jewish ancestry).
In real life, Fox was also the result of an unplanned pregnancy, and she spent much of her childhood moving between different households. The question of how much biography influences fiction is a moot point; obviously, it does, but that doesn’t undermine the act of creation, and if this novel is the consequence of Fox working out her childhood trauma, then we’re all the better for it. An exquisite, heartbreaking achievement. —Tomi Obaro ●
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Roman statuary and Renaissance door-knockers, maps of the world and mortified saints; Easter parade penitents and bloodied, polychrome Christs, souls in torment and two sunbathing girls on the sand, slick with water, their bums catching the light.In 1882, when Archer M Huntington was 11 and on his first family trip to Europe, the adopted son of American railroad baron Collis Potter Huntington found a volume on Spanish Gypsies in a Liverpool bookshop. His interest was piqued. “Spain must be much more interesting than Liverpool,” the boy wrote in his diary. Later on the trip he visited the National Gallery in London and the Louvre in Paris, and he returned home to New York with the idea of creating a museum devoted to the arts of Spain and Latin America. What a strange origin story this is.Everyone’s here … Caspicara, The Four Fates of Man: Death, Soul in Hell, Soul in Purgatory, Soul in Heaven, Ecuador, attributed to Manuel Chili, circa 1775. Photograph: The Hispanic Society of America, New York, NYHaving learned both Spanish and Arabic, and immersing himself in Spanish history and culture on prolonged visits to Spain, and following extensive forays in Europe’s auction houses, in 1908 Huntington opened the grand Hispanic Society Museum and Library in upper Manhattan. For several years now, the museum has been closed for major refurbishments, and works from the collection have been travelling, now landing in the main galleries of the Royal Academy. Sunny Spain and black, severe Catholic Spain; the folkloric Spain of peasants and bullfighters, bodegas and Carmen; the Spain of empire and conquest, the Moorish Spain of Al-Andaluz and the before-and-after of the reconquest and the expulsion of the Jews, are all here.Grim and gorgeous, extensive and rushed, overwhelming in its scope and oddly truncated, the exhibition has great things in it – Sevillian painter Juan de Valdés Leal’s 1661 Christ Carrying the Cross, shuffling along, back bent under the weight of the cross with its telegraph-pole timbers; Luis de Morales’ grim 1565-70 Ecce Homo and a miniature portrait by El Greco, painted on an oval bit of cardboard that one might overlook among the lustreware and glazed pottery by Muslim craftsmen, the plate depicting Jonah fishing in his little boat, the vast creature more a winged serpent than whale.Gripping … Portrait of a Little Girl by Diego Velázquez, circa 1638-42. Photograph: The Hispanic Society of America, New York, NYI’m gripped by a small and intimate Velázquez Portrait of a Young Girl (possibly his granddaughter), which has the feel of having been made for his own pleasure, and his Count-Duke of Olivares, former tutor to Philip IV, whose shadow throws complicated, disturbing shapes in magisterial greys on the floor beneath him. Then we are off again, among the ecclesiastical vestments and church silverware, the monstrances decorated with gold and lapis lazuli, and Giovanni Vespucci’s 1526 World Map, with its elisions and vast blanks and unknown parts. Other illustrated maps, of Tequaltiche in Mexico, with its Caxcan people engaging in gory naked battle and, in another nearby map of the Ucayali River in Peru, a major tributary of the Amazon, produced by Franciscan missionaries and indigenous artists, the local fauna is depicted, the animals frequently devouring one another.This is also a show that attempts to tell a story as we swerve from one thing to another, and from Spain to Mexico, to Latin America and on to the Philippines. Beginning with ceramics by the Bell Beaker people, almost 5,000 years old and found unbroken by a British archaeologist in the Guadalquivir valley near Seville, and Celtiberian silver amulets and bracelets from Palencia, north of Valladolid (looking as fresh as in a shop window) and ending with a motley collection of paintings from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, this exhibition gives us an opportunity to see what are described as “treasures” from the Hispanic Society’s collection, all amassed by Huntington himself. He collected trunkloads of photographs, entire libraries, dozens of old masters, altarpieces and Roman antiquities, Books of Hours, illuminated manuscripts and Hebrew Bibles, Muslim textiles and ceramics, paintings by Zurbarán, El Greco, Velázquez and Goya, travellers’ maps and intricately decorated portable writing desks hefted about by Jesuit missionaries.We travel to the further reaches of the Spanish empire, to the headwaters of the Amazon and to Bolivian silver mines, and on to the English dinner table of Queen Charlotte, consort of George III, where a gilded silver tray from Bolivia, decorated with chinchillas and other exotica, found its way in 1790. The tales of wealth and power (religious as well as secular), empires and colonialism, expulsions and subjugations and exploitation are unavoidable.A great pictorial conceit … The Duchess of Alba by Francisco de Goya, 1797. Photograph: The Hispanic Society of America, New York, NYEven when it comes to Goya, in the rotunda gallery at the heart of the show, you are aware of money and power, or the lack of it. Goya’s little drawing of a woman checking her undershirt for fleas makes a great counterpoint to his full-length 1797 portrait of the Duchess of Alba, wearing the showy costume of a lower class maja, while standing beside a river on her own estate. Her finger points straight down to Goya’s signature, written as though inscribed in the sandy riverbank at her beautifully shod feet. Solo Goya (Only Goya), the painter has written, the words facing the duchess, like a message. Her shoe almost treads on his name, which she could scuff away in an instant. There is a great pictorial conceit here, in this name in the sand, in the duchess’s direct outward gaze and the contrary direction of her pointing finger. It is a painting both totally stilled and also filled with misdirection. My eyes go every-which-way with confusion, like a lover whose declarations leave them on the brink.And then it all goes wrong, and the story becomes all about Huntington’s taste. Ignatio Zoloaga y Zabaleta’s 1903 Family of the Gypsy Bullfighter takes us back to that youthful encounter in a Liverpool bookshop. His appreciation of the Valencian-born painter Joaquín Sorolla seems to me to reflect the taste of Huntington’s monied class (Sorolla was a close friend of John Singer Sargent). He had to be persuaded to purchase works by the artists associated with Catalan modernisme, including Ramon Casas and Isidre Nonell, one of whose portraits is included here. In 1897, Nonell had shared a studio with Picasso in Paris, but Huntington never bought any works by him.Sorolla’s early 20th-century, light-filled summery scenes – promoted as well as bought by Huntington – including those sunbathers, sleek as seals on the wet sand, give way in a final room to large gouache studies for Sorolla’s Vision of Spain, a cycle of paintings commissioned for permanent display at the Hispanic Society, depicting everyday life in the different regions. The completed works total a mind-boggling 277 feet in length. The artist toiled at these for almost a decade. They depict a backward Spain, celebrating its antic customs and fiestas, its quaint regional differences and folkloric poverty. The catalogue tells us how Sorolla employed overtly modernist techniques, such as collage, in these studies, but modernity doesn’t seem to much bother him much here. It isn’t much of an end, after all that history. Spain and the Hispanic World is at the Royal Academy, London, from 21 January to 10 April.
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Get curated editors’ picks, peeks behind the scenes, film recommendations and more.
Built from images gathered around Istanbul, the short video Takrar – from the Arabic for ‘repetition’ – is a mesmerising celebration of the city’s multicultural, centuries-long legacy of art, design and architecture. Intricately pieced together by the Syrian German filmmaker Waref Abu Quba from some 2,900 photographs taken over two years, the stop-motion short contains images spanning Islamic, Ottoman, Greek and Byzantine designs. Set to a lively, percussive soundtrack, Abu Quba’s labour of love makes for a riveting tribute to the city’s timeless beauty and rich history.
Director: Waref Abu Quba
Music: Alex Story, Robbe Kieckens
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Family life
The extraordinary story of a Black Holocaust survivor, as told by his daughter
21 minutes
video
Music
Electronic gloves and even potted plants make music in a playground for sound innovation
6 minutes
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Thinkers and theories
The body politics – a philosophical stroll with Judith Butler and Sunaura Taylor
14 minutes
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Ecology and environmental sciences
The grassroots project that’s restoring an endangered Hawaiian ecosystem
22 minutes
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Demography and migration
One story, in a sea of millions, of swimming from China to freedom in Hong Kong
14 minutes
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Art
From a pencil sketch to cherubs dancing in stone – recreating a Donatello work
7 minutes
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Death
Toby ponders the inner lives of the sheep that roam atop his parents’ graves
6 minutes
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Gender
The ‘sworn virgins’ of Albania who trade femininity for freedom
10 minutes
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Space exploration
Would children born beyond Earth ever be able to return to humanity’s home planet?
5 minutes
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According to a news announcement by China’s Global Times, archaeologists have discovered a shell dragon made from mussels during excavations in the city of Chifeng, Inner Mongolia.
The discovery has been associated with the Hongshan Culture, a Neolithic people that emerged in the West Liao river basin and inhabited northeast China and Inner Mongolia from 4700 to 2900 BC. The culture is best known for its ornate jade pig dragons and embryo dragons, some of the earliest known examples of jade working.
Chinese archaeologists, including Guo Da-shun, regard the Hongshan culture as a significant phase in the early development of China. Regardless of the linguistic connections of the ancient inhabitants, the Hongshan culture is thought to have played a role in shaping the progression of early Chinese civilisation.
The 20 centimetre long shell dragon was discovered in the Caitaopo archaeological site, located in the Songshan district of Chifeng. The artefact was pieced together using several mussel shells that form its head, body and tail, predating the C-shaped jade dragons typical of the culture.
Archaeologists suggest that jade artefacts from the Hongshan Culture were intentionally deposited within sophisticated ritual edifices or ceremonial grounds. In contrast, the shell dragon serves as an indicator of the metaphysical beliefs held by inhabitants of less advanced low grade Hongshan Culture settlements.
Song Jinshan, President of the Inner Mongolia Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology, told Global Times: “The discovery is an important find that fills a gap in archaeologists’ knowledge of the dragon symbol within the early Hongshan Culture.”
Excavations at the Caitaopo archaeological site also found objects and fragments of two pottery wares typical of the Hongshan Culture.
Header Image Credit : Inner Mongolia Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology
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Budapest-based Mihaly Kolodko has won a cult following for his dozens of often illegally placed statuettes that reference Hungarian history and popular culture, as well as the Russian invasion of his home country of Ukraine.
For most Hungarians zipping along the waterfront of northern Budapest on scooters and bikes, a stone post at the beginning of Moscow Promenade flashes by unnoticed. For those in the know, however, the plinth warrants a much closer look.
Atop the post is a cigar-sized sculpture depicting Vladimir Putin and the ill-fated cruiser Moskva. The Russian warship was famously defied by Ukrainian soldiers on Snake Island, and later sunk.
The Moskva sculpture is one of dozens of tiny bronze monuments scattered throughout Budapest that have spawned specialist tours and won Kolodko a cult following among tourists and locals.
Kolodko was born in Uzhhorod, Soviet Ukraine, in 1978. In 2010, the artist began planting miniature statues throughout his home city in western Ukraine.
"I could have waited for years for an order for some monumental sculpture," he told RFE/RL. "Instead, whenever I had enough money for a kilogram or two of bronze, an idea, and a good location, I just went ahead myself."
The illegal mini-monuments in Uzhhorod, he says, were often a way to draw attention to local historical figures who had been ignored by Soviet authorities and who independent Ukraine didn't have the budget to honor with large monuments.
As the Uzhhorod statuettes gained fame online, Kolodko realized "when people can photograph them up close they fill the frame in just the same way as a big statue." The tiny monuments were soon having an outsized impact, attracting more tourists than full-scale monuments that had cost tens of thousands of dollars to produce.
In 2016 Kolodko relocated to Hungary, initially living in a tiny one-bedroom apartment he shared with his wife and two daughters. Kolodko has Hungarian heritage and remembers fondly his frequent trips to the country when he was a child.
Kolodko began stealthily emplacing tiny statues throughout Budapest soon after his arrival. Initially Kolodko paid tribute to cartoon characters that he remembered watching on Hungarian television in his childhood.
The guerrilla artist says he emplaces his statuettes in daylight, sometimes with his children playing nearby. So far he has not been questioned by police while working.
Many of Kolodko's works play on themes from Hungarian folklore and history. The tourists seen above are photographing one of Kolodko's most popular works -- a deep-sea diver clutching a key outside Budapest's opulent New York Café.
The bronze diver references a legend of author Ferenc Molnar hurling the key to the New York Café into the Danube River to prevent staff ever closing the doors to the magnificent establishment.
This lunar rover was fixed onto a traffic bollard near the childhood home of Ferenc Pavlics, a Hungarian-American who designed the wheels for NASA's moon-roving vehicle.
Near a bike stand outside the Dohany Street Synagogue (background on right), this bronze relief depicts Hungarian Jew Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism.
Recently, Kolodko's work has touched on political themes that have rubbed some people the wrong way.
In 2019 Kolodko made a sculpture of a Soviet ushanka cap atop the kind of pillow that bears Hungary's Holy Crown. After placing the monument near a controversial Soviet War Memorial, a politician, apparently misreading Kolodko's statement, smashed the artwork with an ax and tossed it into the Danube.
In place of the destroyed ushanka monument, Kolodko placed an ax atop a velvet pillow (above) to commemorate the unusual political vandalism.
"I can't not do it," Kolodko said of the political art that costs him money and time. But he says although he has several ideas for new war-themed pieces, the people of Budapest "need a break, they can't be given a new sculpture every day."
Kolodko added: "My followers don't love my war work -- they love the themes that are very Hungarian, that give them a connection to their past. These are monuments to their childhoods, and to mine, too."
In 2022 a tour based around the sculptures was launched. A spokesman for the company behind the "hidden mini-statues" tour told RFE/RL it mainly attracted Western tourists, whereas locals tend to prefer hunting out the statuettes themselves on weekend walks.
Inside Kolodko's studio, what may be the next guerrilla mini-statue to appear on Budapest's streets sits awaiting its final touches. The artist asked that photos not be shared of the artwork, but its depiction of two beloved children's characters -- one British, one Russian -- is likely to be popular with both carefree children and well-read politicos.
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Literature provides valuable insight into the meanings of mobility and place
Cultural products, including works of literature, are not detached from reality; instead, they construct and challenge our understanding of the world. Literary texts show the complexity of reality, reflect on the power structures of the surrounding society and reveal the weight of history in the present.
Academy Research Fellow Anna-Leena Toivanen's research explores portrayals of Afroeuropean mobilities in African literatures.
"Mobility is not only a part of everyday life, but also a global megatrend and an integral part of Western and colonial modernity."
Toivanen's research has shown that representations of mobility often have an important function in advancing the story, and they draw attention to the intertwining of place, time and movement.
"In migrants' homecoming narratives, for example, different forms of physical travel play a key role in their attempts to connect with their former home. In these narratives, the meanings of urban space are built in motion and in a way that juxtaposes memories, the present and the new home in Europe," Toivanen says.
The special characteristics of mobility infrastructures have an impact on the understanding of place. This is seen, for example, in the case of African travelers who arrive in Paris by plane for the first time: Paris turns out not to be the city of light or the center of modernity and "progress" they were expecting, but a shabby periphery.
"The modes and speed of travel can be reflected on the narrative rhythm, and they can have an influence on how the characters are described. The speed of air travel and the hectic metro of Paris create accelerating rhythms of narration, while also painting a picture of a modern African tourist."
The portrayals of mobility examined by Toivanen are marked by the colonial history shared by Africa and Europe, and by its traces in the present.
A key phenomenon in the global world
Toivanen is working on a Research Council of Finland project, which runs until the autumn of 2025. Drawing from this project, she is in the process of writing a monograph on mobilities research in the humanities, to be published in 2025.
"Several other publications are also coming out from the project. For example, a forthcoming compilation I've co-edited with Patricia García applies the perspective of mobility studies to urban literature and art. I'm also editing a special issue of English Studies in Africa, which deals with representations of public transport in African literature."
According to Toivanen, it is important to study literary portrayals of African mobilities because they offer a special perspective on marginalized experiences of one of the key phenomena of global modernity.
"My research also diversifies the migration-focused view of Afroeuropean mobilities by highlighting experiences of everyday physical travel."
More information: Urban Mobilities in Francophone African Return Narratives. www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters … 6d-b39d-6e61e0214374
Peripheralising the Metropolis: Aeromobile Portrayals of Paris in Francophone African Literatures. journal-mobilityhumanities.com … pageid=1&ckattempt=1
Anna-Leena Toivanen, Modes of transport and rhythms of mobility in Bernard B. Dadié's Un Nègre à Paris (1959) and Tété-Michel Kpomassie's L'Africain du Groenland (1981), Studies in Travel Writing (2022). DOI: 10.1080/13645145.2022.2099643
Provided by University of Eastern Finland
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Late Prehistoric discovery turns archaeological assumptions on their head
For a team of archaeologists digging in southwest Spain, the discovery of a Bronze/Iron Age stela—a funerary stone slab with carvings depicting an important individual—would have been exciting enough. But to find a stela that challenges longstanding interpretations of how the carvings represent gender and social roles in prehistoric times was beyond the teams' wildest dreams.
The excavation, taking place in the 3000-year-old funerary complex of Las Capellanías, in Cañaveral de León, Spain, uncovered a stela depicting a human figure with detailed face, hands and feet, a headdress, necklace, two swords and male genitals.
Prior to this discovery, archaeologists had interpreted features such as a headdress and necklace on a stela as representing a female form, while the inclusion of weaponry such as swords would be interpreted as male "warrior" stelae.
But this latest discovery, including both "male" and "female" elements, challenges these assumptions.
This led the archaeology team to consider that the social roles depicted by these carvings were more fluid than previously thought, and not restricted to a specific gender.
Funerary monuments
This is the third stela to be found by the team in this location, providing archaeologists with fascinating insight into the funerary rituals of the time. The location of these finds, and the Las Capellanías funerary complex, is also significant as it is on what would have been an important natural pathway linking to main river basins—forming a communications highway of its day.
The team believes that the location of Las Capellanías on this highway is significant, showing that decorated stelae also had a role as territorial markers.
The excavation was part of a fieldwork project co-directed by Dr. Marta Diaz-Guardamino in Durham University's Department of Archaeology, as part of the wider Maritime Encounters project, with colleagues from the universities of Huelva and Seville. The team included Durham University undergraduate students, working alongside undergraduate and postgraduate students from Seville University.
Provided by Durham University
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A Pablo Picasso painting that depicts the late artist's mistress is expected to fetch a whopping $120 million at auction, according to a news release from Sotheby's. The auction house is selling the art collection of Emily Fisher Landau – and the Picasso piece is the standout.
The 1932 oil painting "Femme à la montre" depicts Marie-Thérèse Walter, who was known as Picasso's "golden muse" and appeared in several of his works.
Picasso and Walter met in Paris in 1927 when she was just 17. They kept their relationship a secret because of her age and because Picasso was married to Olga Khokhlova, a Russian-Ukrainian ballerina.
The painting was the first public exhibition of Picasso's love for Walter. One of its standout details is that Picasso painted Walter wearing a watch. He famously loved watches and "owned three of the greatest watches in existence," according to Southeby's. He depicted watches in just three of his major works and honored Walter by depicting her with one.
The painting was one of the first major art pieces New York art collector Fisher Landau acquired – and she bought it on the spot in 1968, according to Sotheby's. It once hung above her mantle in New York and is now being auctioned with about 120 other pieces she collected, including works by Henri Matisse, Mark Rothko and several others.
Some of her other pieces were bought by Fisher Landau's husband, Martin Fisher, after her jewelry was stolen. Fisher used the insurance money to buy his wife art, adding to her growing collection.
Fisher Landau's massive collection was put on display at her own museum, the Fisher Landau Center for Art in Long Island City, New York. Pieces from her collection have also been displayed at museums like the Whitney.
The collection will be on display at international exhibitions then go up for auction in New York on Nov. 8 and 9. In total, the auction is expected to rake in $400 million.
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It takes some time for Travis Alabanza’s show about the underground drag scene to set alight. But once it does, somewhere in the later part of the first act – after the awkward early scenes – it is a magnificent explosion of burlesque, feather boas, radical politics, pain, anger, filthy humour and breathtaking drag.Co-created and directed by Debbie Hannan, the fire lies in the song and dance numbers, thunderous in their power, that come in the second act. But before that there are discussions on the state of the art today. Issues such as low pay and unionisation are flagged up, a little woodenly, but the show begins to bare its heart as the set is dismantled to reveal the naked walls of the theatre beyond.Tammy Reynolds as Midgitte Bardot in Sound of the Underground at Royal Court theatre, London. Photograph: Helen MurrayWith this, performers begin lip-syncing to voiceovers of their own words or each other’s and it feels like a supportive act – the emotional burden of their words shared – but contains its own masquerade. The effect is mesmerising and moving. They reflect on victimisation, precarious wages and the love of their art. Many in the underground scene wind up homeless, says one voice. There is diversity among the eight performers with a drag king and cis queen among them, and they make clear that this mainstream theatre space is not their natural habitat – they are invited, somewhat equivocal, guests.What leads much of their narrative is an only half-jokey plot to kill RuPaul. He might be an icon, they say, but dragging drag into the mainstream has led to vapid commercialisation, and a sanitised version of the form, shorn of its politics and radical interrogations. We as consumers can simply enjoy its playful aesthetics without deeper engagement. This message hits home in the final act when drag king Chiyo stops their adrenalised performance to speak of how their body is admired by (often straight) audiences inside a club but becomes the source of trans danger and derision outside it.Each act in the second half is as exquisite and exhilarating as the next, showing us that drag is as much about dream, fantasy and dress-up as escape, liberation and self-expression through masquerade. There is a stunning strip-tease with fans by Lilly SnatchDragon, burlesque infused with messages on decolonisation by Mwice Kavindele as Sadie Sinner the Songbird, a song filled with operatic grandeur by Ms Sharon Le Grand and a charismatic act by Wet Mess combining Tudor dress with luminous trainers and sinister clown face. Sound (Alexandra Faye Braithwaite) and lighting (Simisola Majekodunmi) too come with a drama which might befit the Moulin Rouge, and there is breathtaking creativity in every costume.Sue Gives A Fuck, acting as compere, speaks of the sadness and joy in drag. There is certainly sadness in this show, sudden and gut-wrenching but the joy of performance too, and it is a sheer joy to watch. Sound of the Underground is at Royal Court, London, until 25 February
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German circus replaces live animals with holograms
The smell of sawdust and popcorn fills the air. The clowns, acrobats and magicians are all in place.
As the audience are guided to their seats inside the big top, all the classic elements of the circus are there—except one. The live animals have been replaced by holograms.
Due to concerns over animal welfare, Germany's Roncalli circus stopped using lions and elephants in its shows in 1991.
But it went further in 2018 and completely removed live animals from its program.
"It is no longer appropriate for Roncalli to show real animals in the ring," circus boss Patrick Philadelphia, 49, told AFP.
Over the last years, circuses have found themselves increasingly constrained by space.
"If you're setting up in the middle of a marketplace in the center of town, there is no space for outdoor enclosures for animal runs," said Philadelphia.
The nomadic character of circus life was also a strain for animals like horses which had to be loaded onto wagons and then driven to the next town.
"This no longer made sense for an animal-protecting circus," said Philadelphia.
As Roncalli looked for ways to preserve the magic of animals for children, a show in which Justin Timberlake "collaborates" with a hologram of the late Prince triggered the idea to turn to 3D imagery.
"If you can project someone who's no longer living onto a holographic screen, why can't you do it with an animal, a horse, an elephant? So that's where the idea came from," said Philadelphia.
Something unexpected
In Luebeck, a steam train circling the ring kicks off the show to the sound of "Sunday Morning" by Nico and The Velvet Underground, before a bright green parrot appears.
The bird gives way to an elephant and her baby, who stomp and trumpet at the audience, only to be chased by a herd of galloping horses.
Designing the visual illusion was a technical challenge, as the circus seats its audience in a circle, unlike a theatre where the public sits in front of the stage.
Using 11 cameras, arranged on the ceiling of the big top around the ring, the high-resolution images are projected onto a fine-mesh netting which surrounds the performance space.
When the lights go down, the netting becomes almost invisible, but the images pop out.
While live animals gave a thrill, the new technology also makes it possible for Roncalli to do something unexpected.
"Whatever you can imagine, it can be created by an animator, by a graphic designer, then it can also be shown up in a circus show," said Toni Munar, the technical director of the circus.
Good without animals
The absence of animals has become a draw in itself.
"I had never heard of Roncalli before. And then all I found out was that there were definitely no animals. That was especially important to me," said student Sophie Schult, 29.
Previous visits to the circus with her family had left a bad impression with Schult.
"I always saw the narrow cages where they (the animals) were all kept. That is basically animal cruelty," she said during the intermission.
Despite the absence of real elephants or lions, the show still manages to enthuse Andreas Domke and his two sons.
"I think it's good without (animals), because they really try to make the rest of the show special," said the 39-year-old doctor.
The performance works its magic on older audience members, too. Mathias and Marina Martens, both 63, said the spectacle made them feel like children again.
"The acrobatics on show here are amazing," said Mathias Martens, before his wife chimed in: "You do not need the animals there. For that you can go to the zoo and see them."
© 2023 AFP
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Covid's arrival in early 2020 threw organisations and businesses into turmoil. But while most workers grappled with furlough, social distancing and working from home, a small band of museum officers sensed history was in the making. This is one museum service's story of trying to collect items in real-time to capture the pandemic story for future generations.
Wayne Kett had been a curator for just two months when Covid-19 reached the UK.
"I was obviously not expecting to set up major contemporary collecting project," Mr Kett, who works for Norfolk's museums service, said. "It was not on my to-do list."
Norfolk Museums was one of a number of local authority services which responded to the BBC's request under the Freedom of Information Act about Covid-related acquisitions during the pandemic.
Some services collected very little. Colchester Museums, for example, acquired just one item - a medical scrubs bag, while West Northamptonshire Council accessioned six items including a pair of nurses shoes and a social distancing sticker.
Norfolk Museums, however, collected a vast trove of items ranging from digital photographs, to personal written testimonies, to physical objects such as signs, clothing and equipment.
Nobody thought a ration book or a gas mask was interesting in 1945 - everybody had them and they were mundane objects."
Many of the items were everyday items during the pandemic. They include masks, testing kits, signs, a toilet roll and medial scrubs. But their future value should not be underestimated, Mr Ketts says.
"Nobody thought a ration book or a gas mask was interesting in 1945," he says.
Mr Kett remembers the earliest days of the pandemic.
"When we first got sent home I think we thought it would be two or three weeks and then we would go back to the office," he says.
The penny then dropped. History was in the making and it needed to be preserved.
"It was really important to capture that information while it was happening to people and while people were experiencing it - there's a lot of value to that," Mr Kett said.
One of of Mr Kett's favourite items is an opaque plastic container from the Great Yarmouth brewer Lacons.
"The company did something called a 'Ding, Dong Dash'," he says. "They were going to have tip a load of beer down the drain.
"Instead, they filled up containers full of beer and you could apply online and they would ring your doorbell and you got four pints of beer on your doorstep."
He is also fond of the various examples of personal protective equipment (PPE) lovingly sewn by volunteers across the county under the aegis of the volunteer group Norfolk Scrubs.
"At one point during the pandemic Norfolk Scrubs was the main supplier of PPE and scrubs for the James Paget Hospital," he says.
Cathy Terry, senior curator in social history, says her focus was on trying to "get a broad idea of what was going in people's homes".
To help achieve this, a survey was set up asking about people's lives during the pandemic.
"We got a very varied set of responses," Ms Terry said.
"People were getting to grips with it, thinking outside the box and doing their best.
"An awful lot of people were following the guidance to the letter."
In terms of lockdown, some responders admitted to enjoying "having a break from family" while others "found it really difficult", she says.
"I think it was the first time we and the rest of the world were physically and legally affected by an illness," Ms Terry says. "This was completely new."
The items that resonate most for Ms Terry were the pictures of new hobbies people took up and the things people made.
"These were things that made people feel all right," she said. "They were often things people had been putting off doing or trying for a long time."
As as collecting a large range of local and national newspapers, the museum service also collected a copy of the conspiracy newspaper The Light and various anti-vaccine and anti-mask wearing material.
Philip Myles, eastern area curator, says: "If you look back to World War Two, museums did collect propaganda posters.
"It is important to tell all stories from all sides and to illustrate that not everybody was necessarily compliant in following government advice because that makes up part of the story."
Asked what story he hoped the collection would tell future audiences, Mr Myles said: "I hope the collection will show that community effort to overcome what was a very difficult time for everyone."
Hannah Henderson, curator of community history, says: "It was more than just trying to collect items in a historical and curatorial way.
"Yes we wanted to do that, but it was also about reaching out to find out about people's experiences."
She says the service sought out examples of mutual aid which were often "intangible".
"While we have collected a lots of three-dimensional objects, we have also collected a bank of photographs taken at the time and digital assets of posters, youth projects or about mutual aid projects," Ms Henderson says.
"Museums always prioritise the physical stuff because that's what people expect to see," she says. "But at the same time, a lot of the stuff that actually moves me are the photographs of empty streets and shops.
"It has made me realise there really is more work to do to make sense of it all."
Photography: Laurence Cawley
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Museum-goers are to be transported back more than 3,500 years in a sniff after researchers identified and recreated the scent of balms used in the mummification of an ancient Egyptian noblewoman.
While mummification might conjure up scenes of bandages and jars, the process was a fragrant affair in which the body and organs were embalmed to preserve them for the afterlife.
However, with a dearth of texts from ancient Egypt revealing the exact ingredients used, scientists have been using modern analyses to unpick the substances involved.
Now researchers studying residues of balms used in the mummification of a noblewoman called Senetnay have not only revealed that many of their ingredients came from outside Egypt but also reproduced their perfume.
“Senetnay’s mummification balm stands out as one of the most intricate and complex balms from that era,” said Barbara Huber, the first author of the research from the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology.
Writing in the journal Scientific Reports, the team write that Senetnay lived around 1450BC and was a wet nurse to Pharaoh Amenhotep II.
Senetnay’s canopic jars – vessels in which the deceased’s mummified organs were stored – were discovered in a tomb in the Valley of the Kings in 1900 by Howard Carter, the British archeologist who would later become famous for his role in discovering the tomb of Tutankhamun.
Huber and colleagues analysed six samples of residues of the mummification balms from inside two jars that that had once contained Senetnay’s lungs and liver, as indicated by hieroglyphic inscriptions.
The team found the balms contained a complex mix of ingredients, including fats and oils, beeswax, bitumen, resins from trees of the pine family, a substance called coumarin that has a vanilla-like scent, and benzoic acid, which can be found in many plant sources including cinnamon and cloves.
Many of the ingredients, they note, would have had to be important to Egypt.
“For instance, certain resins, like the larch tree resin, likely came from the northern Mediterranean and central Europe,” said Huber. “One other substance was narrowed down to either a resin called dammar – exclusive to south-east Asian tropical forests – or Pistacia tree resin. In case it was dammar, this would highlight the extensive trade networks of the Egyptians during the mid-second millennium BCE, bringing in ingredients from afar.”
But not all of the ingredients identified were present in both of the jars, a finding that might suggest the balms were organ-specific, although the team noted it could also be that they were originally the same but were poorly mixed or have degraded differently.
The researchers said few mummies had received the elaborated treatment Senetnay was given, which, together with the non-local provenance of many of the ingredients, supports the view that she had a high social standing – a situation already indicated by the site of her burial and her title of “Ornament of the King”.
Huber added that, working with a perfumer, the team have recreated the balms’ scent, which will be used in an exhibition at the Moesgaard Museum in Denmark this autumn.
The smell of the balm has been labelled “the scent of the eternity”.
Dr William Tullett, an expert in sensory history at the University of York who was not involved in the work, said recreating smells from history was crucial to understanding the relationship between the past and the present.
“To our noses the warm, resinous, pine-like odours of larch might be more reminiscent of cleaning products and the sulphurous scent of bitumen might put us in mind of asphalt. But for Egyptians these smells clearly had a host of other meanings related to spirituality and social status,” he said. “It’s those revealing comparisons between the here and now of smell that make recreations so interesting.”
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The Cannes Film Festival announced its 76th competition lineup on Thursday, unveiling a slate featuring old masters and rising stars—along with a few sure-to-be-controversial curiosities. This year’s festival, which kicks off on May 16, will debut movies about Nazis falling in love, about archeologists working on the fringes of their profession (there’s also an Indiana Jones movie), about a curious relationship between an actress and the woman she’s playing. It all sounds très Cannes, which is what one expects from the venerable, sometimes vexing festival. Let’s take a look at some potential highlights in the lineup.
Writer-director Jessica Hausner’s last Cannes film, 2019’s sinister sci-fi Little Joe, won best actress at the festival (for Emily Beacham), something of a surprise win that immediately installed Hausner as a new Cannes go-to filmmaker. Her latest is billed as boarding-school thriller about disordered eating, starring Mia Wasikowska, an actor who is very selective in her work. Which gives us hope that Hausner’s locked into something as weird and dangerous and intriguing as Little Joe proved to be. With a subject matter like that, it ought to at least get people talking.
Audiences will no doubt have lots to say about Jonathan Glazer’s new film, which is based on the Martin Amis novel about a Nazi officer falling in love with his commander’s wife—at Auschwitz. Whether or not people are really in the mood this year (or ever) to watch a concentration-camp romance between Nazis, the prospect of a new Glazer film is nevertheless very exciting. He’s the mastermind behind stylish gangster thriller Sexy Beast, cult-favorite grief drama Birth, and the rapturously received sci-fi Under the Skin. He hasn’t made a movie in 10 years, so his fourth feature will be one of the most hotly anticipated films in competition.
Asteroid City
Another Cannes, another Wes Anderson act of whimsy. Anderson was at the festival in 2021 with The French Dispatch, a patchwork film that went over well enough at Cannes before receiving a chilly reception in the States later that year. This new film, about student-astronomer convention interrupted by aliens (we think), seems to be a bit more accessible than an homage to old-school New Yorker articles. And, as ever with Anderson, what a cast: Tom Hanks, Scarlett Johansson, Steve Carell, Tilda Swinton, Jeffrey Wright, and many, many more. If nothing else, we’ll get some good press-call and red-carpet photos out of Asteroid City, which counts for a lot at Cannes.
Hiokazu Kore-eda is about as reliable a Cannes filmmaker as there is these days. He had a lovely feature, Broker, at the festival last year, and won the Palme d’Or for the sweet, albeit heartbreaking, Shoplifters in 2018. We don’t know anything about the plot of Monster, but we’d guess the film is a mixture of closely realized drama and gentle humor, as that’s what Kore-eda tends to produce. Shoplifters standout Sakura Ando is in the cast, and the film boasts a score from the recently late, beloved composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, which will bring extra attention to the film.
Fresh off a live-action short Oscar nomination, Italian director Alice Rohrwacher will have her first feature at the festival since 2018’s exquisite Happy as Lazzaro. This one is about archeologists working in Italy who get involved in the black-market trading of antiquities. It features an exciting international cast, including Josh O’Connor (Prince Charles on The Crown) and Isabella Rossellini as a retired opera singer. Rohrwacher’s films are rarely straightforward, so we don’t expect this to be a mass-market grave-robbing thriller. But who knows! She could surprise us, as she has before.
American auteur Todd Haynes was last at the festival with a documentary about the Velvet Underground, but now he’s back to fiction. His latest is about a tabloid romance between an older woman (Julianne Moore) and a younger man (Riverdale’s Charles Melton) that, twenty years later, becomes the subject of a film. The star of that movie, played by Natalie Portman, comes to town to research the couple, and then . . . Well, we’re assuming complications of some kind ensue. A new Haynes film is a major event at Cannes, even if his last scripted Cannes feature, 2017’s Wonderstruck, failed to catch heat. With a log line like May December has, who could resist?
In addition to the already announced out-of-competition films like Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, and Euphoria creator Sam Levinson’s already scandal-ridden HBO series The Idol, Cannes announced the premiere of a documentary from Oscar-winning director Steve McQueen: Occupied City, said to be about his adopted city of Amsterdam.
There are some intriguing titles premiering in the Un Certain Regard sidebar category, usually reserved for newer filmmakers. Cate Blanchett has a movie called The New Boy, a period-piece from director Warwick Thornton about an Aboriginal boy in 1940s Australia who takes refuge with a nun played by Blanchett. And the award for grabbiest title of the festival goes to How to Have Sex, a first feature from British cinematographer and director Molly Manning Walker. The film is billed as being about “a group of teenage girls on a rite of passage clubbing holiday, as they navigate early sexual encounters,” which could be a little Spring Breakers or something else entirely. Audiences will no doubt queue up in droves to find out.
We'll have full coverage of the festival beginning on May 16 through the end of the festival. Stay tuned! The full competition lineup is below.
COMPETITION
Club Zero, Jessica Hausner
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Ernst Haas: The American West, written by Paul Lowe, showcases the work of late photographer Ernst Haas His images, captured in the mid-to-late 20th century, document U.S cultural and geographic landscapesThe book 'offers a vision of America that feels both poignantly distant and reassuringly familiar' Published: 04:17 EST, 15 January 2023 | Updated: 04:17 EST, 15 January 2023 Advertisement Take a step back into the American West of bygone times, courtesy of this fascinating new book.Ernst Haas: The American West, written by Paul Lowe and published by Prestel, is an eye-opening compendium of vintage photographs of western America, captured by the late photographer and photojournalist Ernst Haas.Having already established himself as a talented black-and-white photographer in Europe, the Austrian photographer moved to America in 1951 and soon earned a reputation for taking iconic colour photographs of geographic and cultural landscapes in the U.S. The book delves into the archives of both his black-and-white and colour photography of the mid-to-late 20th century, showcasing spectacular images of scenes that include the bright lights of Route 66, enormous Arizonan canyons and rows of cowgirls in New Mexico.In the introduction to the book, photography lecturer Lowe writes: ‘This book charts Ernst Haas‘ 34-year love affair with the myth and the reality of the American West. Haas celebrated the grandeur of the landscape, but also critiqued the excesses of American culture, and found solace in the traditions of the Native Americans. Haas used his extraordinary command of colour to great effect.’And the publisher notes: ‘The remarkable book offers a vision of America that feels both poignantly distant and reassuringly familiar.' Below are photographs from the book that encapsulate this vision… This richly-coloured 1969 photograph, titled Route 66 Albuquerque, shows traffic on the streets of Albuquerque, New Mexico, following a heavy downpour Captured in August 1977, this awe-inspiring photograph by Haas shows Arizona's Spider Rock casting its shadow in the Canyon de Chelly. It's titled Rock Mountain A buffalo seeks shelter under trees during a snowstorm in Yellowstone National Park in this evocative 1966 picture by Haas, titled Buffalo Winter Titled Flood Lands, this mesmerising photograph, taken in 1963, shows a section of Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park in Utah Taken in 1978, this dynamic picture of wild horses galloping across the countryside is titled Free Spirits This curious 1960 photograph shows a house being transported by a trailer along a Nevada road. Haas titled the shot Snail's Pace LEFT: This striking picture shows a little girl in Native American dress standing in front of a Plymouth Valiant car and a teepee in Seattle, Washington State, in 1975. Haas named the shot Seattle Settlement. RIGHT: Titled TV and Shadows, this beautifully-lit picture depicts a television set by a window in California, circa 1975 Titled Cowgirls in Santa Fe, this eye-catching photograph shows a row of five young women wearing identical cowboy hats in New Mexico in 1952 In this epic 1960 photograph, Haas has captured an aerial view of cloud and rock formations in western America Advertisement
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Archaeologists excavating beneath the ruins of an early Christian church have unearthed underground rooms and a tunnel from 1,500 years ago in the oldest part of Istanbul — once Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire.
The purpose of the hidden structures isn't completely understood, but they are probably part of the vast Church of St. Polyeuctus above them, which was built when the city was the center of Christianity, the empire's official religion.
The subterranean features consist of two large chambers connected by a tunnel and seem to have been linked to the church prothesis — the chamber beside the altar where bread and wine were prepared for the Byzantine Christian rite of the Divine Liturgy, a name still used in Eastern Orthodox churches. Parts of the underground rooms are still decorated with mosaics, stone inlays and carved marble blocks, according to archaeologists.
The underground rooms were first discovered during excavations following road construction in the 1960s. But they were covered up again, and their entrances were backfilled to preserve the rooms, according to Mahir Polat, the deputy general secretary of the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality (IBB.)
The area, in the Saraçhane district at the center of Istanbul, had since become derelict. But the IBB started a redevelopment of the area last year as part of a project to transform the extensive ruins into a tourist attraction. In March, workers re-excavated the underground rooms and tunnel, and authorities soon plan to let the public observe the progress, Polat told Live Science in an email.
Imperial church
The Church of St. Polyeuctus was built between A.D. 524 and 527, during the reign of the emperor Justinian, according to "The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium" (Oxford University Press, 1991). It was one of the most splendid churches in Constantinople, as well as the largest until the cathedral of Hagia Sophia (now a mosque) was completed in 537.
All that's left now are its ruins, but in its heyday the Church of St. Polyeuctus was ornately decorated and may have boasted an early dome — a design perfected in the Hagia Sophia.
Polat said the church was abandoned after it was badly damaged by an earthquake in the 11th century and finally destroyed during the sack of the city in 1204 by Crusaders, mainly from Western Europe.
According to British historian Jonathan Phillips, author of "The Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople" (Penguin Books, 2005), the Crusaders had been lured to Constantinople in support of a Byzantine Imperial faction while on their way to liberate Jerusalem. But they were left empty-handed when their favorite emperor was deposed by an uprising, and they turned instead to looting the imperial city.
Several architectural features of the church were taken and placed on buildings as far away as Barcelona and Vienna, and two of its ornately carved pillars — known as the Pilastri Acritani, or "Pillars of Acre" — are now part of St. Mark's Basilica in Venice.
The church ruins were built over during Istanbul's Ottoman period. Polat said it was notable that the underground structures had survived so long without being greatly damaged by the region's numerous earthquakes; and this longevity suggests many Byzantine buildings had been designed to withstand them.
Ken Dark, an archaeologist at King's College London who isn't involved in the new project but has conducted excavations in Istanbul, said the ruins of St. Polyeuctus are among the best-documented in the city.
"Hopefully, re-displaying the ruins of this historically important and once-magnificent church will bring awareness of it to a much wider audience," he told Live Science in an email.
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Tom Metcalfe is a freelance journalist and regular Live Science contributor who is based in London in the United Kingdom. Tom writes mainly about science, space, archaeology, the Earth and the oceans. He has also written for the BBC, NBC News, National Geographic, Scientific American, Air & Space, and many others.
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MILAN -- Vandals set fire and destroyed a seminal artwork by one of Italy’s most famous living artists early Wednesday outside Naples’ City Hall.
By the time flames were doused, all that was left of the installation by Michelangelo Pistoletto was a charred frame.
Pistoletto's artwork, titled “Venus of the Rags” had been display in Naples since June 28. It featured a large plaster neoclassical nude Venus, inspired by Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen’s 19th century “Venus with Apple,” picking through a mountain of rags.
Pistoletto made several versions of “Venus of the Rags.” The first, in 1967, had a concrete or cement Venus purchased at a garden center covered with mica to create a glittery surface. Others used plaster casts of the that statue, and one was made out of Greek marble containing mica, according to the Tate Gallery, which owns one of the pieces.
Pistoletto told the Corriere della Sera daily newspaper that the reasons for the attack could be many.
“It is a work that calls for regeneration, on the necessity to find a balance and harmony between two minds that are represented on the one hand by beauty, and on the other by consummate consumerism, a disaster,’’ the 90-year-old artist said.
He added: “The world is going up in flames anyway. The same spirits that are waging war are the ones that set the Venus on fire. “
Pistoletto is a painter, object artist and art theorist who is one of the main representatives of the Italian Arte Povera movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s through which artists attacked the political, industrial and cultural establishment.
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While the cowboy aesthetic is well-worn territory in art and fashion, a collaboration between Helmut Lang and Antwaun Sargent, a director and curator at Gagosian, explores the concept to break new ground. explores the concept to break new ground. The brand’s famous reverse cowboy T-shirt, first released in 2004, nods to none of the classic elements of cowboy fashion—the blue jeans and leather boots that remain staples of America's sartorial identity—favoring a spare design that makes a bold statement, one that asks viewers and wearers of the garment to imagine the possibilities implied by that label.
The shirt functions as the point of departure for the brand’s AW 2023 collection as well as for the complementary art installation, for which seven artists chosen by Sargent (Turiya Adkins, American Artist, Awol Erizku, Devin B. Johnson, Justen Leroy, Daniel Obasi, Quay Quinn Wolf) were tasked with plumbing centuries of history and mythmaking around the cowboy and western aesthetic. Titled “Helmut Lang Seen By Antwaun Sargent,” the show is on view at the Hannah Traore Gallery on the Lower East Side through February 23. Though it finds its basis in the traditional iconography of cowboy lore, Sargent’s lens spans from Lagos to Los Angeles, beyond the badlands and the 1800s through to the present day.
“From a contemporary standpoint, this notion of ‘cowboy’ has really taken on global dimensions in our culture,” Sargent tells me, as the artists take in their first looks at the installed pieces. There are hours between our chat and the show’s debut, but already a buzzy energy within the gallery lures a few passersby inside, only to be turned away until the official opening. “I thought about everything from Beyoncé’s Renaissance album cover to [featured artist] Daniel [Obasi]’s images of cowboy culture in Africa, in New York, in Philadelphia, in the American South and West. So it really wasn't about the American West, it was about new narratives and the way that notion has taken on [meanings] that are not necessarily always connected to the realities of what it meant to be a cowboy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The exhibition is a way to rethink, reimagine or further imagine the different components of this grand narrative.”
With the T-shirt as their anchor, the artists ventured off in all different directions examining themes of spirituality, masculinity, and migration for their works. The resulting exhibit is a mix of paintings, photographs, sculptures, and sonic components. Justen Leroy’s submission, Hymn 1, mixes media: the black and white image of a man with two fingers pressed against his forehead and two pointed skyward covers the gallery’s entire back wall as a prayer rings out through headphones. The subject is Leroy’s father, eyes closed and clearly channeling something greater, the opposite of lost in thought. Breaking out into song or prayer is a common occurrence for the artist’s dad, one Leroy wanted to capture for his submission and layer atop the visual element. “I was thinking about the show and cowboys and really [my father’s] journey from Kingston, Jamaica, to the Americas and the spirituality of that journey,” Leroy says. “What is in the spirit of the cowboy on that journey? While you’re being nomadic, what are you praying for, praying about? What kind of song are you singing to yourself when you’re in the heat of the desert sun? [I was] trying to get into the heart and the mind and spirit of the cowboy.”
In contemplating the cowboy’s journey, artist Quay Quinn Wolf thinks of grime and buildup, strain on the body, the patina on a saddle. The sculptor experimented with rubbing essential oils on leather to the point of bruising and tearing for submissions Bruise No.1 and Bruise No.2. The pair are installed directly behind Saddle, also Wolf’s work.
“When you think ‘cowboy,’ you think masculinity,” Wolf says. “I was looking for an auto body repair stand that looks a lot like a saddle rest [for Saddle]. I’ve used auto body repair stands in the past to talk to societal notions of masculinity. I often pair them with drapey things or clothing that’s embroidered with pearls so there’s a bit of tension between what society considers masculine and feminine. I hand cut lamb leather and wove it since I also wanted to talk about community, and that kinship of cowboys, like the weaving together of a quilt.”
The exhibit’s pieces are all in dialogue with the Helmut Lang T-shirt, so it’s only fitting that the concept behind the show inspired some designs for a few accompanying garments. Limited edition T-shirts featuring pieces displayed in the exhibit, as well as a shirt depicting Sargent’s own take on the COWBOY T-shirt, (which swaps the backwards label “COWBOY” for “ART”), are available for sale. “It really is a way not only for the artists to create new commissioned works but also to create our own garments within the discourse that we had around creating this exhibition,” Sargent says.
For Hannah Traore, the show is a major marker of success after the one-year anniversary of her gallery’s opening, and one that aligns perfectly with its mission. “If you told me a year ago that someone I respected as deeply as Antwaun Sargent would be curating an exhibition that would be on the walls of my gallery, I simply wouldn’t believe you,” Traore gushes. “And it goes so well with the ethos of my gallery: this group of amazing Black artists, all different mediums, really pushing the envelope, all brought together by Antwaun. It’s kind of a ‘pinch me’ moment.”
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By the time I arrived in Sarajevo in June 1992, I had already spent some time documenting the end of the cold war, shooting the Romanian revolution and the fall of the Berlin Wall. When rumours began to circulate that something was going to happen in Bosnia, no one could believe it. The country seemed integrated: a war would mean people literally fighting their neighbours.Many of us covering the siege of Sarajevo initially believed, perhaps naively, that telling the story loud enough, well enough and honestly enough would lead to condemnation and intervention from the international community. There was a sense of incredulity that this could be happening in a European capital city. I don’t think any of us would have thought the blockade would still be in place three years later.During those years, I made about 10 visits. In my first couple of weeks, I concentrated on the siege itself: casualties, patients in hospital, bodies in the morgue. Later, I became preoccupied with what happens to ordinary, educated, cultured people when they’re reduced to the medieval conditions caused by a siege.Sarajevans had little in the way of weapons, while food, water and electricity were often in short supply, but they were incredibly adaptable and tried to live as normally as they could. They would not give up things they wanted to do, such as meeting friends in the city centre. One of my photographs, taken a year in, shows a woman’s feet under a shroud in the morgue. Her toenails were painted, which seemed like a small act of resistance.A vibrant and important cultural life began to emerge – and that was my focus. I became friends with actors and artists, including a painter who alternated between working in his studio and fighting on the frontline. He even made a sketch, a plan for a network of trenches, in the shape of Piet Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie. Art and culture were seen as central to the defence of Sarajevo. It wasn’t just the physical city that was being defended, it was the concept of the city – what it is to be a citizen and part of society.People would risk their lives for a little pleasure. And it could be very hard on kids, who obviously didn’t want to be stuck indoors. During quieter periods, they were able to go outside more – I took a picture of children swimming in the river during a ceasefire. But the river, like so much of the city, was clearly visible to Serbian snipers. One winter, I attended an awful scene: a group of five or six children had been killed by a shell while sledging in front of their house.This picture of a child with a ball was taken while I was out walking in the beautiful late afternoon winter light. I just happened upon the scene, capturing the ball being thrown up in the air as if this was any street in the world. It’s such an ordinary thing for a kid to do, but it’s happening against the backdrop of the tank trap, a hint of the ever-present danger.Today, I split my time between the UK and Sarajevo. My wife is from the city and I have friends here. I recently held an exhibition in the rebuilt Vijećnica, the Sarajevo town hall that was razed in 1992. One photograph showed a string quartet playing in its ruins during the siege. I hung the image where it was taken, with the building restored to its former glory. Paul Lowe’s books include Photography Masterclass; Understanding Photojournalism, with Dr Jenny Good; and Reporting the Siege of Sarajevo, with Kenneth Morrison.Paul Lowe’s CVPaul Lowe. Photograph: Justin McKieBorn: London, 1963.Trained: BA in history, Cambridge University. BTec in documentary photography, Gwent College of Higher Education. PhD in photography, University of the Arts London.Influences: “Rembrandt, Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand, Tony Ray Jones, Gilles Peress.”High point: “Documenting the extraordinary resilience of the citizens of Sarajevo as they defended their city not just with guns on the frontlines but with culture and art. Their incredible courage, humour and creativity was inspiring.”Low point: “The fact that, despite all of our coverage of the atrocities taking place in Bosnia, the international community failed to intervene, and it took the massacre of 8,000 men and children in Srebrenica to force their hand. And then, to watch the same unfolding in Ukraine today.”Top tip. “Let your subject breathe, let the situation unfold. And think about how the aesthetic choices you make contribute to the meaning of your photograph.”
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Art and Culture
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Robert O’Hara is a tease. In this exhilarating tragicomedy, the writer is always several fleet-footed steps ahead. A nervous delight results from his total control of the stage, as he lets us flounder in entertained bafflement before gradually handing us subtle, playful reveals. First staged in New York in 2014, Bootycandy is the kind of play you cannot imagine working as any other art form. Alive and lively, it is deliciously unpredictable.
In-the-round at the recently relocated Gate theatre, O’Hara (who directed Jeremy O Harris’s scalding production, Slave Play in New York) feeds us a collection of fragmented scenes that rocket in wildly different directions, all looping around violence and desire. At the centre is Sutter, played by Prince Kundai, who is luminous as the character grows from an overexcited child to a hurt and hardened adult, his eyes fixed firmly on revenge.
Each segment is a puzzle piece scattered across the stage: scenes from Sutter’s life and others that extend beyond his but grapple with similar themes. They deal with fantastical experiences of queerness, Blackness, power, longing, cruelty and resistance. Uproarious and anarchic, individually they hold their own. Put together, they are radiant.
In this thrilling UK debut, the action is dynamised by Tristan Fynn-Aiduenu’s inventive, nimble direction. No moment is wasted, no energy dropped. Every movement is a dance, from Bimpé Pacheco’s absurdist performance of a woman on the phone to Luke Wilson’s exquisite, gold-heeled preacher. Kundai moves with grace and joy in his bones as he moonwalks dressed as Michael Jackson, his body loose and free without the understanding of what the figure signifies.
Only as the scenes pile up do we see the sinister threads that keep these characters tied together. A wickedness seeps into innocence. Boundless imagination builds into twisted fantasy. The play delights in not fitting into a recognisable structure, and we are met with constant surprises as each storyline is extended beyond its logical conclusion, heightened and violated, while Sutter tries desperately to control the spiralling narrative.
The Gate is one of many theatres to be losing all of its Arts Council funding later this year. This production stands as testament to what we could lose due to this ill-made decision: beautiful, fearless art.
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Art and Culture
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‘For me, the Sussex landscape offers some of the most beautiful and interesting landscapes in the UK, yet somehow it remains relatively unknown.’
So says Brighton-based photographer Lloyd Lane, whose work is a masterful celebration of the multi-faceted scenery of his home county. At times, Lane, 47, focuses on the ferocity of the Sussex coast, capturing waves crashing and breaking under stormy skies, but on other occasions, he dwells on Sussex’s softer side, looking at its misty valleys and forests.
He observes: ‘People are sometimes surprised that some of my photographs of mist surrounding the undulating hills of the South Downs are from this country and have instead mistaken them for Tuscany! Mostly, I think people are reminded of how beautiful the UK actually is.’
After a spell spent living in London, Lane moved back to his native Sussex seven years ago. 'I‘m still finding new things to photograph,' he reveals.
The photographer - who works as a software developer when he's not shooting landscapes - says that Sussex ‘is a part of the world that never stops giving’ and that witnessing its transformation through the changing seasons is ‘truly breathtaking’.
Below are 15 pictures by Lane that paint Sussex in a truly spectacular light…
In this powerful shot, a wave pounds against Newhaven harbour, which sits at the mouth of the River Ouse in East Sussex. Touching on how he approaches photographing the dramatic Sussex coast, Lane says: 'On the whole, it’s about waiting for the right weather conditions. I normally look for strong winds of more than 40mph (64kph), at the same time as a high tide, so that the waves are as close to the coast as possible. The sea can be ferocious and creep up on you when you least expect it, so I use a telephoto lens to zoom in and get closer to the action, whilst allowing me to stand far away from the waves.' He adds: 'It is then a case of waiting for Mother Nature to do her best'
This magical picture was taken from a vantage point on the Firle Beacon, a hill in the South Downs. This is one of Lane's favourite spots from which to 'watch a sunrise over the undulating South Downs, preferably with a healthy dose of mist'. He says: 'With early starts, it’s very easy to stay in bed as long as possible, but the best light can start 45 minutes before sunrise'
None For more from Lloyd Lane, visit his
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Art and Culture
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Now in his second season as its music director, Vasily Petrenko has brought a welcome touch of post-pandemic style and excitement to the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, once the Cinderella of London orchestras. His thematic programming this year, subtitled Journeys of Discovery, is at once imaginative and accessible. Best of all, the RPO, who were in great form, seem to love playing for him.
Not all of the repertoire in the latest concert lived up to the evening’s prescribed theme of Ecstasy. There are certainly ecstatic moments in Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet, but you would hardly know that from the four largely doom-laden pieces Petrenko selected from the ballet to open the concert. Nevertheless the RPO played them with swagger, weight and swift-fingered finesse, allowing a succession of principals to shine.
Nor is ecstatic the first word that comes to mind in relation to Ravel’s bustling Piano Concerto, which the Spanish pianist Javier Perianes dispatched with insouciant assurance. Perianes seemed determined to ignore the atmospherics of the adagio, which plodded more than it should. There is more to this piece than he found in a somewhat offhand performance.
Things picked up markedly after the interval. Wagner’s Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde is never an easy piece to bring off in a concert setting. But it is certainly ecstatic, and it was expertly shaped and moulded by Petrenko, who showed himself a natural Wagnerian. The final chord, in which the pain embodied for so long by the cor anglais is suddenly silenced, was spine-tingling.
The bullseye of the concert, though, was unquestionably Scriabin’s Poem of Ecstasy. Petrenko had a firm grasp of the rapidly changing harmonic moods of the piece, drawing alluring playing from the orchestra, in which Emer McDonough’s flute beguiled and Matthew Williams’ wonderfully obsessive trumpet shone out. It was a compelling performance that made complete sense of Scriabin’s dazzling score, and it isn’t every day you can say that.
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Art and Culture
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Describing the early 2023 arts calendar as “stacked” feels like an understatement. The sheer number of exhibitions, group shows, retrospectives, and openings is overwhelming in both number and scale. But fear not: we’ve put together a list of the highlights from the first few months of this year in New York City, Los Angeles, and other select cities throughout the United States. Consider this your grab-bag guide to the can’t-miss exhibitions of the season, and check back often—we’ll be updating this list as more events roll in.Drake Carr: Walk-Ins at New York Life GalleryDrake CarrPhotograph by Jan Carlos DiazDrake Carr is taking a page out of Marina Abramović’s playbook. This month, the Brooklyn-based artist presents a residency and exhibition of live drawings at New York Life Gallery. Meaning: Carr will draw both personal friends of his and models by trade (including supermodel and fellow illustrator Connie Fleming) in person at the gallery over the course of 12 days. The sketches, drawings, and paintings born from that nearly two-week period will be installed directly and immediately onto the gallery walls—where they’ll be on view from January 14-20, 2023. Plus, the artist will be on site and making drawings periodically throughout the exhibition period while the gallery is open to the public—an opportunity to witness his process. House for the Inhabitant Who Refused to Participate at Tina Kim GalleryCourtesy of Tina Kim GalleryOn view through January 21, this hybrid art and design show curated by the New York and Los Angeles-based architecture and interior design firm Charlap Hyman & Herrero features works by Louise Bourgeois, Heidi Bucher, architects Sam Chermayeff and John Hejduk, and many more artists and makers modern and contemporary whose work reflects a moment frozen in time. Felt “shadows” on the floor and an audio artwork by Emma McCormick Goodhart add an electric, surrealist energy to the proceedings. The exhibition is an homage to a project by the same name that Hejduk opened in 1978.Julia Chiang: Salt on Our Skin at Nicola Vassell GalleryJulia Chiang, So Far So Close (2023).Courtesy of Nicola Vassell GalleryThrough February 25, Nicola Vassell Gallery is highlighting the work of Brooklyn-based painter, sculptor, and installation artist Julia Chiang. Chiang’s pieces reflect her obsession with repeating patterns—and offer commentary on the idea of transformation and assimilation. “I grew up with parents who didn’t throw things away,” Chiang writes of her inspiration for the show. “Sometimes out of thrift, but often because my dad would give old things a new life. An old chair leg would become a new railing. A hand-painted wood carving would show up as a holder for some new kitchen gadget. Piles of newspapers in Chinese and English would be twined together, waiting for recycling, but there were too many piles to ever really disappear. There were textures and materials for all kinds put aside for later use, we just weren't sure what.” Leonor Fini: Metamorphosis at Kasmin GalleryLeonor Fini, rue Payenne, Paris, c. 1938. Courtesy of Kasmin, New York, and Galerie Minsky, Paris.The Argentine-Italian artist Leonor Fini (1907-1996) spent her life surrounded by sartorial elegance, excess, and high fashion. She maintained personal relationships with Christian Dior and Elsa Schiaparelli, and created decadent paintings, sculpture, and works on paper that explored themes of masquerade and performance. Now, a portion of her oeuvre is on view at Kasmin Gallery in Metamorphosis—a tribute to Fini’s figurative depictions of drama and folklore. This is the first-ever solo presentation of work by the artist at Kasmin, and it will run through February 25.Dan Flavin: Kornblee Gallery 1967 at David ZwirnerInstallation view, Dan Flavin, Kornblee Gallery, New York, January 7–February 2, 1967. © 2023 Stephen Flavin/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.Courtesy of David ZwirnerIn January of 1967, Dan Flavin—the artist famous for creating minimal sculptures and installations from fluorescent lights—mounted two groundbreaking exhibitions at New York City’s Kornblee Gallery. On January 10, David Zwirner is recreating those two projects inside its Upper East Side location. The “situations,” as Flavin used to call them are separated into two distinct rooms inside the townhouse at 34 East 69th Street. At Zwirner’s London gallery, there will be concurrent show titled Dan Flavin: Colored Fluorescent Light.Projects: Ming Smith, at MoMAMing Smith, Grace Jones, Cinandre, New York, 1974 archival pigment print24 x 36 in (61 x 91.4 cm).©Ming Smith. Courtesy of the artist and Nicola Vassell GalleryOne of the most hotly anticipated openings of the year is coming to New York City’s Museum of Modern Art on February 4. Projects: Ming Smith is a deep dive into the work of the inimitable photographer, who has been living and working in New York since the 1970s and inspired a generation of artists that followed her. Curated by Thelma Golden, the director and chief curator at The Studio Museum in Harlem, along with associate curator Oluremi C. Onabanjo, Projects is a deep dive into Smith’s archives, and a new examination of her most famed images. If you can’t make it to New York and are hoping for more Ming, no worries—Nicola Vassell Gallery will have a booth at Frieze L.A. with a solo exhibition of the photographer’s work.Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age, 1952–1982, at the Los Angeles County Museum of ArtOn the West Coast, LACMA presents Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age, 1952–1982, a show exploring how the rise of computer technology has shaped how art is made. Featuring artists, writers, musicians, choreographers, and filmmakers—some of whose work will be digitally generated—this exhibition will run from February 12 through July 2. María Berrío: The Children’s Crusade, at the ICA BostonThe New York–based Colombian artist María Berrío is taking her large-scale, collaged paintings to the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. Using Japanese paper and watercolors, Berrío makes artworks that capture riveting, magical scenes, evoking folkloric stories of her upbringing. For this particular exhibition, Berrío blended the history of the Children’s Crusade of 1212 with modern-day migrant stories of displacement, loss, and the unknown. On view from February 16 through August 6.Robert Grosvenor at Paula Cooper GalleryRobert Grosvenor, untitled, 2022.Photograph courtesy of Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.At last year’s Venice Biennale, the American sculptor Robert Grosvenor displayed three of his signature super-sized installations; those three pieces became sources of inspiration for Grosvenor’s next show at Paula Cooper Gallery in New York City. The artist, who is known for his large-scale room installations that toe the line between sculpture and architecture, created untitled—a bright orange, VW Buggy-looking car sitting directly on the gallery’s floor—just for Paula Cooper. But rare photographs he snapped between 2000 and 2013 will be on display as well. See the show soon: it closes on January 28.Gaetano Pesce: Dear Future at The Future PerfectLeft: Gaetano Pesce, Nobody’s King Chair (2002). Right: Gaetano Pesce, Leaf Shelf (2022).Courtesy of The Future PerfectWhen it comes to today’s trends in furniture and interior design, Gaetano Pesce deserves his due credit. The Italian artist, industrial designer, and architect is the forefather of practically every candy-colored Lucite furnishing and home decoration populating your For You Page today. And at The Future Perfect Gallery’s new sprawling Los Angeles outpost, the Goldwyn House, six decades of Pesce’s visionary designs will be on view—including some never-before-seen works alongside rarely exhibited historic pieces—from February 16 through March 31....Plus, 정Jeong at The Future PerfectDetail of Jane Yang-D’Haene, The Moon Jar Collection, 2022. Photograph by Sean Davidson. Courtesy of the artist and The Future Perfect.Another standout show at The Future Perfect’s New York City location: 정Jeong, an exhibition of new work by eight South Korean artists, designers, and craftspeople. Inside the gallery’s West Village townhouse, you’ll find Korean concept furniture made by Seungjin Yang, soft-focus colorfield sculptures by Rahee Yoon, as well as contemporary interpretations of the moon jar, made by Jane Yang-D’Haene and Jaiik Lee (shown above). Don’t miss this very special show, which opens on February 2 and closes March 17.Gordon Matta-Clark & Pope.L: Impossible Failures at 52 WalkerPope.L, studio, 2022.Courtesy of 52 Walker52 Walker is kicking off the new year with Gordon Matta-Clark & Pope.L: Impossible Failures, an exhibition pairing the work of the site-specific artist Gordon Matta-Clark and the visual artist Pope.L. The TriBeCa space helmed by Ebony L. Haynes will unveil on February 3 an examination of the two artists’ careers—specifically, their shared fixations on the problematic nature of institutions, language, scale, and value. Running through April 1, Impossible Failures will also feature a new site-specific installation by Pope.L, presented in collaboration with Mitchell-Innes & Nash. Personally, we can’t wait to see the Newark, New Jersey native’s take on Matta-Clark’s preferred medium.
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Art and Culture
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JERUSALEM -- One of the oldest surviving biblical manuscripts, a nearly complete 1,100-year-old Hebrew Bible, could soon be yours — for a cool $30 million.
The Codex Sassoon, a leather-bound, handwritten parchment tome containing almost the entirety of the Hebrew Bible, is set to go on the block at Sotheby’s in New York in May. Its anticipated sale speaks to the still bullish market for art, antiquities and ancient manuscripts even in a worldwide bear economy.
Sotheby’s is drumming up interest in hopes of enticing institutions and collectors to bite. It has put the price tag at an eye-watering $30 million to $50 million.
On Wednesday, Tel Aviv’s ANU Museum of the Jewish People opened a week-long exhibition of the manuscript, part of a whirlwind worldwide tour of the artifact in the United Kingdom, Israel and the United States before its expected sale, on Wednesday.
“There are three ancient Hebrew Bibles from this period," said Yosef Ofer, a professor of Bible studies at Israel’s Bar Ilan University: the Codex Sassoon and Aleppo Codex from the 10th century, and the Leningrad Codex, from the early 11th century.
Only the Dead Sea Scrolls and a handful of fragmentary early medieval texts are older, and “an entire Hebrew Bible is relatively rare,” he said.
Starting a few centuries before the Codex Sassoon’s creation, Jewish scholars known as Masoretes started codifying oral traditions of how to properly spell, pronounce, punctuate and chant the words of Judaism's holiest book. Unlike Torah scrolls, where the Hebrew letters are devoid of vowels and punctuation, these manuscripts contained extensive annotation instructing readers how to recite the words correctly.
Precisely where and when the Codex Sassoon was made remains uncertain. Sharon Liberman Mintz, a senior Judaica specialist at Sotheby’s, said that radiocarbon dating of the parchment gave an estimated date of 880 to 960. The codex’s writing style suggests its creator was an unspecified early 10th-century scribe in Egypt or the Levant.
“It’s like the emergence of the biblical text as we know it today,” Mintz said. “It’s so foundational not only for Judaism, but also for world culture.”
Though it's certainly ancient and rare, scholars say the Codex Sassoon doesn't match the pedigree and quality of its contemporary — the Aleppo Codex.
“Any Masoretic scholar in their right mind would take the Aleppo Codex over the Sassoon Codex, without any regret or hesitation,” said Kim Phillips, a Bible expert at the Cambridge University Library. He said the scribal quality was “surprisingly sloppy” compared to its counterpart.
The Aleppo Codex, dated to around 930, has been considered the gold standard of the Masoretic Bibles for around 1,000 years. The Codex Sassoon’s margins contain an annotation from a later scholar who says he checked its text against the Aleppo Codex — referring to the manuscript by the Arabic title a-Taj, “the Crown.”
“The Aleppo Codex is more precise than the Sassoon Codex, there’s no doubt,” Ofer said. “But because it’s missing (a third of its pages), in those parts that are absent, there is great significance to this manuscript.” The Codex Sassoon's 792 pages make up around 92% of the Hebrew Bible.
These venerable manuscripts were protected and treasured by Syrian Jewish communities for centuries until the 20th century. How the Sassoon Codex survived the ages is an epic in its own right.
A note on the manuscript attest to its owners in centuries past: A man named Khalaf ben Abraham gave it to Isaac ben Ezekiel al-Attar, who gave it to his sons Ezekiel and Maimon.
It later migrated east to the town of Makisin in what's today northeast Syria, where it was dedicated to a synagogue in the 13th century. Sometime in the following decades, the synagogue was destroyed and the codex entrusted to Salama ibn Abi al-Fakhr until the synagogue was rebuilt.
It never was rebuilt, but the book survived.
Its whereabouts for the next 500 years remain uncertain until it resurfaced in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1929, and was bought by a legendary collector of Jewish manuscripts whose name it still bears.
David Solomon Sassoon was a Bombay-born son of an Iraqi Jewish business magnate who filled his London home with a massive collection of Jewish manuscripts.
“His capacity was astounding, both in terms of number but also in terms of what he was able to find,” said Raquel Ukeles, head of collections at Israel's National Library.
Sassoon roved across Europe, the Middle East and North Africa buying up old books, and by his death in 1942, he had amassed over 1,200 manuscripts.
Sassoon’s estate was broken up after he died and the codex was sold by Sotheby’s in Zurich in 1978 to the British Rail Pension Fund, which had started investing in art several years earlier, for around $320,000.
The pension fund flipped the Codex Sassoon 11 years later for 10 times its hammer price. Jacqui Safra, a banker and art collector, bought it in 1989 for $3.19 million and is now putting it up for auction.
If the target price is realized, the Codex Sassoon could not only eclipse the most expensive Jewish document ever sold — the 2021 sale of the Luzzatto Machzor, a 14th-century prayerbook, for $8.3 million. It also could break the record for the priciest historical document ever sold at public auction. That honor is currently held by a 1787 copy of the U.S. Constitution sold in 2021 for $43 million.
Yoel Finkelman, a former curator of Judaica at Israel’s National Library, said that prices for Judaica manuscripts have skyrocketed in recent years, but Sotheby’s proposed range is “a different league.”
Few institutions, and only a small handful of ultrawealthy collectors, could afford such a price tag. There is precedent, however, of museums joining forces to buy prized manuscripts or philanthropists donating their purchases to libraries and other bodies.
Ukeles said that the National Library managed to purchase seven of Sassoon’s manuscripts when his collection was auctioned off in the 1970s, “but this one got away. And so for us, this is an opportunity to bring this great treasure home.”
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Art and Culture
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The great American journalist and jazz enthusiast Stanley Crouch died in September 2020, yet his death was not given the proper recognition. COVID restrictions were still preventing a lot of mass gatherings, and the news was preoccupied with an election and other things. The recently released volume Victory is Assured: Uncollected Writings of Stanley Crouch will hopefully do something to help correct that.
Crouch was a large force of nature, a brilliant thinker, and quite funny. As journalist Glenn Mott explains in the introduction, “To experience Stanley, indomitable, indefatigable, irrepressible Crouch, was to know the kinetic energy and bombast of an indelible force of New York , as large and complex as any character this city has produced.”
Crouch’s greatest contribution to American culture was his elevation of jazz as the great American art form and one that reflects the creed found in our founding documents. Crouch called the Constitution “a document based in tragic optimism.” That is to say, the Constitution recognizes that men are not angels; it starts with the premise that we are flawed and often prone to despicable behavior. Yet the document that enumerates our rights can be amended when, as is inevitable, we make mistakes. Thus, we accept our flawed nature while being energized with the optimism that comes with knowing we can correct our wrong turns.
Crouch compared the nature of the Constitution to the nature of jazz and the blues, the American art forms he wrote about for more than five decades. Like the Constitution, these are art forms of tragic optimism. “There has never been anything more American than jazz,” Crouch wrote in an essay repainted in Victory is Assured. “Jazz music remade every element of Western music in an American way, just as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution remade the traditions of Western democracy, expanding the idea of freedom to levels it had never known any prior time.” American democracy “updated the social order with its checks-and-balances system and its amendment process.” These measures were, again, “based in tragic optimism, the idea that abuse of power can create tragic consequences, but if there is a form in place that allows for the righting of wrongs, we can maintain an upbeat vision that is not naive.”
Crouch then offers this magnificent observation:
American democracy is also the governmental form in which the interplay between the individual and the mass takes on a complexity mirrored by the improvising unit of the jazz band. In jazz music, the empathetic imagination of the individual strengthens the ensemble. This happens as the form, which is an outline that is followed but is also played with, is given dimension through the collective inventions of the ensemble. In that sense, jazz is a democratic form itself, one in which, as the great jazz critic Martin Williams observed, there is more freedom than ever existed in Western music.
Crouch was born in Los Angeles on Dec. 14, 1945. In his early life, he was on the political left, publishing black nationalist poetry and teaching literature at Pomona College before moving to New York in 1975 to become a cultural critic at the Village Voice. Crouch rejected Marxism and black nationalism in 1979, identifying with writers Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray, who believed they could embrace their black identity as well as their American one.
Crouch, whose prose could be battering, blasted radicals such as Malcolm X and the Black Panthers. “When compared to men like Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King,” he wrote, “Malcolm X seems no more than a thorned bud standing in the shadow of sequoias. Given national recognition by television in 1959, Malcolm X was just beginning to realize how empty his platform had been when he was silenced in 1965, shot down in the very same Harlem that he had victimized either materially as a street hustler or intellectually as the loudest mouthpiece for the Nation of Islam .” Crouch lamented “the intellectual dishonesty that has dogged Negro America since too many in positions of influence and responsibility started sipping at the well of a black nationalism.”
In the 1980s and until his death, Crouch championed what some called “rebop,” or a return to the jazz traditionalism of Duke Ellington and the bebop era of the 1950s. Like so many of his fans, I, too, found something to disagree with him about. Crouch didn’t like a lot of the “free jazz” of the 1960s, some of which I love. However, in our era of tribalism and online bickering, Crouch’s vision of expansive democracy based on excellence and foundational principles is terribly missed.
Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of The Devil ’ s Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi . He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.
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Art and Culture
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VIENNA -- A Vienna museum is hanging some of its paintings at an angle to reflect the possible effects of climate change on the landscapes they depict.
The Austrian capital's Leopold Museum said Tuesday that 15 paintings will be slightly skewed until June 26 as part of the action titled “A Few Degrees More (Will Turn the World into an Uncomfortable Place).” They include works by Gustave Courbet, Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt.
The museum is turning the paintings by the number of degrees by which temperatures at the locations they depict — such as the coast of Normandy and Austria's Attersee region — could rise if far-reaching action isn't taken against climate change.
It worked with a Vienna-based climate research network, Climate Change Center Austria. Museum director Hans-Peter Wipplinger said in a statement that museums “preserve and impart cultural heritage to the next generations” and “have the potential to positively influence our future action by making people aware of social phenomena.”
He added that the museum is showing solidarity with “the efforts of the climate movement.”
In November, members of the Last Generation Austria group threw a black, oily liquid at Klimt's 1915 painting “Death and Life” in the Leopold Museum, and one protester glued himself to glass protecting the painting's frame. The artwork wasn't damaged.
Wipplinger said at the time that the activists' concerns were justified but attacking artworks was the wrong way of trying to achieve their aims. He appealed to them to find other ways to make their concerns known.
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Art and Culture
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One of the many triumphs of “Black Panther” was the film’s use of African art and culture as inspiration for the clothing and architecture of Wakanda. The Afrofuturism-fueled vision for the fictional nation propelled several members of the film’s design team to Oscar gold, with legendary costume designer Ruth E. Carter winning her first Oscar for Best Achievement in Costume Design.
So when it came time to start working on a sequel, the crafts team knew that the pressure was on. In addition to bringing back the people of Wakanda, the film also introduced a new underwater civilization, Talokan. The home of Namor, the film’s villain, was heavily influenced by the aesthetics of Mayan culture. While that history provided an incredible jumping off point for Ryan Coogler and his team, it also came with the responsibility of ensuring that the culture was represented positively. At IndieWire’s Consider This FYC Brunch, Carter and producer Nate Moore sat down with IndieWire’s Marcus Jones to discuss the process of bringing Talokan to life. “It was really hard,” Carter said. “It was underwater. We actually really shot a lot of scenes in a 20-foot tank. To bring in the historical references, we did rely heavily on historians to help us. There were little things I really loved. The jade, the ear spools… you’ll see characters with these ear spools that they wear. The architecture, the art, the beautiful aesthetics that you see from Mayan culture. Also we had to create our own Vibranium for the Talokans and we found, by process of sampling, this blue-style jade that Ryan really loved and said ‘this will be the Vibranium for the Talokans.’”
Ultimately, the team found success by applying the same combination of historical pastiche and comic book technology that made their vision for Wakanda so compelling.
“Those kinds of connections, combined with our version of the Vibranium, we mixed the culture just like we did with Wakanda, with modern technology,” Carter said. “It was a very intense creative process to build this world, and just as rewarding as Wakanda was.”
“Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” is now playing in theaters. Watch the complete panel from IndieWire’s Consider This FYC Brunch below. Sign Up: Stay on top of the latest breaking film and TV news! Sign up for our Email Newsletters here.
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Art and Culture
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It was a major cultural row between France and China, prompting a history museum to pull the plug on one of its most important exhibitions of the decade accusing the Beijing authorities of interference and trying to rewrite history.
But now the Chateau des ducs de Bretagne history museum in Nantes has finally opened its blockbuster exhibition on Genghis Khan and the Mongol empire, with large crowds queueing to see hundreds of objects that have never been shown in Europe, some dug up by archaeologists only three years ago. It is part of a new modern reading of the geopolitical importance of the vast continental empire.
The exhibition, Genghis Khan: How the Mongols Changed the World, is the first French show about the warrior ruler, who by the time of his death in 1227 ruled over an empire that stretched from the Caspian to the Pacific, four times the size of Alexander the Great’s and twice the size of Rome’s.
Crucially, the exhibition seeks to look beyond the cinematic cliches of bloodthirsty warriors to the wider-ranging and geopolitically relevant lessons of the expansive Mongol empire through the 13th and 14th centuries, from climate change to pandemics, cartography and science. At its height, the empire controlled more than 22% of the landmass of planet, stretching from the shores of Japan to eastern Europe.
The museum row in 2020 focused on the project’s collaboration with the Inner Mongolia Museum in Hohhot, China. Chinese authorities demanded that certain words, including “Genghis Khan”, “empire” and “Mongol”, be taken out of the French show. They asked for power over exhibition brochures, explainers and maps at a time when the Chinese government had hardened its discrimination against ethnic Mongols, many of whom live in the northern Chinese province of Inner Mongolia.
The Nantes museum pulled the plug and refused the demands, saying Chinese authorities wanted “elements of biased rewriting of Mongol culture in favour of a new national narrative”.
The new show, which features more than 400 pieces including helmets, fabrics, ceramics and paper money, has instead gone ahead in collaboration with museums in Mongolia, the landlocked country between Russia and China. It comes amid fresh interest and re-examining of the history of the Mongol empire ahead of a planned Royal Academy show in London on Mongol art.
Bertrand Guillet, the director of the Chateau des ducs de Bretagne and Nantes history museum, and general curator of the show, said: “What seemed important when we launched this project six years ago was to go beyond the figure of Genghis Kahn, who is known in slightly vulgar terms as a bloody tyrant.
“We wanted to look beyond the bloody conquests … to explore the coexistence between sedentary populations and nomad populations, a moment of globalisation that allowed considerable exchanges between east and west, the transfer of savoir-faire, the transfer of materials, ideas and that moment of exchange which sparked great changes in the history of humanity.”
Guillet said it was a way of looking afresh at history’s relevance to current geopolitics. “The Mongol empire was gigantic and there are echoes of its political and territorial questions today in the contemporary world: the relationship of China and Russia, what happens in Iran, in central Europe.”
He said a close reading of the history of the Mongol empire also revealed how it was confronted centuries ago with climate change in a way that “resonates with us today”. He said: “There is also the issue of globalisation and pandemics. One of the reasons for the collapse of the Mongol empire was the spread of the great plague, which circulated on the main routes across it.”
Guillet said religious tolerance in the empire had important effects on history in terms of the spread of Islam in central Asia as well as Christian and Buddhist history. Also, the maps created by the Mongols changed the world. “That cartography would be seen by Marco Polo and feed the imagination of Christopher Columbus, with multiple consequences.”
The exhibition runs until 5 May 2024.
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Art and Culture
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NY Met to let French make 3D copies of two 16th-century sculptures
Two 16th-century sculptures, jewels of French Renaissance art, have been on display since 1908 at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.
But thanks to modern technology and an unusual agreement, precise 3D copies will be made and installed in the French castle where the originals long resided.
The facsimiles plan is the fruit of a rare partnership between the Met, as the New York museum is known, and the Dordogne department in southwestern France.
The statues, both from the early 1500s and by an anonymous sculptor, represent Biblical scenes entitled "Entombment of Christ" and "Pieta With Donors."
A tourism promotion agency in the Dordogne, Semitour, will be working with the Atelier of Fac-Similes Perigord (AFSP) to make the replicas over the coming months.
For nearly 400 years, the originals graced the chapel of the Biron chateau in the Dordogne.
Built on a strategic promontory, the sprawling fortress comprises buildings from different eras, including a dungeon dating to the 12th century.
Damaged and rebuilt repeatedly through the centuries, the chateau has belonged since 1978 to the Dordogne department, which declared it a historic monument, Dordogne president Germinal Peiro said during a visit to the Met.
Digital copy
The technology to be employed in copying the sculptures was described to AFP by Francis Rigenbach, who heads the Perigord atelier, and C. Griffith Mann, the Met's medieval art curator.
Using 3D scanners to make digital images of the sculptures, artisans will be able to create replicas without having to move or disturb the monumental originals.
"By making a digital 'cast,'" said Rigenbach, "we can employ non-invasive techniques" to produce identical copies.
He added that "90 percent of the artistic work" will involve reproducing signs of wear, such as the patina on the ageing marble originals—though both statues are considered exceptionally well-preserved.
The replicas, to be returned to their original spots in the Biron chapel, will cost around 350,000 euros ($375,000), Rigenbach added.
His atelier is famed for having copied the celebrated Lascaux cave—including its prehistoric wall art—for a museum in Montignac, in northern Perigord.
That allows visitors to feel as if they were visiting the cave itself, which was closed 60 years ago to avoid damage to the fragile site, said Sebastien Cailler, who manages the Biron chateau.
"And when you see these facsimile sculptures in Biron, you'll surely feel the same emotion as if you were standing before the originals," he told AFP in New York.
The two statues, whose value was recognized by historians and collectors in the late 18th century, were sold in 1907 by the last marquis of Biron to wealthy American banker John Pierpont Morgan, who was then president of the Met board.
In the 1950s, Dordogne and the Biron castle negotiated with the Met for four years in a vain effort to recover the statues.
In 2018, Perigord officials revived talks with the Met; four years later, technological tests were undertaken, and then on February 15, the agreement was signed in New York.
This type of unusual deal ensures that art works can exist in two places, Mann said, while adding that his museum, with its millions of annual visitors, "seems like the safest place to have the sculptures for their long-term preservation."
© 2023 AFP
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The ceremonial return of 21 Benin bronzes to Nigeria by Germany last month gave the latest powerful signal of how fast the international tide is turning on the repatriation of looted art. The German handover followed an American one two months earlier, when the Smithsonian Institution signed over 29 bronzes in Washington. Both ceremonies turned the spotlight once again on the country whose army was responsible for seizing the bronzes in the first place: Britain.The restitution of artefacts is an old bone of contention that has left the British Museum, in particular, beleaguered on all sides. The defence has often focused on how works arrived in museum collections: whether they were honestly acquired or stolen by individuals or armies. In the case of the Benin bronzes, there is no ambiguity. They were looted in 1897, when British forces sacked the Benin kingdom, in modern-day Nigeria, burning down the royal palace, exiling the oba (ruler), and seizing all royal treasures.Most ended up at auction in London, where an estimated 3,000 objects eventually made their way into museums and private collections around the world. Ownership of more than 1,000 bronzes that ended up in Germany was legally transferred to Nigeria last July, five months before the symbolic handover, in the capital, Abuja, of the 21 outstanding items.Several of the UK’s smaller institutions have also joined the great repatriation of Benin plunder, with the University of Cambridge last month pledging to return more than 100 objects, after similar moves by Jesus College, Cambridge, and the University of Aberdeen. The Horniman Museum in south London returned six bronzes in November.Each handover piles more pressure on the British Museum, which has more than 900 artefacts from Benin in its collection, but has recently been more occupied with trying to find a compromise with Greece over the future of the Parthenon marbles. Unlike its smaller siblings, the British Museum is forbidden by law from disposing of its holdings unless they are duplicates, irreparably damaged or unworthy of a place in the collection. In the case of the Parthenon marbles, the chairman, George Osborne, has been trying to sidestep this legal barrier with behind-the-scenes attempts (unsuccessful so far) to reach a loan agreement with Greece.The Benin bronzes cast the legislation in a different light. They might not be duplicates, damaged or unworthy, but there is only room to display 100 of them at any one time in the British Museum, making them a prime hostage of what the Canadian author Malcolm Gladwell has described as the “dragon psychology” of modern museums: an instinct to hoard for hoarding’s sake.This year marks the 40th anniversary of the National Heritage Act, which locked several other national museums into a similar bind over the disposal of their possessions. Tristram Hunt, the director of one of these, the V&A, argued last year that it was time for the act to be repealed, enabling institutions to sharpen up their act and respond to the ethical demands of a changing world. It is a conversation that is badly needed if the UK’s national museums are not to become bywords for postcolonial backwardness.
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Stunning photos of autumnal red maple trees lining a highway are a moving commemoration to Canadian soldiers who gave their lives overseas during the two World Wars.
Many motorists are unaware that they are passing through a sacred war memorial on the A3 in Hampshire, England.
The 418 maples, Canada’s national tree, were planted near Liphook to mark the lives of the 418 Canadian servicemen who trained locally and were stationed at Bramshott, in five temporary army camps established by the Canadian Army on each side of the A3.
Associated with the five military camps named for the five Great Lakes, there was also a large hospital caring for sick and wounded soldiers, especially in preparation for, and in the aftermath of, D-Day, which helped the allied forces win WWII.
Each tree is twinned with a soldier’s grave. Those who lost their lives in the World War I are buried in Bramshott Churchyard and St Joseph’s Catholic Church, in Grayshott. The soldiers who died in World War II were laid to rest at Brookwood Military Cemetery, in Surrey.
Mark Chambers took the photos last weekend at sunrise and sunset on October 22.
“I have been visiting and photographing the area, which is very near to where I live, for the last three or four years now and I have gradually learnt more about the significance of the trees,” said the 29-year-old.
The maple trees were imported directly from their native Canada to replace the line of sycamores that were previously planted there as a reminder to the lost soldiers, but removed after they became a road hazard.
A plaque accompanying the original living monument to the Bramshott Canadian soldiers on the A3 was installed after World War II ‘as a continued memorial to those who gave their lives in defense of freedom’.
The last of the maples were planted by visiting representatives of the Canadian Veterans’ Association and Royal British Legion, as well as government officials on Canada Day in June of 1995.
A scarlet maple leaf is the iconic symbol on the Canadian flag, known for its bold, red design. The use of these trees not only adds a seasonal crimson tribute but also serves as a representation of Canada’s role in the World Wars and the close ties between Canada and the United Kingdom.
A pedestrian underpass opened in 2008, allowing people to cross the motorway to pay their respects and marvel at the trees.
Mark, who bought his camera during lockdown as a “creative outlet during those isolated times”, also wrote about the commemoration in his blog.
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What do women do when no one is watching? These images sum it up nicely.
Realness is key in Sally Nixon's work.
What are women up to when no one is watching?
Artwork courtesy of Sally Nixon, used with permission.
The subjects in her artwork aren't aware we're looking at them.
And that's the point. They're living in a world free from the pressures that exist in the real one.
"I like drawing girls doing their everyday routine — just hanging out, not worried about what others are thinking," Nixon told Upworthy. "They're usually alone or with other girls. Their guard is down."
Editor's note: An image below contains partial nudity.
Capturing her subjects in this liberated light wasn't intentional at first, she explained.
But when she started a 365-day challenge last April to create one art piece a day, the work started reflecting the nuances of her own life away from prying eyes — "I was kind of like, 'Oh, I'm brushing my teeth, so I'll draw that.'" — and a theme began to form.Her illustrations show how women look, away from the exhausting world where they're often judged more harshly than men.
You also might notice none of the girls in her illustrations are smiling.
According to Nixon, that's a deliberate choice.
"I don't sit around smiling to myself," Nixon said, noting the double standard that exists in thinking women should always appear cheerful.
"I've been told, 'You need to smile more.' It's so infuriating. I wanted to show the way girls actually look, comfortably."
The theme of friendship is also an important one in Nixon's drawings.
“I have four older sisters, so female friendship has always been a big part of my life," Nixon told The Huffington Post. “You gotta have someone to talk about periods with, and dudes just don't get it."
Creating relatable scenes was key to Nixon, too — from the details of women's lives to the physical shapes of their bodies.
“It's important that the women I draw aren't rail thin with huge boobs," Nixon said. “I think there are enough images of bodies like that out in the world. The ladies I draw typically have small-ish, droopy breasts and thick thighs. They're kind of lumpy but in an attractive way. Just like real people."
The women in Nixon's work aren't real, but she hopes their stories are.
"One of my absolute favorite comments [on my work] is, 'Oh my God, it's me!'" she explained of the depictions.
"There's a little bit of beauty in [everyday life] and I wanted to bring that out."
This article originally appeared on 04.15.16
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Amazon and Spotify offer a raw deal for artists.Tyler Comrie / The AtlanticDecember 6, 2022, 1:26 PM ETIn 2012, Jeff Bezos claimed in a letter to Amazon shareholders that the company was serving humanity by eliminating old-fashioned “gatekeepers,” like book publishers, that stood between creators and their audiences. Today, nearly three decades since its founding, the company has indeed replaced these businesses with an even bigger and more centralized gatekeeper: Amazon itself.Think about the art and culture you consume—the books, music, movies, and podcasts. You generally know the creators by name and credit them for their work. The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois, for instance, is clearly Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’s novel, not her publisher’s. It’s certainly not Amazon’s novel.But your relationship with—and, more specifically, your financial support for—Jeffers and other creators is not so straightforward. In their new book, Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We’ll Win Them Back, Rebecca Giblin, a professor at Melbourne Law School, and Cory Doctorow, a technology activist and best-selling science-fiction novelist, portray creative markets not as two-way freeways but instead as hourglasses, with authors, musicians, and other artists at one end and consumers at the other. Lodged in the middle of the hourglass are the chokepoint capitalists: the Amazons (and Spotifys and YouTubes and Apples and Googles and other “predatory rentiers”—companies that make money by charging “rent” to anyone who wants to use their services). These companies are different from the standard middlemen that exist in many capitalistic relationships between buyers and sellers, because they have seized complete control of the channels by which culture reaches its audiences.Read: Now do AmazonFrom the consumer’s perspective, the problem might not seem so immediately obvious. Books on Amazon are cheap and arrive quickly. Spotify offers tens of millions of songs and podcasts for less per month than what we pay for a single CD. But for creators, chokepoint capitalists—the firms that control access to their work—are an exploitative nightmare. Chokepoint capitalists don’t just offer a means for creators and audiences to exchange art for money; they provide one of the only means by which that exchange can happen—while shortchanging creators by setting unsustainably low prices for their art, and skimming off most of whatever profit that art manages to generate. But every industry is vulnerable to the price-setting and power-concentrating characteristics of these firms. These struggles, in other words, are a warning for the rest of us.One of the earliest indications of just how brutally Amazon would come to wield its power came in May 2004, when Melville House, a fledgling independent book publisher, found itself at the mercy of a chokepoint. To sell its books on Amazon, Melville was told that it needed to hand over fees to boost its titles on Amazon’s website and in its algorithms. Unexpectedly, Melville refused. As George Packer reported in The New Yorker, one of the publisher’s co-founders, Dennis Johnson, even publicly called Amazon out for bullying publishers while withholding sales information from them, calling its tactics “blackmail.” The following day, the “Buy” button vanished from Melville’s books on Amazon.Only 8 percent of Melville’s sales came from Amazon, but Johnson told Packer that the publisher couldn’t afford the sacrifice. “I paid that bribe, and the books reappeared,” he said. Giblin and Doctorow describe Amazon’s shakedown of Melville as an early example of “chokepoint capitalism.”Musicians are hardly better off. Spotify claims to operate under its stated mission “to unlock the potential of human creativity … by giving a million creative artists the opportunity to live off their art.” What Spotify actually does, Giblin and Doctorow show, is serve as “a gatekeeper between musicians and listeners.” Spotify is the go-to platform for a third of the planet’s music streaming, and whether an artist’s song appears on one of its popular playlists can make or break their career. The company is in a tremendously powerful position when it sits down to negotiate how much it pays music labels to license their content. That’s bad for the labels, sure, but it’s far worse for artists, who are forced to accept whatever terms their desperate labels agree to.Giblin and Doctorow tell the story of Zoë Keating, an independent composer and cellist who shares her Spotify earnings publicly. In September 2019, they write, Keating took home $753 from the platform. That sounds decent until you learn that Spotify listeners played her songs more than 200,000 times that month. Earnings are even more minuscule for artists signed to labels: Giblin and Doctorow estimate that they might take home $0.0009 a stream before taxes, and that’s if they’ve secured decent royalty terms. “For those artists locked into decades-old contracts,” they explain, “it might take a hundred thousand plays to generate enough to buy a $20 pizza.” YouTube, one of the most widely used music services in the world, is no friendlier to artists. Regardless of the platform, most creators face a lose-lose proposition: They work invisibly, or they work essentially for free.Read: Spotify isn’t really about the music anymoreJohnson felt compelled to pay a “bribe” to Amazon even though the company was the source of only 8 percent of Melville’s book sales. Eight percent doesn’t sound particularly monopolistic. Neither does Spotify’s 31 percent market share in music streaming.But Amazon and Spotify aren’t selling books and music that they’ve created themselves. Instead, as marketplaces, their power lies in their strength as buyers. Their leverage comes not from monopoly but from “monopsony,” the term for a market in which “buyers have power over sellers,” as Giblin and Doctorow describe it. As an author (or a publisher), if you don’t sell your books on Amazon—and accept whatever terms Amazon dictates for you to do so—much of your potential audience won’t even know your books exist. What’s more, “Monopsony power … can arise at much lower concentrations than monopoly does,” they write. A buyer responsible “for just 10 or 20 percent of a producer’s sales can have substantial power.”What’s true for Amazon in publishing and Spotify and YouTube in music is true for countless sectors and industries beyond the arts. Giblin and Doctorow’s book is such a valuable read because “chokepoint capitalism” is a profoundly clarifying way to think about the economy as a whole. Simply put, economic chokepoints discourage, rather than encourage, innovation and creativity by concentrating power in fewer and fewer hands. And they’re everywhere.Consider the physician whose only path to a medical career runs through her town’s sole hospital, which is more and more likely to be owned by a private-equity firm bent on short-term profiteering by overworking and underpaying staff. Or the retail worker forced to accept whatever hourly wage and working conditions that Walmart—with its buying power and economies of scale—happens to offer. Despite professing enthusiasm for free markets and “disruption,” what many executives actually seek, and what investors and venture capitalists reward, are practices that smother competition, rig markets in their favor, and shelter incumbent firms from potential threats.Whether in publishing or poultry, once a company has created a chokepoint and established control over the pipeline between buyers and sellers, it can be almost impossible for a potential competitor—no matter how original its ideas, disruptive its strategy, or superior its product—to find a workaround. “As monopolies and monopsonies suck up ever more money and opportunity, more and more of us are being shaken down,” Giblin and Doctorow write. “What’s been happening in the creative industries presages what’s coming for everyone else if chokepoint capitalism is allowed to reign unchecked.”In his 2013 book, Who Owns the Future?, the tech philosopher Jaron Lanier warned that it serves only the biggest and most profitable tech companies to believe that the internet we know—the ad tech, the surveillance, the distractions, the manipulation—is the only conceivable internet. “Because digital technology is still somewhat novel,” Lanier wrote, “it’s possible to succumb to an illusion that there is only one way to design it.”Our similarly novel incarnation of the modern creative economy suffers from comparable illusions that the ease of the Kindle, say, or the convenience of Spotify requires sacrificing creators’ livelihoods and well-being. Chokepoint Capitalism offers an admirable antidote to the fiction that our economic systems operate the way they do because that’s how they are, rather than because a few companies managed to take early advantage of new technologies to manipulate those systems for their own benefit.You might not expect to find much hope in a book about the exploitation of people trying to earn a living doing what they love. But Giblin and Doctorow make a convincing case that taking on Big Tech and Big Content—seemingly a lonely and demoralizing endeavor—is, in fact, an opportunity for community. Indeed, the fight demands community. “We’ve organized our societies to make rich people richer at everyone else’s expense,” the authors conclude. “If we’re going to do something about it, we’re going to have to do it together.”
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Yuri Vakulenko, director of the Kyiv National Art Gallery, last year asked European museums if they would hold modified versions of two exhibitions that had already been held in Ukraine. Two Swiss museums, the Musee d’Art et d’Histoire in Geneva and the Kunstmuseum Basel, agreed.This content was published on February 23, 2023 - 15:09
“This was an idea that would allow our paintings to be in a safe place while allowing our gallery to continue to fight on the cultural front,” Vakulenko told Reuters from Kyiv on Thursday.
The museum in Geneva, which took in paintings from Madrid’s Prado Museum during the Spanish civil war in the 1930s, sent packing materials to ensure safe transport.
The Musee Rath, which hosts the Musee d’Art et d’Histoire’s temporary exhibitions, is now showing From Dusk to DawnExternal link, showcasing works by Ukrainian painters from the Kyiv gallery.
The crates in which the paintings were transported from Ukraine, weeks after the Kyiv gallery’s windows were shattered by the shock of a nearby shell, are also on display.
Vakulenko said it was impossible to insure the paintings crossing Ukraine, so the shipment was accompanied by security on its two-day journey to the Polish border.
“The most important thing was keeping secrecy of the cargo’s movement on the territory of Ukraine,” he said. “The details of the movement of cargo were known only to a very limited circle of people directly related to the process of transportation and security.”
Critical approach
The exhibition at Basel’s Museum of Fine Arts, Born in UkraineExternal link, showcases 49 works from the 18th to 20th centuries by Ukrainian-born artists, such as Ilya Repin and Volodymyr Borovykovsky. Many of the painters were trained in Russia and became associated with its empire or the Soviet Union.
But the exhibitions challenge the concept that the works fit into an all-encompassing understanding of Russian art.
“It was an important project to understand the narrative of their collection, and also to view [their] history more critically and consciously,” Olga Osadtschy, assistant curator at the Kunstmuseum Basel, said of the Kyiv gallery’s initiative.
“We’re all used to this label ‘Russian art’, but there’s so much more beneath it.”
From Dusk To Dawn in Geneva runs until April 23; Born in Ukraine in Basel runs until July 2.
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What would an ancient Egyptian corpse have smelled like? Pine, balsam and bitumen, if you were nobility
In 1900—some 22 years before he discovered the tomb of Tutankhamen—British archaeologist Howard Carter opened another tomb in the Valley of the Kings. In tomb KV42, Carter found the remains of a noblewoman called Senetnay, who died around 1450 BCE.
More than a century later, a French perfumer has recreated one of the scents used in Senetnay's mummification. And the link between these two events is our research, published today in Scientific Reports, which delves into the ingredients of this ancient Egyptian balm recipe.
Recreating the smells of a disappeared world
Our team drew upon cutting-edge technologies in chemistry to reconstruct ancient scents from jars of Senetnay found in the tomb.
We used three variations of chromatographic and mass spectrometric techniques, which work by breaking samples down into individual molecules. Specific substances have different assemblages of molecules. Based on these characteristic compounds and through comparison to known reference materials, we identified the different ingredients.
After the excavation by Carter, two of Senetnay's jars recovered from the tomb made their way to Germany. So, in 2020, we approached the Museum August Kestner in Hannover about the possibility of analyzing the jars with these new methods.
These jars are known as canopic jars. They are made of limestone and were used to store the mummified organs of the ancient Egyptian elite. Somewhere along the way, however, Senetnay's jars lost their contents. All that remained of the mummified organs were faint residues on the bottom of the jars.
Remarkably, chemical analyses allow scientists to take such trace remains and reconstruct the original contents.
An ancient ingredients list
Our analysis revealed the balms used to coat and preserve Senetnay's organs contained a blend of beeswax, plant oil, fats, bitumen, an unidentified balsamic substance, and resins from trees of the pine family (most likely larch).
One other substance was narrowed down to either a resin called dammar—found in coniferous and hardwood trees in South-East and East Asia—or Pistacia tree resin.
The results were exciting; these were the richest and most complex balms ever identified for this early time period. It was clear a lot of effort had gone into making the balms. This suggests Senetnay, who was the wet nurse of the future Pharaoh Amenhotep II, had been an important figure in her day.
The findings also contribute to growing chemical evidence that the ancient Egyptians went far and wide to source ingredients for mummification balms, drawing on extensive trade networks that stretched into areas beyond their realm.
Since trees of the pine family are not endemic to Egypt, the possible larch resin must have come from somewhere further afield, most likely Central Europe.
The most puzzling ingredient was the one identified as either Pistacia or dammar resin. If the ingredient was Pistacia—which is derived from the resin of pistachio trees—it likely came from some coastal region of the Mediterranean. But if it was dammar, it would have derived from much farther away in South-East Asia.
Recent analysis of balms from the site of Saqqara identified dammar in a later balm dating to the first millennium BCE. If the presence of dammar resin is confirmed in Senetnay's case, this would suggest ancient Egyptians had access to this South-East Asian resin via long-distance trade, almost a millennium earlier than previously thought.
A perfume for the ages
Senetnay's balm would not only have scented her remains, but also the workshop in which it was made and the proceedings of her burial rites—perfuming the air with pine, balsam, vanilla and other exotic notes. The vanilla scent comes from a compound called coumarin, and from vanillic acid, and in this case likely reflects the degradation of woody tissue.
Due to the volatile nature of scents, however, Senetnay's unique scents gradually vanished once her remains were deposited in the Valley of the Kings.
Earlier this year, we began a collaboration with perfumer Carole Calvez and sensory museologist Sofia Collette Ehrich to bring Senetnay's lost scent back to life.
The results of this effort will go on display at the Moesgaard Museum in Denmark in October, as part of its new exhibition: Egypt—Obsessed with Life.
The new olfactory display will be like a time machine for the nose. It will provide a unique and unparalleled window into the smells of ancient Egypt and the scents used to perfume and preserve elite individuals such as Senetnay.
Such immersive experiences provide new ways of engaging with the past and help broaden participation, particularly for visually impaired people.
More information: B. Huber et al, Biomolecular characterization of 3500-year-old ancient Egyptian mummification balms from the Valley of the Kings, Scientific Reports (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-023-39393-y
Journal information: Scientific Reports
Provided by The Conversation
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Editor’s note: This review was originally published at the 2022 Tribeca Film Festival. Shout! Factory releases the film in theaters and on VOD on Friday, February 3.
It’s been almost five years since The New York Times and The New Yorker published a pair of damning exposés of Hollywood’s ugliest open secret, that Harvey Weinstein was a sexual predator, taking the #MeToo movement worldwide and forever shifting the conversation around the film industry’s horrifying treatment of women. The flurry of similar allegations that followed has slowed to a trickle, but there are many women in Hollywood who want to keep the issues front and center.
The message is loud and clear in “Body Parts,” a clever and damning documentary about the history of nudity, sex scenes, and women’s bodies on film. Objects become subjects in Kristy Guevara-Flanagan’s sweeping yet focused analysis that exposes the truth about the power of images to shape the world’s views of women.
In a brisk 86 minutes, “Body Parts” mashes together interviews with the likes of Jane Fonda and Rosanna Arquette, analysis from film historians, intimacy coordinator trainings, and whirlwind montages from both classic and contemporary films. There’s a lot of ground to cover, and Guevara-Flanagan runs a tight ship. Though each piece could easily fill more time, the filmmaker shrewdly stays focused on the portrayal of women’s bodies, earning the film’s provocative title. The quick barrage of film clips acts both as handy filler and an almost dizzying background noise, illustrating the central thesis that these images are everywhere.
Anyone who followed the accounts from the first wave of #MeToo stories will be familiar with Fonda’s regrets about “Barbarella,” or Arquette’s account of feeling pressured to film topless at 19. (Arquette: “It was a completely different consciousness. You were expected to do these things.”) Though they are the most recognizable faces in the film, one gets the sense that almost every actress of a certain age has similar stories.
In choosing what sound bites to include, Guevara-Flanagan finds eerie refrains repeating themselves. “I was at a place in my life where if you were asked to do something, especially by a man, you did it,” says Fonda, echoing Arquette almost to a tee. Another unsettling chorus emerges in the way the women talk about leaving their body, blacking out, or floating above the room while shooting sex scenes.
Taking a wide angle on the subject, “Body Parts” assembles a unique mix of filmmakers, actors, intimacy coordinators, film historians, and even body doubles for its rapid-fire interviews. It’s a rare moment in the spotlight for Marli Renfro, Janet Leigh’s body double from “Psycho,” and Shelly Michelle, who stood in for Julia Roberts in the opening sequence of “Pretty Woman.” Filmmakers Karyn Kusama, Angela Robinson, and Joey Soloway add a touch of the academic, illuminating the awkward minutiae of nudity riders, or how a studio’s sex-obsessed marketing plan can completely undermine a feminist film, as it did for Kusama’s 2009 satirical horror “Jennifer’s Body.”
Toward the end of the film, “Body Parts” zooms out yet again, sandwiching footage of Anita Hill and Christine Blasey Ford between clips from “Kill Bill,” “Boogie Nights,” “The Graduate,” and “Showgirls.” Guevara-Flanagan makes use of the shorthand afforded by a visual hint, such as the date rape scene in “Sixteen Candles” or the classic old Hollywood struggle that turned into a kiss. The film historians offer a brief but satisfactory explanation of the Hays code, lamenting the brevity of the pre-Code era where women screenwriters wrote fully actualized roles for stars like Bette Davis and Mae West.
The intimacy coordinator trainings lack the luster of this jaunt through cinema history, though the merkin maker who presents her creations in “little boxes” is certainly a highlight. It feels necessary to highlight what is working, and a recent move by SAG-AFTRA to accredit seven intimacy coordinator training programs is the most concrete outcome of #MeToo and Time’s Up. Though the vocation is growing quickly, there is still no industry-wide requirement to hire an intimacy coordinator.
If “Body Parts” wanted to offer more solutions, it’s missing a more forward-looking chapter, though its digestible length and pace is certainly appealing. The choice to remain accessible is a shrewd one, and the film manages to lay out its concise thesis without digressing too far into the nitty gritty. It’s a simple and powerful message, executed economically. This time, it’s not the women, but the emperor who has no clothes.
Grade: B+
“Body Parts” premiered at the 2022 Tribeca Film Festival.
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Since 2015, a mobile museum has been traveling around the most rural parts of India, introducing disadvantaged schoolchildren to the rich tapestry of Indian history—from the dinosaurs to the Mughals.
The innovative education idea has so far traveled over 50,000 miles and visited 700 cities in the states of Karnataka, Maharashtra, Goa, Gujarat, Haryana, and Delhi NCR.
The “Museum on Wheels” was dreamed up by the staff at a famous Mumbai Museum called Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya, who received support for the idea of a pair of large coach buses carrying museum-like exhibitions to rural communities from both parents and the government.
“Even in today’s day and time, people from rural backgrounds, especially children, do not see museums as a place that can aid learning. With this initiative, we want to change the narrative and say, ‘If you can’t visit a museum, we can bring it to you’,” says Krutika Mhatre, who spearheads the MOW project.
She told The Better India that the subject matter rotates every 6 months based on feedback from schoolteachers in the towns and cities visited.
The overwhelming success of the MOW initiative led to the museum getting a government grant for the purchase and outfitting of a second bus in 2019.
“We wanted to start with a topic that everyone was familiar with. So we based it on Harappan civilization, and it was a great success,” said Krutika.
It makes sense—the Harappan, or Indus Valley Civilization, was the first great civilization of the Indian subcontinent, dating back to 3,300 BCE. The Harappans built the Great Baths, an archaeological find today recognized as a World Heritage Site.
But the MOW has also featured exhibitions on the dinosaurs of Cretaceous India, traditional Indian games, Indian coinage through the ages, and other past civilizations.
Krutika remembers that not only did many of the schools they visited not have a museum in town to go to, but many of the classrooms didn’t even know what a museum was.
It’s especially important in a nation like India that is so big, where human history stretches back so far, and which is also rapidly modernizing.
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Two masks of the Indigenous community of the Kogi from the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in Colombia are displayed at the presidential palace in Berlin on June 16, 2023.
Markus Schreiber/AP
Two masks of the Indigenous community of the Kogi from the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in Colombia are displayed at the presidential palace in Berlin on June 16, 2023.
Markus Schreiber/AP
BERLIN — Germany handed over to Colombia on Friday two masks made by the Indigenous Kogi people that had been in a Berlin museum's collection for more than a century, another step in the country's restitution of cultural artifacts as European nations reappraise their colonial-era past.
The wooden "sun masks," which date back to the mid-15th century, were handed over at the presidential palace during a visit to Berlin by Colombian President Gustavo Petro. The decision to restitute them follows several years of contacts between Berlin's museum authority and Colombia, and an official Colombian request last year for their return.
"We know that the masks are sacred to the Kogi," who live in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta mountains of northern Colombia, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier said at the ceremony. "May these masks have a good journey back to where they are needed, and where they are still a bridge between people and nature today."
Petro welcomed the return of "these magic masks," and said he hopes that "more and more pieces can be recovered." He said at a later news conference with Germany's chancellor that the Kogi community will ultimately decide what happens with the masks. He added: "I would like a museum in Santa Marta, but that's my idea and we have to wait for their idea."
Konrad Theodor Preuss, who was the curator of the forerunner of today's Ethnological Museum in Berlin, acquired the masks in 1915, during a lengthy research trip to Colombia on which he accumulated more than 700 objects. According to the German capital's museums authority, he wasn't aware of their age or of the fact they weren't supposed to be sold.
"This restitution is part of a rethink of how we deal with our colonial past, a process that has begun in many European countries," Steinmeier said. "And I welcome the fact that Germany is playing a leading role in this."
Markus Schreiber/AP
toggle caption
German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, right, and Colombian President Gustavo Petro shake hands after a ceremony to return two masks of the indigenous community of the Kogi from the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in Colombia at Bellevue Palace in Berlin on Friday.
Markus Schreiber/AP
German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, right, and Colombian President Gustavo Petro shake hands after a ceremony to return two masks of the indigenous community of the Kogi from the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in Colombia at Bellevue Palace in Berlin on Friday.
Markus Schreiber/AP
Governments and museums in Europe and North America have increasingly sought to resolve ownership disputes over objects that were looted during colonial times.
Last year, Germany and Nigeria signed an agreement paving the way for the return of hundreds of artifacts known as the Benin Bronzes that were taken from Africa by a British colonial expedition more than 120 years ago. Nigerian officials hope that accord will prompt other countries that hold the artifacts, which ended up spread far and wide, to follow suit.
Hermann Parzinger, the head of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, which oversees the Ethnological Museum and others in Berlin, noted that the background is particularly complex in the case of the Kogi masks.
They weren't "stolen in a violent context" and Colombia was already long since an independent country, he said. Preuss bought them from the heir of a Kogi priest, who "apparently wasn't entitled to sell these masks" — meaning that their acquisition "wasn't quite correct."
"But there is another aspect in this discussion of colonial contexts, and that is the rights of Indigenous people," Parzinger added, pointing to a 2007 U.N. resolution stating that artifacts of spiritual and cultural significance to Indigenous groups should be returned.
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NEW YORK -- The first thought that comes to mind when you enter the Balloon Museum for the “Let’s Fly” exhibit is the massive scale of the art.
It's easy to think of such an environment as having either professional-level balloon art or installations that rival the scale of a Thanksgiving Day Parade float, and that would be true. But it's the adventure of a theme park attraction that can awaken the childlike wonder in all of us.
That's definitely the intention according to Chiara Caimmi, who serves as the artistic production coordinator. She wants every installation to provide “some kind of interaction” with the audience.
“Sometimes it’s a relationship with the space where you enter a new world, or you have a different perception of the space you are in. You feel little or you feel big,” Caimmi said.
She calls it “an immersive experience through inflatable artwork.”
“We have 14 artists involved in our New York City exhibition, and so you are going to see all of these amazing artworks, one after the other,” Caimmi said.
Some installations are introspective, some put you in awe, while others literally make it about the journey. Take the “Flying Maze,” an inflatable labyrinth by French artist Cyril Lancelin. This large green inflated structure resembles a bouncy house you would encounter at a carnival or kid’s birthday party. Yet, it differs because you’re bouncing off the tubular walls while making your way through the narrow maze, a disco ball awaiting you in the center.
Whether physically or mentally, each installation takes the spectator on an immersive journey that contrasts the weightlessness of air and the heaviness of gravity in ways that would make Sir Isaac Newton proud.
“Hyperstellar” strongly emphasizes this concept. The signature installation by Hyperstudio provides an experience for the mind and body with a dash of whimsy. The massive space resembles a Las Vegas rooftop pool party where sound and vision affect the senses. And if that’s not enough — a jump into the enormous ball pit consisting of more than 1 million balls in a 9-million-square-foot space provides a rejuvenating feeling without getting wet.
“You can actually jump into a giant ball pit and somehow reconnect to your childhood while being inside the light and visual and sound performance,” Caimmi said.
German-Polish artist Karina Smigla-Bobinski, the creator behind “ADA” says the installations are all about inclusion.
“The idea of Balloon Museum is to create a space where artists meet the public and they meet by meaning everybody from the smallest to the oldest,” said Smigla-Bobinski.
Her installation honors the contribution of Ada Lovelace, the 19th century mathematician whose work with Charles Babbage discovered the groundwork on how binary code could provide instructions for computers.
Using a 12-foot ball inflated with helium, and 300 pieces of charcoal glued to holders on the ball, participants bounce the large floating sphere in a six-side space of white canvas to make a gigantic abstract drawing.
Other works include the outdoor setup of structures called “A Quiet Storm.” This array of colorful buildings resembles an inflatable village, and more importantly, will be heated on cold winter days. Inside, “Lava Lamp” by Michael Shaw, is a psychedelically colored snake-like sculpture that adorns the upper level of the venue.
While the exhibition varies in content from each city the Balloon Museum takes up residency, there’s one constant, Balloon Street, where guests can be fully immersed and become part of the installations. Whether that means taking pictures with your head in the clouds — made of balloons, of course — or putting yourself inside a large red balloon, this is a section primarily dedicated to the guests.
Then there’s “BB,” which provides an introspective experience with mirrored mylar balloons inside a mirrored room that alters your perception between environment, subject and space. Lithuanian artist Tadao Cern wants viewers you to contemplate the possibility of endless reflection and possibilities without any pressure. Or you can simply enjoy the soundscape — the sounds of birds from Lithuania.
Premiering in Rome in 2020, the Balloon Museum has toured through Europe with its curation focused on inflatable art installations. It’s limited run in New York City at Pier 36 lasts until January 14.
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Art and Culture
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Amoako Boafo, who has become a superstar in the art world, has been back home in Ghana, where one of his self-portraits is being exhibited. He told journalist Stephen Smith that he never intended to be an artist.
For all Amoako Boafo's head-turning success, he is a reluctant interviewee. Not yet 40, he has had his canvases displayed in the galleries of the mega-dealer Larry Gagosian, who has hailed him as "the future of portraiture".
Boafo says he used to vie with his friends to see who could do the best drawings of their favourite superheroes, but art simply wasn't a career choice when he was growing up.
"All I know is that studying portraiture growing up, it never dawned on me that it was a form of art that artists of colour could reference and study," he says of Gagosian's high praise. "So to see that my work is regarded in that way, is a lot to process."
His is a real-life rags to riches story. The Ghanaian used to scavenge for food in rubbish bins in his hometown of Accra to support his mother and grandmother. Now his portraits of black subjects, often painted with his fingertips, can command up to seven figures at auction.
He has emblazoned his work on to the fuselage of Jeff Bezos's rocket ship, becoming one of the first artists to exhibit in space. It doesn't come more ragged, it doesn't get much richer.
Boafo's the shooting star of a remarkable constellation of talent from West Africa. One of the striking features of this scene is how readily Boafo and his peers acknowledge each other's ability and pool their resources and knowhow.
He recently visited Accra to check on the progress of an artists' residency he supports at his own studio. He was also exhibiting at a group show in the Ghanaian capital.
It was a rare opportunity to catch up with a man who is always on the move, from his base in Vienna to commissions round the world, and perhaps a chance to grab a few words with him.
He was born in 1984 and his father died when he was very young. His mother worked as a cook and Boafo taught himself to paint while she was out of the house.
He showed promise on the tennis court and supported himself for a few years as a semi-pro player. He only got the chance to go to art school after one of the people his mum worked for offered to pay his tuition fees.
He graduated top of his class from the Ghanatta College of Art and Design in Accra in 2008, taking the title of Best Portrait Painter of the Year.
In 2014, he moved to Europe with an Austrian artist called Sunanda Mesquita, who became his wife.
Boafo's big break came in 2018 when his paintings were discovered on Instagram by Kehinde Wiley, the artist best known for his portrait of former US President Barack Obama, who recommended Boafo to the galleries he works with.
I asked him about getting Wiley's backing.
"It was a major step for me," he replied. "His support came in the early days of my career, and this partly inspired my desire to continue to form relationships and share spaces with my fellow artists and creatives for the purpose of sharing experiences which would hopefully be beneficial to them."
I met Boafo at his studio close to the seafront, dot.ateliers, a three-storey building designed by the well-known Ghanaian-British architect Sir David Adjaye.
The building is the colour of sand and finished in uncompromising breezeblock. This ramification wraps around an inner structure, enabling cooling winds off the sea to ventilate the property. A staircase winding inside the breezeblock and up to Boafo's workspace on the third floor offers a view of crashing surf and of a funeral taking place in a nearby compound, the mourners in vivid designs of black and white.
The roof of Boafo's building is a cockscomb with three points, said to be an audacious nod to the crown motif in the paintings of Jean-Michel Basquiat.
In the space of a very few years, Boafo has gone from selling his pictures for £100 ($125) or so in Ghana to exhibiting at international fairs and seeing buyers outbid each other for his work.
In the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter movement, museums and collectors belatedly realised that they had few if any works by black artists in their holdings and scrambled to make good the omission.
Work of Boafo's calibre has been particularly in demand.
He says he's flattered by the accolades. I wondered if his rapid ascent had brought its own pressures.
"My success, hopefully, has allowed me to impact the lives of others in my community.
"Being able to provide resources for members in my creative community through my residency means a lot to me. As far as stress of reaching a wider audience, I can't say it's that heavy."
Boafo has contributed a self-portrait to an exhibition of work by artists from the African diaspora - In and Out of Time - which is on show at Gallery 1957 in Accra, curated by Ekow Eshun, a former director of the ICA in London.
In his painting, the artist is seen from the back, naked from the waist up, arms above his head, perhaps in celebration.
As is often his practice, he had painted the work with his fingertips. He signed it "Amoako Boafo King". A source close to the exhibition told me that King is a name he uses, or perhaps the meaning of his name.
The gallery is owned by Marwan Zahkem, a Lebanese-born developer and art impresario, who was one of the first people to buy Boafo's work and exhibit it.
"What we are seeing in West Africa now is a movement like the Young British Artists in the 1980s, and Amoako is the Damien Hirst or Tracey Emin of this movement," he told me.
Osei Bonsu, a curator of international art at London's Tate Modern, put Boafo on the cover of his major new book African Art Now - or rather, he chose Boafo's painting Yellow Dress, which sold at Christies last year for £675,000, more than double its estimate. The record price for Boafo's work is currently £2.5m.
"In chronicling a generation of young people who perform their identities through the medium of the 'selfie', Boafo's portraits figure a vital relationship between the historical traditions of portraiture and the social media age we are living in today," Bonsu said.
As for the superstar himself, Boafo told me that he much prefers painting to talking about painting.
"At the end of the day, I paint because I love to create," he said.
"As an artist, I think we are most stressed when we have to attend to tasks that pull us away from the studio. So for me activities which are not painting, I won't say I'm stressed about, but are less exciting - unless it's tennis!"
Stephen Smith is a writer and broadcaster based in London. In and Out of Time is at Gallery 1957 in Accra until 12 December.
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An earthquake last year revealed a big surprise beneath a law school in modern-day Mexico City: a giant, colorful snakehead from the Aztec Empire.
The snakehead dates back more than 500 years, to when the Aztecs controlled the area, which at the time was part of the flourishing capital of Tenochtitlan. The sculpture was discovered after a magnitude-7.6 earthquake struck Mexico City on Sept. 19, 2022; the seismic event caused damage and changes in the topography, revealing the snakehead beneath a building that was part of a law school at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) said in a Spanish-language statement.
The Aztecs built temples and pyramids and worshipped a number of deities, including Quetzalcoatl, who was often depicted as a snake. However, it's unclear if this sculpture depicts him, the archaeologists said.
The sculpted snake is 5.9 feet (1.8 meters) long, 2.8 feet (0.85 m) wide and 3.3 feet (1 m) high, and it weighs about 1.3 tons (1.2 metric tons), the INAH said. Several colors — including red, blue, black and white — are preserved on the sculpture.
Color was preserved on about 80% of the sculpture's surface. To keep it preserved, an INAH team lifted the snakehead out of the ground with a crane and constructed a humidity chamber around the sculpture. This chamber allows the sculpture to lose humidity gradually, with its color being preserved, María Barajas Rocha, a conservationist with the INAH who worked extensively on the sculpture, said in the statement.
While other snakehead sculptures have been found at Tenochtitlan, this one is particularly important for its preserved colors, said Erika Robles Cortés, an archaeologist with the INAH.
"Thanks to the context in which this piece was discovered, but above all, thanks to the stupendous intervention of the restorers-conservators led by Maria Barajas, it has been possible to stabilize the colors for its preservation in almost all the sculpture, which is extremely important, because the colors have helped us to conceive pre-Hispanic art from another perspective," Robles Cortés told Live Science in an email.
The sculpture's "sheer size is impressive, as well as its artistry," but the survival of the colors is remarkable, said Frances Berdan, a professor emeritus of anthropology at California State University, San Bernardino who was not involved with the excavation. "The survival of black, white, red, yellow, and blue paints is particularly interesting — one gains a good image of the visual impact of such sculptures as they were arrayed about the city center," Berdan told Live Science in an email.
In addition to its preserved colors, the snakehead's size is notable, said Bertrand Lobjois, an associate professor of humanities at the University of Monterrey in Mexico who is not involved in the excavation. The "first time I saw this serpent head, I was dazzled by its dimensions," he said in an email.
Lobjois also praised the conservation work that allowed the colors to survive, noting that "the conservation process allows us to appreciate the naturalistic approach of figuration" the Aztec artists used.
This work is ongoing and will continue at the site into next year.
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Owen Jarus is a regular contributor to Live Science who writes about archaeology and humans' past. He has also written for The Independent (UK), The Canadian Press (CP) and The Associated Press (AP), among others. Owen has a bachelor of arts degree from the University of Toronto and a journalism degree from Ryerson University.
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It is slated to be the “western world’s museum of museums”, a showcase of Greece’s greatest repository of ancient art.
Once completed, the revamped National Archaeological Museum in Athens will, say officials, not only have been expanded but “reborn” at a time of record tourism to the country.
“Today I have been profoundly persuaded that a personal dream of mine has become reality,” the Greek prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis told an audience at the museum for the unveiling of the new design on Wednesday.
The emblematic work, overseen by the British architect Sir David Chipperfield, is expected to last five years. Presenting the plans, the Briton emphasised that the goal was not to compete with the museum’s main neoclassical building, which houses one of the finest collections of antiquities globally, but to complement the historic landmark by drawing on the original design. “Our architectural approach has been to create a plinth growing out of the existing building … [that] at the same time develops into a powerful piece of architecture,” he said.
“The challenge, of course, is to get those two things in balance.”
The proposed renovation was unanimously selected from a shortlist of 10 by an international evaluation committee last month. Chipperfield, renowned for his restoration of the Neues Museum in Berlin, has calculated the construction will generate about 20,000 sq m of additional space, including two floors of subterranean galleries, a lush roof garden and street-level entrance.
But like most public works it is controversial.
Not since the Acropolis Museum was built back in 2009 at the foot of the fifth century site has a project of such scope stirred such debate or emotion. Before the proposed design had been chosen, the Association of Greek Architects had threatened to take the issue of the competition’s rules to the Council of State, the country’s supreme administrative court, after it became clear that only award-winning foreign firms with experience in museum work would be permitted to participate.
“It is unacceptable that Greek architects were not allowed to take part,” said Tassis Papaioannou, emeritus professor of architecture at the National University of Athens. “We are seriously thinking of taking it to court because the way they have proceeded so far is illegal.”
Greek renovation experts have also objected to the scale of the new entrance, saying photorealistic images released by the winning team are overly optimistic. “The new construction will virtually eclipse the original 19th building from public view at street level,” said Costas Zambas, who headed restoration works at the Acropolis for 25 years. “After yesterday’s presentation it is clear that what is one of the great neoclassical monuments in Athens will be hidden if this overly optimistic approach is allowed.”
Chipperfield, described as a master of works dealing “in dignity, in gravitas, in memory and in art”, told the Guardian his team had wrestled with similar concerns. “You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs,” he said after the presentation. “From certain angles, it is true, it will have an impact but the question is whether it amounts to significant harm or whether [the change in view] is just different. It’s a perfectly valid question. Our concerns are not dissimilar.”
Mitsotakis, whose centre right government faces re-election this year, has made the renovation a cultural priority, saying it will not only put the institution on the map but help revive an entire district in downtown Athens.
“We display less than 10% of what we have in our warehouses,” he said of its vast collection. “It has always troubled me that just over 500,000 visitors come to the museum every year when it hosts such an incredible wealth of world cultural heritage.”
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An art collective has hacked into the controversial Bührle Collection exhibition at the Kunsthaus Zurich museum. It replaced written information accessible to visitors by QR code with critical comments about the provenance of the works on display.
These codes do not take readers to the provenance research carried out by the Bührle Foundation, but to the online site of the KKKK art collective, which hacked them. The hacking was discovered at the weekend.
For example, the pirated QR code for Cézanne’s “Boy in the Red Waistcoat” links to a commentary denouncing the fact that Emil Bührle profited twice from the Nazi regime: he made a fortune from his arms dealings with Nazi Germany and also took advantage of the distress of Jewish art collectors, persecuted by the Nazis, to build up his own collectionExternal link.
Historians do not dispute this version of events. However, the Kunsthaus has never presented them so clearly.
In addition to the Cézanne painting, KKKK lists four other paintings and their stories on its websiteExternal link. With the help of sources, the collective shows how these works came to be in the Bührle collection. It compares this research with the museum’s own communication via QR codes.
The Kunsthaus has repeatedly been criticised for not providing sufficient information about the Bührle Collection’s problematic past. According to SRF, the KKKK collective comprises artists and journalists, two of whom have already written for the weekly magazine WOZ on the subject of sensitive provenance.
An independent panel of historians has previously called the situation at the Kunsthaus Zurich an “affront” to victims of Nazi looting.
Exhibition to be revisited
In March, the museum introduced a new provenance research strategy for works in the Bührle Collection. An independent international commission of experts is taking part in this work. A systematic and in-depth examination of the collection is currently underway.
From November 3, the Kunsthaus will present a new overview of the controversial collection. It will focus on the historical context and take a critical look at the collection, made up of 203 works.
Quellenberg said the Kunsthaus was actively seeking contact with the KKKK collective. As part of the exhibition, there will “possibly” be an opportunity to discuss the positions of these and other activists, he said.
Emil G. Bührle, who died in 1956, became one of Switzerland’s richest men by selling arms – to Nazi Germany in particular. His collection of art has been on permanent loan to the Kunsthaus Zurich since 2021.
In compliance with the JTI standards
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The mystery behind a stone bridge depicted in the Mona Lisa has finally been solved, with an art historian identifying it as a crumbling ruin on the banks of a Tuscany river.
The painting has been definitively identified to depict Italian noblewoman Lisa del Giocondo and it is believed to have been painted between 1503 and 1506. It was acquired by King Francis I of France and is now the property of the French Republic and has been on permanent display at the Louvre in Paris since 1797.
Whilst Mona Lisa's face is often described as enigmatic, the possible location of the bridge featured in the painting has, perhaps until now, eluded researchers and art historians. But, drones and painstaking sleuthing have been used to match the bridge featured in the background of Leonardo da Vinci’s painting (in the bottom right hand corner) to a real one spanning the Arno River near the village of Laterina.
All that remains of the Romito bridge today is a single arch, after it was badly damaged, probably by flooding, in the 18th century.
A digital reconstruction has shown it would have had four arches, just like the one in the portrait. On the opposite side of the riverbank, the foundations of what would have been the fourth arch can still be seen in the undergrowth.
The findings could transform the fortunes of tiny Laterina, where the bridge crosses the river Arno. Simona Neri, the local mayor, hopes the discovery - if confirmed - could encourage tourism.
The claim about the bridge was made by Silvano Vinceti, a historian who has written several books about Da Vinci.
Leonardo's 280m Single Span Bridge Would Have Worked: Everyone knows that Leonardo was a brilliant artist and all-round polymath. We have, amongst other genius scribblings, his drawings for helicopters and parachutes - and a 280m single span bridge from 1502 which those clever people at MIT have now proved would actually have worked. More...
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VENICE, Italy -- Scottish-Ghanaian architect Lesley Lokko is giving a platform to voices that have long been silenced at this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale, which opens Saturday, the first ever curated by an African, featuring a preponderance of work by Africans and the African diaspora.
The 18th architectural Biennale, titled “The Laboratory of the Future,” explores decolonization and decarbonization, topics about which Africans have much to say, Lokko said, citing the long exploitation of the continent for both human and environmental resources.
“The Black body was Europe’s first unit of energy,’’ Lokko told The Associated Press this week. “We have had a relationship to resources since time immemorial. We operate at a place where resources are not stable. They are also often fragile. They’re often exploited. Our relationship to them is exploitative.”
Lokko tapped global stars like David Adjaye and Theaster Gates among 89 participants in the main show — more than half of them from Africa or the African diaspora. To reduce the Biennale's carbon footprint, Lokko encouraged the participating architects, artists and designers to be as “paper-thin" as possible with their exhibits, resulting in more drawings, film and projections as well as the reuse of materials from last year's contemporary art Biennale.
“This exhibition is a way of showing that this work, this imagination, this creativity, has been around for a very, very long time,’’ Lokko said. “It’s just that it hasn’t found quite the right space, in the same way.”
It is a fair question why an African-centric exhibition has been so long in coming to such a high-profile, international platform like Venice.
Okwui Enwezor, the late Nigerian art critic and museum director, was the first African to head the Venice Biennale contemporary art fair, which alternates years with the architectural show, in 2015. Lokko was the first Biennale curator selected by President Roberto Cicutto, who was appointed in 2020 during the global push for inclusion ignited by the killing of George Floyd in the United States.
“This is more for us than for them,” Cicutto said, “to see the production, hear the voices we have heard too little, or heard in the way we wanted to.”
Impediments in the West to inclusive events with a focus on the global south were evident in the refusal by the Italian embassy in Ghana to approve visas for three of Lokko’s collaborators, which Lokko decried this week as “an old and familiar tale.”
A refocusing of the North-South relationship is suggested in the main pavilion’s facade: a corrugated metal roof cut into deconstructed images of the Venetian winged lion. The material is ubiquitous in Africa and other developing regions, and here offers free shade. The lion, native to Africa and for centuries a symbol of Venice, serves as a reminder of how deeply cultural appropriation runs.
“I don’t see any lions around here,’’ Lokko said wryly.
Inside, Adjaye’s studio exhibits architectural models created “outside the dominant canon,” like the Thabo Mbeki Presidential Library in South Africa that takes inspiration from pre-colonial buildings. Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama explores the colonial exploitation in the installation, “Parliament of Ghosts.”
And Olalekan Jeyifous, a Brooklyn-based Nigerian national, creates a sprawling retro-futuristic narrative around the fictional formation of a united African Conservation Effort, something he imagines would have been constructed a decade after African decolonization in an alternative 1972.
His is no utopia. This new global Africa he imagines is flattened, at the expense of local traditions.
“It’s never utopia/dystopia. Such binary Western terms, that I’m really interested in operating outside of,’’ he said. “It’s not just: We’ve solved all the problems now. Everything’s fantastic. It’s never that simple.”
More than in previous editions, the 64 national participants responded to Lokko's themes with pavilions that found a natural echo with the main show and its focus on climate change issues and an expanded, more-inclusive dialogue.
Denmark offered practical solutions for coastal areas to work with nature to create solutions to rising seas, proposing Copenhagen islands that invite the sea in to form canals, not unlike Venice's. The strategy contrasts with Venice's own underwater barriers, which, underscoring the urgency of the issue, had to be raised during the Biennale preview week outside the usual flood season and for the first time ever in May.
Decolonization was a natural theme at the Brazilian pavilion, where curators Gabriela de Matos and Paulo Tavares show the architectural heritage of indigenous and African Brazilians, and challenge the “hegemonic” narrative that the capital, Brasilia, was built in the “middle of nowhere.”
“Decolonization is really a practice,’’ Tavares said. “It’s an open word, like freedom, like democracy."
The U.S. Pavilion looked at ubiquitous plastic, invented and propagated in the United States, and how to cope with its durability, under the title “Everlasting Plastic.” In one of the five exhibits, Norman Teague, a Chicago-based African American artist, designer and furniture-maker, used recycled plastics from such everyday items as Tide laundry detergent bottles to create one-off baskets, referencing weaves from Senegal and Ghana.
Teague said he was inspired by Lokko's themes to consider "how I could really think about the lineage between the continent and Chicago.”
Ukraine returns to the Biennale with two installations that, in the gentlest possible way, serve as a reminder that war continues to rage in Europe. The pavilion in the Arsenale has been decked out in black-out materials to represent ad-hoc, if futile protective measures ordinary Ukrainians are taking against the threat of Russian bombardment.
In the center of the Giardini, curators Iryna Miroshnykova, Oleksii Petrov and Borys Filonenko have recreated earthen mounds that served as barriers against 10th century invaders. Though long abandoned, overtaken by modern farming and sprawl, they proved effective against Russian tanks last spring.
Despite their serious message, the curators said they hope visitors will come to lounge, and that children will be left to roll down the grassy hills.
"These spaces, the fortifications, are a place to be quiet, to chill. But it is also kind of a reminder that somewhere, someone is fearing for their safety,'' Filonenko said.
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Who Was Altina Schinasi, The Woman Behind The Iconic Cat-Eye Frames
Google Doodle celebrates the 116th birthday of Altina 'Tina' Schinasi, the 'cat-eye' eyeglass frames designer.
On August, Google Doodle celebrates the 116th birthday of the iconic American designer, Altina 'Tina' Schinasi acknowledged for designing the trendy 'cat-eye' eyeglass frames.
Altina Schinasi
This sculpted artist was born on August 4, 1907, to immigrant parents in Manhattan, New York. After graduating high school, Altina moved to Paris to study painting which ignited her interest in the field of arts.
Later, she moved back to the States and art at The Art Students League in New York. She began her career as a window dresser for multiple stores on Fifth Avenue.
This provided her the opportunity to learn from renowned artists such as Salvador Dalí and George Grosz whom she admired.
"At the window display of a nearby optician's office, she noticed that the only option for women’s glasses tended to be round frames with mundane designs, " said Google.
This observation motivated Schinasi to craft a unique design for women, mimicking the shape of the Harlequin masks she observed people wearing in Venice, Italy during the Carnevale festival.
She believed that the pointed edges are flattering to the face and started cutting paper demos of her innovative frame design.
Moving ahead towards execution, all major manufacturers rejected her creation claiming it to be edgy. She was adamant and approached a local shop owner.
The owner trusted her craft and the Harlequin glasses quickly became a success, earning Schansi much publicity.
By the late 1930s and through the 1940s, Harlequin glasses became an overwhelming fashion accessory among women in the US.
Altina was bestowed with the Lord & Taylor American Design Award in 1939 for her invention, and popular magazines like Life and Vogue appreciated her creation.
Schinasi's Varied Artistic Achievements
Apart from the cat-eye eyeglass, she ventured into the world of films. In 1960, she produced a documentary by her former teacher George Grosz titled George Grosz's Interregnum. This documentary was nominated for Academy Award and won the first place at the Venice Film Festival.
She published her memoir The Road I Have Traveled (1995). She even volunteered as an art therapist. And also invented unusual portrait benches and chairs, popularly named Chairacters.
Today, almost a century after its inception, Altina’s cat-eye design thrives in fashion accessory trends worldwide.
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OYSTER BAY, New York -- Interwoven in the history of Oyster Bay, NY, a hamlet on the North Shore of Long Island, are untold stories of African Americans that have played significant roles in shaping the fabric of the town.
The incredible life of David Carll is one of these stories and his great-great-grandchildren Denise Evans-Sheppard, Actress and Singer Vanessa Williams, Iris Williams, and Francis Carl are sharing that story in celebration of Black History Month.
"David Carll was born a free man right out outside of Cold Springs, New York, and ended up residing in Oyster Bay," said Vanessa Williams.
As a free man, he did not turn a blind eye to the culture that surrounded him. In Oyster Bay, there were African American men, women, and children that were enslaved and he wanted everyone to experience the same freedoms that he had.
When a colored regiment was established in the State of New York, David Carll enlisted into the Civil War and was assigned to the 26th United States Colored regiment. He understood his responsibility to ensure the freedom of all.
"When it was time for him to come home from the Civil War, $300 bounty was given to any person that enlisted. David Carll purchased property and that is when Carll Hill was built," said Denise Evans-Sheppard, Executive Director of the Oyster Bay Historical Society.
Since its purchase in 1865, five generations have raised families on the property. 'Carll Hill' has served as the backdrop for family gatherings and a constant reminder of the incredible legacy of David Carll.
Through the family's extensive research of the life of David Carll, they came across his pension file, a written document about his experience in the Civil War at the National Archive in Washington, DC.
This document allowed the family to visually see the man that they had heard about for all of these years.
"As Black people in the United States, we don't have the opportunities at times to see photos of us in the 1800s that we can say those are our family members," said Vanessa Williams.
This discovery was a pivotal point for the family. Not only did they have the property as evidence of his contributions to society, now they can see the man himself.
In July 2018, Pine Hollow Cemetery, the final resting place of David Carll, was placed on the National Registry of Historic Places. The land is owned by the Hood African Methodist Episcopal Zionist Church of Oyster Bay, New York.
"We have a lot of shoulders to stand on, said Francis Carl. "David Carll is the most courageous man that I know of."
Oyster Bay is home to many unsung heroes and David Carll is one for the history books. His legacy is a big beautiful family that will continue to make him proud.
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Classical Greek marble sculptures today appear crisp and white. But they weren’t always that way, according to a new study, which found the famous 2,500-year-old Parthenon sculptures were painted.
By using a non-invasive imaging technique, researchers at the British Museum - where nearly half of the sculptures controversially reside - found traces of paint on 11 out of 17 figures and from a section of frieze on show in the museum, according to a study published in the journal Antiquity.
Paint often does not survive on archaeological finds, particularly in cases such as the Parthenon sculptures that date back to between 447 and 438 BC and were continuously exposed to the environment.
According to the study, infrared light has helped identify a blue paint known as "Egyptian blue" - a popular pigment of its time that was made using calcium, copper and silicon. The bright blue was highly valued for its rarity and was commonly saved for royalty or depictions of gods and goddesses.
The researchers also detected a purple colour that was not found through the imaging process but by the human eye, reports CNN. The hue, which they named “Parthenon purple,” is particularly unique, the study said, because researchers found that it was not made using shellfish - the common ancient Mediterranean recipe.
“This is a big deal because it challenges the traditional Western idea that classical art was just plain white marble and shows how important color was to ancient Greek artists. … These findings help us understand the creative process behind, as well as the meaning of the Parthenon and its sculptures,” said Michael Cosmopoulos, a professor of archaeology and Greek studies at the University of Missouri - St. Louis.
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David Bowie's costumes, handwritten lyrics, album artwork and awards are among more than 80,000 archived items set to go on display to the public for the first time.
London's Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) is setting up The David Bowie Centre for the Study of Performing Arts at its upcoming new venue V&A East Storehouse, to showcase the extensive archive from 2025.
Spanning six decades of Bowie's career, from the 1960s to his death in 2016, the display in east London will provide an up-close look into the cultural icon's life, work and legacy.
The collection will also feature letters, instruments, sheet music, fashion, photographs, film, music videos and set designs, as well as unrealised projects never before seen in public.
Hailing Bowie as "one of the greatest musicians and performers of all time," V&A director Dr Tristram Hunt said the museum was "thrilled to become custodians of his incredible archive" and to open it to the public.
"Bowie's radical innovations across music, theatre, film, fashion, and style - from Berlin to Tokyo to London - continue to influence design and visual culture and inspire creatives from Janelle Monae to Lady Gaga to Tilda Swinton and Raf Simons," he said.
Highlights include stage costumes such as Bowie's breakthrough Ziggy Stardust ensembles, designed by Freddie Burretti in 1972; Kansai Yamamoto's creations for the Aladdin Sane tour in 1973; and the Union Jack coat designed by Bowie and Alexander McQueen for the 1997 Earthling album cover.
Handwritten lyrics for songs including Fame, Heroes and Ashes To Ashes also feature, as well as a photo collage of film stills from The Man Who Fell to Earth, and more than 70,000 photographs, prints, negatives, slides and contact sheets from photographers including Terry O'Neill, Brian Duffy and Helmut Newton.
The archive also includes instruments, amps, and other equipment, such as a Stylophone - a gift from Marc Bolan in the late 1960s - used on Bowie's seminal Space Oddity recording.
Additionally, the archive holds a series of intimate notebooks from every era of Bowie's life and career.
The acquisition by the V&A and the creation of the Bowie centre was made possible thanks to the David Bowie Estate and a £10m donation from the Blavatnik Family Foundation and Warner Music Group.
A spokesperson from the Bowie estate said: "With David's life's work becoming part of the UK's national collections, he takes his rightful place amongst many other cultural icons and artistic geniuses."
Read more:
Most influential artists of last 50 years revealed
David Bowie back catalogue sells for 'hundreds of millions of dollars'
'We wanted to tell the story we wanted to tell': Actor on playing Bowie
'His influence only grows over time'
Moonage Daydream, the first officially sanctioned documentary on the star since his death from cancer, was released in 2022, and was shortlisted at this year's BAFTAs.
Click to subscribe to Backstage wherever you get your podcasts
Max Lousada, chief executive of recorded music at Warner Music Group, said: "As the stewards of David Bowie's extraordinary music catalogue, we're delighted to expand our relationship with his estate through this partnership with the V&A.
"This archive promises to be an unparalleled display of individual artistic brilliance, invention, and transformation. Bowie's influence only grows in stature over time, and this will be an enduring celebration of his profound legacy."
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In April 1987 the National Museum of Women in the Arts opened to fanfare and corresponding controversy. Its founder, Wilhelmina Cole Holladay, had a spartan, though burdensome, mission: to reinsert women into the history of art—even if “she never had the intention to create a museum,” as director Susan Fisher Sterling explains. Wedged between New York Avenue and 13th Street, two blocks from the White House, the 93,400-square-foot landmark building was originally a Masonic Temple, a space from which women were largely excluded and a fitting location for Holladay’s bold vision. “Our potential is very exciting,” she said at the time. “There’s a subconscious view on the part of the masses that all good works were done by men. But the museum will show to a wide public the many women artists who made great contributions, beyond the well-known names of Georgia O’Keeffe and Mary Cassatt.”
Yet from the moment the museum opened its doors, Holladay grappled with criticism from all sides. As Sterling says, “A new idea is always scary.” On the right, she was accused of politicizing art. Among feminists, she was indicted for isolating women from the broader art world. Others dismissed the effort as unserious. A New York Times article pegged to the opening quotes artist Miriam Schapiro: “Frankly, I’m ambivalent. I support such a museum because we need one to repair the historical omission of women’s place in cultural history. But in this there doesn’t seem to be a concise acquisition position and exhibition program. Also, it needs a staff of the highest quality and an active, rotating board of professional advisors. It seems to me the code word here is Junior League.”
Holladay cast the criticisms as wholly premature. “I’m a little angry that people have to come down on a side while the jury’s still out.”
Thirty-six years later, the museum’s objective has morphed in audacity, encompassing exposure plus equity. “We’re both a museum and a megaphone,” Sterling says. “If women are left out of the arts, what does that say about us in the larger social landscape?” A $67.5 million reimagining of the space, designed by Baltimore-based architectural firm Sandra Vicchio & Associates, will showcase the museum’s expanding ambitions.
“The renovation is transformative in that it will give us the building that we require,” Sterling says. “Every, every generation needs to see themselves in the art and the exhibitions of their time. And each generation sees it through different eyes, through different means, through different circumstances. If we are going to continue to be able to break down—and this is the intellectual part of this—the sort of the hierarchies of worth and value that are traditional, then we have got to be able to meet our audience where they are.”
Despite the building’s fixed footprint, Sandra Vicchio says she undertook the project intent that the museum’s mission would no longer “be bound by or constrained by a building.” With 15 percent more gallery space, it strikes a balance between long vistas, a spacious rotunda, and intimate alcoves. There’s also a new Learning Commons for hands-on workshops and an enhanced research library and performance hall. The renovation reflects the evolution of society and art, from expanding accessibility to embracing digital tools like QR codes to provide a more in-depth, educational experience for museum visitors. Chief curator Kathryn Wat says the two-year, top-to-bottom renovation “opens up every possibility” to exhibit the “infinite capacity” of women creators to make works across mediums and materials, varying approaches and techniques.
When the museum reopens on October 21, its inaugural exhibitions will exemplify the mission. Chief among them is “The Sky’s the Limit,” which will feature sculptures, large-scale works, and immersive installations created by 13 living women artists within the last two decades, while in “Antoinette Bouzonnet-Stella” 25 prints made by the eponymous artist in 1675 will be displayed for the first time in nearly 15 years. And, bridging the gap between past and present, “Hung Liu: Making History” will feature nine works by the late Chinese-born American artist, who drew inspiration from the four years she spent as a field laborer during Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution. An exhibition of artists’ books and a series of short films on artists at work will also be on view.
“What we were looking for from the renovation on the curatorial side was taking away a lot of limitations,” Wat says. “Artists work in such amazingly inventive ways. We wanted to be prepared to showcase all of that.” One way in which the museum will differ from typical permanent-collection curation is an emphasis on theme rather than temporality: Newer works will live alongside historical pieces. “We didn’t have to be bound by that trajectory or chronology of art,” Sterling explains, noting that women and people of color often see themselves left out. “This was a disservice to, as I like to call it, history moving forward.” Grouping work across time and space, she adds, “gives you relevance.”
Wat’s ultimate goal: that every visitor might “turn a corner and see something that they just never expected and really have their thinking about creative women expanded exponentially.”
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Street artist creates delightful 3D scenes in walls and walkways for everyone to enjoy
David Zinn's characters bring joy to the lucky folks that happen to come upon them before they wash away.
Street artists are a special breed. While "the art world" can sometimes be a snooty, elite place for those with means, street art is made for everyone. Sometimes that means large public murals, but street art can be small, too. In fact, some of the best street art is so small you might miss it if you're not paying attention. But those who are can discover some delightful surprises.
Just imagine walking down a sidewalk and seeing this little fella at your feet:
Or this young lady:
Or this creature:
That would make your day, wouldn't it? Or at least bring a smile to your face for a while?
Public art is an act of love to strangers, a way of connecting to people without saying a word. It says, "Hey there, fellow human. Here's a little something to make you smile, just because."
That's the beauty of David Zinn's street art. It's meant for the public—just average passers-by—to enjoy, individually and collectively.
Zinn has created an entire world of characters who pop up in unexpected places. For instance, meet Gerald the otter, who is waiting for a blind date in this tree stump.
Zinn uses chalk and charcoal to make his cast of characters come to life in cracks and crevasses, sidewalks and tree trunks. His creations aren't meant to last forever; in fact, as Zinn points out, the temporary nature of them adds value to them.
"Famous works of art hanging in museums get seen by thousands of people every day. But this? You could be among the dozens of people who get to see this while it exists," he told CBS Mornings. "That's pretty special."
Watch how he takes something he finds in the sidewalk and transforms it into a sweet little duo.
Sometimes he uses natural things he finds as inspiration for a piece.
Other times, he uses something human-made, like this upside down terra cotta pot:
Or this manhole cover:
Sometimes the shape of a rock lends itself to a character, like Keith and his emotional support chick here:
Or the space itself serves as inspiration.
Nadine the mouse features in many of Zinn's pieces, probably due to her small size making it easy for her to fit into small spaces.
Usually his pieces use what's already there—like a crack in the sidewalk—to tell a story.
The 3D nature of his drawings make it feel as if his characters are truly there.
"Looks like another long day of things stubbornly refusing to be impossible," he writes in a caption of one of his "pigasuses."
(Speaking of having wings, Nadine found a pair for herself.)
Watch Zinn turn a simple pot into a character with personality in a matter of minutes:
This is all well and good, you might say to yourself, but how does Zinn make a living if he's not selling this art?
He sells books and prints of photos of his artwork on his online store. He also gets invited to schools and events. He has created a career for himself by rejecting blank canvases, putting his imagination out on the street for everyone to see for a while, then selling versions that will actually last. Pretty brilliant, really.
Zinn gave a fascinating TEDx Talk explaining how he found his own artistic niche. You'll never look at a parking meter or sidewalk the same way again.
This article originally appeared on 02.12.22
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Cave art of a lion with a luscious mane drawn deep in a Puerto Rican cave about 500 years ago might have been created by an enslaved African, new research suggests.
"We have an image that looks like a lion — but in Puerto Rico, we don't have lions," project researcher Angel Acosta-Colón, an adjunct professor of geophysics at the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo and an expert on the island's caves, said in a statement.
Instead, the drawing may have been made by someone who'd seen one in Africa before they were enslaved and taken to the island by the Spanish.
The idea was controversial, Acosta-Colón said. "But the age of the art is around [A.D.] 1500," he said. "We have data to corroborate what, I think, is one of the first [examples of] slave art in caves in Puerto Rico."
Acosta-Colón and Reniel Rodríguez Ramos, an archaeologist at the University of Puerto Rico at Utuado, have radiocarbon-dated some of the drawings in Puerto's Rico's caves to more than 2,000 years ago, according to unpublished research presented Oct. 18 at the Geological Society of America's annual conference in Pittsburgh.
Their discovery refutes a colonialist claim that people had lived on Puerto Rico for only a few hundred years before 1493, when the Italian navigator Christopher Columbus claimed the Caribbean island for his patrons in Spain.
Ancient evidence
Determining the age of rock art is difficult. Substances like the mineral ochre used to inscribe them often can't be reliably dated, and some of the drawings are superimposed on others. Oftentimes, the age of cave art in Puerto Rico is estimated by linking it to nearby artifacts that have datable organic material, Acosta-Colón said.
To acquire more accurate dates, Acosta-Colón and Rodríguez took samples of 61 pigments used to make drawings in 11 caves on La Isla Grande, Puerto Rico's main island. The sampling destroys a tiny part of the drawing — between 1 and 2 milligrams (3.5 to 7 ounces) of the pigment — so the researchers were careful to sample only cave art that was commonly seen.
The radiocarbon dating revealed that the cave drawings were made in three phases: the earliest, of abstract and geometric shapes, dated to between 700 and 400 B.C.; the second phase, with simple shapes of human bodies, dated to between A.D. 200 and 400; and the third phase, with more detailed portrayals of humans and animals, started between 700 and 800.
The discovery of the earliest phase was key. "That is very important to us," Acosta-Colón said. "This proves that we were here [thousands] of years before the European invasion."
Meanwhile, the last phase continued through the period of European colonization after about 1500 and included pictures of horses, ships and other animals, such as the lion.
This feline was likely painted by someone who had actually seen a lion, possibly an enslaved person from Africa who had been brought to the island by the Spanish, Acosta-Colón said.
The cave drawings illustrate the history of the Puerto Rican people, Acosta-Colón said. "Normally we get the European history version of Puerto Rico, but this is direct evidence that the story in Puerto Rico didn't start with the European invasion; it started much, much earlier in history," he said.
He thinks further research could push back the record of human history on the island to around 7,000 years ago. Recent research found some of the human remains from Puerto Rico were up to 3,800 years old.
Alice Samson, an archaeologist at the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom, wasn't involved in the research but has studied cave art on Puerto Rico's Mona Island. "This really important work … sheds light on thousands of years of human interaction with caves throughout precolonial and historic eras," she told Live Science in an email.
Jago Cooper, a professor of art and archaeology at the University of East Anglia in the U.K., wasn't involved in the research but worked alongside Samson on Mona Island.
"Such advances will help untap the huge cultural reservoir of knowledge preserved in the spectacular cave-scapes across the Caribbean," he told Live Science in an email.
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Tom Metcalfe is a freelance journalist and regular Live Science contributor who is based in London in the United Kingdom. Tom writes mainly about science, space, archaeology, the Earth and the oceans. He has also written for the BBC, NBC News, National Geographic, Scientific American, Air & Space, and many others.
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New York’s Chelsea Hotel (strictly, the Hotel Chelsea) is the almost mythic building renowned for the radical bohemianism and life-on-the-edge danger of its famous residents, who have included Dylan Thomas, Patti Smith, Sid Vicious, Bob Dylan, Madonna and Iggy Pop. But unlike CBGBs or checker cabs, the Chelsea is a New York institution that does in fact still exist, and is the subject of this interesting, if meanderingly vague documentary from Maya Duverdier and Amélie van Elmbt.It is all about the now ageing artists and radicals still living there, such as dancer and choreographer Merle Lister, who once staged performances in the Chelsea’s beautiful stairwell with its wrought-iron balustrades. They are the ageing holdout generation with legally protected tenancy – and they resent the forces of gentrification for trying to evict them and ruin the Chelsea’s artistic spirit. A property developer bought it in 2011 and has been striving for an upgrade. But this is more of an apartment building than a hotel, so the overhaul is no simple matter.Then there is a division of opinion within the longtermers themselves. The ones who have not simply accepted a cash inducement to quit are willing to accept the new landlord’s secondary offer of smaller but better appointed apartments – but others are unashamedly obstructive, seeking to delay all the refurbishments because they know that once complete (and the restoration was in fact finished this year), big modern-Manhattan-style rent hikes will be on the way.This is a reasonably engaging film although I found myself guilty of the cardinal sin of modern documentary-watching: pining for an old-fashioned voiceover that would explain exactly what and who everyone is and what are the dates of the archive film and video material being used – particularly that involving the former manager Stanley Bard, who reputedly created the hotel’s artist-colony image. It’s a melancholy, dreamy study.
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LONDON -- One of the earliest portraits of a person of color by a British artist will remain on public display after London’s National Portrait Gallery and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles struck a 50 million-pound ($62 million) deal to buy it.
The two institutions announced Wednesday they had each pitched in 25 million pounds to acquire Joshua Reynolds’ depiction of an 18th-century Polynesian man, “Portrait of Mai.” The seven-foot high (2.1-meter) painting is considered a masterpiece by the renowned portrait artist and is the first known grand depiction of a nonwhite subject in British art.
“It’s undisputed how important this is in terms of British art history,” National Portrait Gallery director Nicholas Cullinan said. He said it would have been a “tragedy” if the painting had disappeared into private hands.
Under the deal, Getty and the London gallery will share the painting. It will go on display at the National Portrait Gallery when it reopens in June after a three-year refurbishment and will tour the U.K. before moving to Los Angeles in 2026.
The first known Polynesian visitor to Britain, Mai came from the island of Raiatea near Tahiti and traveled to England with explorer Captain James Cook in 1774. He was figure of fascination and became a celebrity — granted an audience with King George III, invited to Parliament and a guest at literary soirees hosted by novelist Fanny Burney and writer Samuel Johnson.
He returned to his homeland in 1777 and died there two years later.
Reynolds was one of Britain’s leading society artists, and his painting of Mai, which shows him as a dignified figure in flowing robes, caused a sensation when it was first exhibited in 1776. Reynolds never sold it, and it remained in his studio when he died in 1792.
Getty museum director Timothy Potts said the painting — formerly known as ”Portrait of Omai,” the name by which the prince was known in Britain — “is not only one of the greatest masterpieces of British art, but also the most tangible and visually compelling manifestation of Europe’s first encounters with the peoples of the Pacific islands.”
After Reynolds’ death in 1792, the painting was bought by the artist’s friend the Earl of Carlisle and remained at his stately home, Castle Howard, until it was sold to a private collector in 2001 for $16.5 million, at the time one of the highest prices ever paid for a British painting.
The U.K. government blocked its export, and British institutions have been battling for two decades to raise the money to keep the portrait in the country.
Cullinan acknowledged that saving the painting had cost “a huge amount of money” at a time when Britons are feeling the pinch from a cost-of-living crisis. But he said it was worth it.
“What none of us wanted was that in 100 years’ time people would be lamenting that we let this go because we were quibbling about the price,” he told the BBC.
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Two major art festivals have been cancelled - with Brexit partly to blame
Two major art festivals have been cancelled - with Brexit partly to blame Since 2020, increasing amounts of red tape and the introduction of an import VAT rate of 5%, have made it considerably harder to move art between the Britain and Europe.
Works of art from the EU to the UK now require customs clearances and payment of VAT
Two of London's major summer art fairs have been cancelled this year, with organisers saying Brexit is partly to blame.
The cancellations of Masterpiece and Olympia have raised concerns about the threat Brexit poses to the UK's status as a major global art market.
Currently, Britain's market is second only to the United States by volume of sales. But since 2020, increasing amounts of red tape and the introduction of an import VAT rate of 5%, have made it considerably harder to move art between the UK and Europe.
This is having a noticeable effect. Organisers of Masterpiece, one of the fairs cancelled this summer, told Sky News that the number of EU-based galleries applying to participate this year had dropped by 86% compared to 2018.
Gander & White is one of the world's leading fine art shipping firms. Operations director Victor Khureya said: "Works of art from the EU to the UK now require customs clearances and payment of VAT.
"Works of art from the UK to the EU require payment of VAT in the destination country. There's increased complex customs procedures that we now have to comply with. The business has definitely been affected."
According to survey data from the recent Art Basel & UBS Art Market Report 2023, UK dealers were the least optimistic globally, with many citing "concern about the difficult economic conditions that might lie ahead".
But London still has several advantages as a global centre for the art market: world-class galleries, storied auction houses, prestigious art schools and universities, to name but a few.
Read more:
Solo Banksy exhibition to be held at Glasgow's Gallery of Modern Art
Sky's Kay Burley speaks to the world's first artistic robot
Vicki Wonfor, managing director of leading London auction house Roseberys, said: "We can't forget over the last three years we've also had the global pandemic, and obviously, more recently the war in Ukraine and all of these things have actually had financial impacts on the European market and also the UK art market.
"So it's important to consider it all as a whole, and we can't pigeonhole it into being directly related to Brexit. There's still a hunger and appetite within the London art market. We're still a global art market capital here in London."
In the aftermath of Brexit and the pandemic, the value of art and antiques imports into the UK collapsed by nearly half.
But last year, the numbers rebounded again by 65%, and although they are still below 2019 levels, it suggests the drop may have been more temporary than initially feared. Sales too, rose modestly last year.
But a striking comparison from the Art Basel & UBS Report provides food for thought. Between 2013 and 2022, the value of the UK art market fell by 7%. Over the same period, the US market, a major competitor, rose by 46%.
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Macron looks to carve his name in history with French language museum
French President Emmanuel Macron looked to cement his legacy, and take on political opponents, with the inauguration on Monday of a former royal palace that has been dedicated to the French language, deep in far-right heartland.
Issued on:
Modern French presidents love a cultural "grand projet" - an imposing monument to "scratch" their name on history, as ex-leader François Mitterrand put it in the 1980s.
Mitterrand was an avid and controversial legacy-builder, transforming the Louvre museum with a glass pyramid, and erecting the vast Opera Bastille and National Library.
Other examples include the modern art museum built by Georges Pompidou in central Paris, and Quai Branly culture museum of Jacques Chirac on the banks of the River Seine.
The practice fell out of fashion this century, but has been revived by Macron, who was already eyeing up a crumbling chateau in the small town of Villers-Cotterêts, located in northern France, while still a presidential candidate in 2017.
Museum dedicated to French language
He has overseen the renovation of the Renaissance castle, completed in 1539 under King Francois I, and its transformation into the Cité Internationale de la Langue Francaise, a museum celebrating the history and future of the French language.
It hopes to attract 200,000 visitors a year to its large library (replete with AI-supported suggestion engine), interactive exhibits, games and cultural events.
"All those who, around the world, work, create, think, write, play and sing in French should feel at home at Villers-Cotterets," explained the Elysee Palace in a statement.
The French language is "the greatest asset of the nation [...] and the foundation of who we are intellectually and our relations with the world," the Elysee said.
Culture Minister Rima Abdul Malak added it will be "the beating heart of the Francophone world".
Il était une fois… le château de #VillersCotterêts 🏰— Cité internationale de la langue française (@citelanguefr) October 30, 2023
Retrouvez les chapitres marquants de l’histoire de ce château devenu Cité internationale de la langue française !
⏳ Remontons le fil de cette aventure… pic.twitter.com/URqpoP6Sbl
"The region's economic and social difficulties"
The choice was also made up by "the region's economic and social difficulties", according to the Élysée.
The small town of 10,000 people, around 80 kilometres from Paris, lies deep in France's northeast where factory closures and high unemployment have made the region a stronghold of the far-right.
The town hall has been run since 2014 by Rassemblement National (RN) mayor Franck Briffaut, and in the Aisne region, Marine Le Pen came out well ahead in both rounds of the last presidential election.
The new institution aims "to show that the region's recovery does not rely on withdrawing into itself, but by greater openness," an advisor to Macron said.
Also, it underlines that France is not the most populous francophone country - that prize goes to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) with its 100 million citizens.
The chateau will host the 19th summit of the francophone world next year, to which some 88 leaders are invited.
On Monday the Senate was due to debate a bill pushed by right-wing politicians aimed at "protecting the French language from the abuses of so-called 'inclusive' language".
(with AFP)
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Art and Culture
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The story of a juggling pig; another about monks who juggle their way to enlightenment in Bhutan; the feats of a three-armed showman; the existence of a trick so dangerous we can’t risk seeing it – some of Sean Gandini’s tales might be too tall to be true, but it’s all part of the games he plays.Having started out performing on the streets of Covent Garden, Gandini founded the company Gandini Juggling 30 years ago with his partner (on stage and off), Kati Ylä-Hokkala. Their work brings together juggling and choreography; they have made ensemble shows inspired by dance legends such as Pina Bausch and Merce Cunningham, and worked in collaboration with contemporary choreographers including Seeta Patel and Alexander Whitley.But this time it is just the two of them, plus a sign language interpreter, looking back on their three decades and way beyond into the history of juggling. The show sets itself up as a lecture-style explainer (with Ylä-Hokkala very much the silent partner, the Teller to Gandini’s Penn). They break down some basic juggling patterns while Gandini references colour and rhythm, drawing parallels with David Hockney, Kazimir Malevich and Steve Reich. Then they build to something more complex, juggling as a pair with arms crisscrossing so you’re not sure whose hand is whose. It’s immensely pleasing to watch the puzzle pieces fit together.Catch it if you can … Gandini Juggling. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The GuardianThe Games We Play delves into juggling’s past, introducing us to Jenny Jaeger from the 1920s, the first person to perform the 10-ball fountain. It also offers philosophical moments, gentle absurdism and forays into experimental theatre. The show is very funny, and then all of a sudden very dark, and it will certainly disabuse you of any notion that juggling is solely about tossing as many balls in the air as you can. Did you ever see passive-aggressive juggling? Well, here it is. This amiable and absorbing show is part of the last-ever London international mime festival, which has been a valuable platform for so many surprising performances. A hybrid of dance and juggling is the kind of art you might not think needs to exist, but the Gandinis make you glad that it does.
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Art and Culture
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More than 57,000 years have passed since Paleolithic humans stood before the cave wall, with its soft, chalky rock beckoning like a blank canvas. Their thoughts and intentions are forever unknowable. But by dragging their fingers across the rock and pushing them into the cave wall, these creative cave dwellers deliberately produced enduring lines and dots that would lie hidden beneath the French countryside for tens of thousands of years.
Now, scientists have discovered that these arresting patterns are the oldest known example of Neanderthal cave engravings.
Authors of a study published Wednesday in PLOS One analyzed, plotted and 3D modeled these intriguing markings and compared them with other wall markings of all types to confirm that they are the organized, intentional products of human hands. The team also dated deep sediment layers that had buried the cave’s opening to reveal that it was sealed up with the engravings inside at least 57,000 and as long as 75,000 years ago—long before Homo sapiens arrived in this part of Europe.
This find, supported by the cave’s array of distinctly Neanderthal stone tools, identifies Neanderthals as the cave art creators and adds to growing evidence that our closest relatives were more complex than their dim caveman stereotype might suggest.
“For a long time it was thought that Neanderthals were incapable of thinking other than to ensure their subsistence,” notes archaeologist and study co-author Jean-Claude Marquet, of the University of Tours, France. “I think this discovery should lead prehistorians who have doubts about Neanderthal skills to reconsider.”
La Roche-Cotard is an ancient cave nestled on a wooded hillside above the Loire River. It was first uncovered in 1846 when quarries were operated in the area during construction of a railroad line. When it was first excavated in 1912, the array of prehistoric stone implements and cut-marked and charred bones of bison, horses and deer within revealed that Paleolithic hunters had frequented the site many thousands of years earlier.
Scientists first noted the finger tracings, with their organized appearance, as early as the 1970s. Beginning in 2016, the authors of the new study diligently plotted the various distinct panels and created 3D models for comparisons with other known examples of Paleolithic engravings. They also identified the cave’s many other wall markings made by the claws of animals, like cave bears, and by metal or other implements during modern incursions into the cave after 1912. Marquet says this process helped to show that the engraved panels were created in a structured and intentional manner. “These panels were not produced in a hurry, without thought,” he says.
The results also suggested that the designs were created by human hands, working the soft chalk wall, a material known as tuffeau, made of fine quartz grains and ancient mollusk shell fragments. The rock is permeable and covered with a fragile sandy-clay film.
“When the tip of a finger comes into contact with this film, a trace is left in the shape of an impact; when the tip of the finger moves, an elongated digital trace is left,” Marquet says. He knows this process firsthand. The team reproduced this method in a nearby cave made of the same type of rock. They marked walls using tools of bone, wood, antler and stone, as well as with their fingers, which produced engravings very similar to the ancient examples.
Co-author Eric Robert, an archaeologist at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, says the graphics are impossible to interpret because they were made by a vanished people for viewing by their contemporaries.
“These images are not for us, and we do not have the keys to understanding their meaning, their possibly diverse and multiple functions,” he says.
Scientists know that the cave’s assemblage of discarded stone tools are of the Mousterian technology, sophisticated flake implements that are typically associated with Neanderthals. This suggests the cave was in use exclusively by Neanderthals, who in turn created the carvings on the walls. However, the authors note they can’t establish a direct relationship between those discarded tools and the engravings.
But another strong line of geological evidence comes from analyzing nearby sediments. During the Paleolithic, the Loire River, once closer to the hillside, flooded the cave numerous times and helped to carve out parts of it. Eventually those floods deposited thick sediments that, aided by erosion from wind and the hillside above after the river changed course, completely sealed off the cave. Clear evidence remains showing how layers of sediment were put down over the years, which would have completely covered the slope and cave entrance to a depth of more than 30 feet.
This covering persisted in place until 1846, when material was extracted for the railroad embankment, exposing the cave entrance. The sediments above and around the cave entrance, part of the layers that covered it before 19th-century excavations, were dated by optically stimulated luminescence dating, which can determine how long it has been since grains of sediment like quartz were exposed to daylight. A total of 50 sediment samples collected showed the cave was very likely sealed up at least 57,000 years ago, well before humans lived in this part of France. Previously, the oldest cave engravings attributed to Neanderthals were an abstract cross-hatching pattern found in Gorham’s Cave, Gibraltar, and dated to some 39,000 years ago.
Robert notes that several lines of evidence—the presence of Neanderthal tools, the geological evidence and the analysis of the engravings themselves—converge to demonstrate that the cave walls were adorned by Neanderthals.
“The authors present as convincing a case as can be made from a site disturbed by early excavations that the animal and human marks on its walls were left long before the arrival of our own species in Europe,” says archaeologist Paul Pettitt of Durham University in England, who wasn’t involved with the research. “Given that the cave’s archaeology is exclusively indicative of Neanderthals, with no evidence of subsequent Upper Paleolithic occupation, presumably because the cave was by this time inaccessible, this provides strong indirect, cumulative evidence that Neanderthals produced the finger markings.”
Humans from our family of ancestors began expressing themselves visually a very long time ago; Homo erectus carved zigzag patterns onto a shell more than half a million years ago. A series of handprints and footprints, which may have been deliberately placed by hominin children some 200,000 years ago, has been found on the Tibetan Plateau.
Neanderthals, or Homo neanderthalensis, may also be responsible for the world’s oldest known cave paintings. Pettitt was part of a team that found 65,000-year-old paintings in three Spanish caves that they attribute to Neanderthal artists. The early humans left red pigmented designs by drawing around their hands or pressing stained fingertips to the walls.
Examples of Homo sapiens’ very different style of cave art appear later. A purplish pig found on the walls of a cave hidden in a highland valley on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi was painted an estimated 45,500 years ago. If that date is correct, the Leang Tedongnge cave could be the earliest known work of figurative art, in which painters recreate real-world objects rather than producing abstract designs. The collections at Spain’s El Castillo cave and France’s Chauvet cave, where sophisticated lions and mammoths were painted perhaps 30,000 to 40,000 years ago, are notable early examples of this complex, figurative art that is unlike anything Neanderthals are known to have produced—at least so far.
But that distinction doesn’t necessarily mean that Neanderthal creations should be regarded as products of simpler minds or thought processes. Robert believes that comparisons between Neanderthal and Sapiens traditions aren’t necessary. For each species, he believes, the appearance of prehistoric carvings and paintings is less about when people were capable of making them and more about when social dynamics created a need for them at a specific time—even if those needs are a mystery to us today.
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Art and Culture
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You mellow with age, they say. So whither, now she’s 31, the comedy of Catherine Cohen? When Cohen unleashed herself on the 2019 fringe – and later on Netflix – it was with an emotional car-crash of a musical comedy act, pasting sequins on her neuroses and narcissism and splaying them fabulously across the stage. But are those Olympian heights of anxiety and self-absorption still scalable now?
Yes and no, on the evidence of her second show, Come for Me. The Cohen it introduces, with opening number The Void, is recognisably the same self-ironic, self-obsessed monster as before. She performs, and commentates on every detail of her performance. She self-glamorises, ad absurdum (“Dating me is what critics and fans alike are calling an immersive experience”). Her sentences teem with put-on voices, hashtags, air quotes and asides.
Maybe there’s no longer the shock of the new that accompanied her debut. But I love this act; I could watch it all day. It’s the social-mediated psyche set loose on stage to music – and fine music, too, with piano from Frazer Hadfield and lyrical free-associating from Cohen, now sweetly trilling, now starting to blather, midway through a horoscope song, about the various ways one might enjoy artisan bread.
But as the set progresses, a slightly maturer Cohen emerges. Yes, anxiety about relationships, sex, and her body stays high in the mix. And the ego is still all-consuming. But there’s reflectiveness, too, and perspective. Two songs, in their differing ways, make peace with, and indeed celebrate, her dysfunctions and out-of-control appetites. A final number, with its breezy melody and bleak lyrics in playful opposition, finds the New York resident in transit between youth and maturity.
It’s also full of laughs, which Cohen never forgets to deliver. There’s oversharing, fresh perspectives, and life-stage material about freezing her eggs and having a boyfriend who’s also – quelle horreur! – an uncle. But there’s also ridiculousness in abundance, from a comic with a sense of her own daftness, that at every pivot, pose and sashay finds hilarious new ways to express itself. Would you call it mellow? Not exactly. But outrageously sharp and funny? Absolutely.
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Art and Culture
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The name Monet conjures up pictures of water lilies, Rouen Cathedral, the Houses of Parliament and French haystacks, some of European art’s best known works.
Now a Paris exhibition will focus on another, lesser known, Monet: Léon Monet, the artist Claude Monet’s long overlooked elder brother who supported him when he was poor and struggling to make his name.
It will be the first time an event – which also includes previously unseen works and sketches by the painter known as the ‘father of impressionism’ – has focused on the elder sibling.
Léon Monet, a chemist and industrialist, has been largely ignored by posterity but was one of the first patrons of the blossoming impressionist movement in the 19th century. He not only supported his brother but also helped his painter friends including Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro and Alfred Sisley.
Géraldine Lefebvre, curator of the new exhibition that opens next month at the Musée du Luxembourg, said very little was known about him.
“I contacted the family, Monet’s descendants, and went through public and private archives but there was very little information,” Lefebvre said. “I saw his name here and there but not much else. It really piqued my curiosity.”
Digging deeper, the curator discovered that Léon, like his brother, had been passionate about colour, and had been a key figure helping Claude financially by buying his paintings and introducing him to the rich industrialists who could support him.
Léon was born in 1836, four years before Claude, the oldest son of Adolphe and Louise-Justine Monet, and both boys spent their early years in Paris before the family moved to Le Havre, Normandy, some time around 1845. He studied as a chemist and specialised in the then new field of synthetic dyes and pigments used to colour fabrics. After moving to Rouen as a sales representative for a Swiss-based factory producing Indian-style fabrics, he was one of the founder members of the Rouen Industrial Society established in 1872.
“It was interesting to see Léon was interested in the chemistry side of pigments and dyes while Claude was interest in the artistic use of colour,” Lefebvre said. “Léon was conscious of the importance of his brother’s work and supported him when he was poor and could hardly afford to eat.”
Léon began collecting art – mainly impressionist works – directly from the struggling artists he met through his brother and encouraged them to take part in local exhibitions for greater exposure.
His patronage of what became known as the Rouen School painters encouraged others to buy works from the nascent radical art movement officially launched in 1874 with a show in Paris made up of works rejected by the influential Académie des Beaux-Arts’ Salon – the then arbiters of artistic taste. Its name came from an insult flung by the journalist and playwright Louis Leroy who sarcastically described Monet’s painting Impression, Sunrise as worse than sketches for wallpaper. Léroy coined the word ‘impressionist’, which stuck.
Although all correspondence between the brothers has disappeared, Lefebvre said Claude’s letters to his wife suggest Léon had a “lively and quick intelligence” and was “cordial and frank”. The brothers nevertheless fell out before Léon died in 1917, in part after Claude’s son Jean worked for Léon his Rouen factory.
The Musée du Luxembourg is devoting three months to showcasing the little-known Monet and his impressionist collection. Pride of place will go to a portrait of Léon never seen before in public that Claude painted in 1874, showing him in a bowler-style hat and sombre black suit. Two of Claude’s first sketch books – one of which was started when he was just 15 years old – that Léon bought at auction and his brother later signed, also unseen until now, will also be on display.
The exhibition will also feature 20 works by Claude Monet and others by Renoir, Sisley, Pissarro and Berthe Morisot – doyenne and co-founder of the impressionist movement – as well as paintings by lesser-known artists of the Rouen School, along with fabric samples and colour swatches from the elder Monet’s work. More personal exhibits will include drawings and photographs of the Monet brothers and family.
“This is an unusual exhibition. Léon Monet’s collection was not very large – there are only about 60 works – but the quality is extraordinary and many are still in private collections and have never been seen by the public,” Lefebvre added.
Léon Monet, artist’s brother and collector opens at the Luxembourg Museum on 15 March and runs until 16 July.
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Art and Culture
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Movie Review: 'Fallen Leaves' is deadpan nirvana
In a movie year rife with grand, three-hour opuses from auteur filmmakers comes a slender 81-minute gem that outclasses them all
In a movie year rife with grand, three-hour opuses from auteur filmmakers comes a slender 81-minute gem that outclasses them all. Aki Kaurismäki’s “Fallen Leaves,” short, sweet and utterly delightful, is the kind of movie that’s so charming, you want to run it back the moment it’s over.
Kaurismäki, the writer-director Finnish master of the deadpan, has for nearly four decades been making minimalist, clear-eyed fables about mostly working-class characters in harsh economic realities. Bleak as his films are, they’re also funny, compassionate and profound. They put up a tough, droll front that never quite hides the heart underneath.
The same could be said for one of the main characters in the plaintive and tender “Fallen Leaves." When Holappa (Jussi Vatanen), a construction worker, is invited by his friend Houtari (Kaurismäki veteran Janne Hyytiäinen) to karaoke, he replies: “Tough guys don’t sing.”
“You’re not a tough guy,” Houtari responds.
“Fallen Leaves,” Kaurismäki's first since 2017’s “The Other Side of Hope,” is about Holappa and a woman named Ansa (Alma Pöysti), both solitary people scraping by in Helsinki. They first encounter each other at that karaoke bar where Houtari proudly sings (for the rest the rest of the movie, whenever he appears he’ll be seeking compliments for his performance), but Ansa and Holappa watch quietly apart.
Kaurismäki draws them together, but slowly. “Fallen Leaves” is the best big-screen romance of the year even though its prospective lovers exchange only a handful of words and, for most of the film, don’t know each other’s names.
It’s more about the circumstances they’re both in. In the beginning of the film, Ansa is working at a supermarket while a security guard glares at her. She’s fired for keeping an expired item instead of throwing it away. At home, she looks at her bills and then shuts the power off. Her next job, at a restaurant, fizzles on pay day when the owner is arrested for selling drugs.
Holappa loses his job, too. After an accident at a construction site due to shoddy equipment, he’s fired for having alcohol in his blood. He’s a scapegoat, but the drinking problem is real. He keeps vodka in his locker and hidden on the job site.
“I’m depressed because I drink and I drink because I’m depressed,” he tells Houtari.
The cinematography of longtime Kaurismäki collaborator Timo Salminen is so spare, with occasional pops of color and irony, that “Fallen Leaves” has a timeless feeling. It casts the cruelty of the world as an eternal state, a sense only enhanced and expanded upon in the most precise contemporary reference of the film. Whenever Ansa turns the radio on, news from the war in Ukraine is being read.
In Kaurismäki’s film, the world is full of bullying authorities. (His radiant 2011 film “Le Havre,” about an old French shoe shiner helping a migrant boy, hinged on a police officer who in the climactic moment choses to look the other way.) In “Fallen Leaves,” the only thing to do is curse the jerks who make life miserable, have a drink and head to the movies.
That’s where Ansa and Holappa go, once they finally meet, for a date. They see Jim Jarmusch’s “The Dead Don’t Die,” a funny choice not just because it’s a zombie comedy but because Jarmusch, a friend of Kaurismäki’s, is so similar in deadpan style to him. Outside, the couple stands in front of telling posters: “Le Cercle Rouge,” “Fat City,” “Pierrot le Fou" — each a touchstone to the director.
It’s little odes to cinema like these that make “Fallen Leaves” — winner of the jury prize at the Cannes Film Festival and Finland’s Oscar submission — one of the most personal and self-reflective films for Kaurismäki. He probably wouldn't stand for all the analysis or the praise. But as Ansa and Holappa come together without a word of flowery romance, they carve out a small, private refugee from the world around them — just like the movies do. There isn't a bit of fat on “Fallen Leaves,” just some lean truths about life and a dog named Chaplin.
“Fallen Leaves,” a Mubi release, is unrated by the Motion Picture Association. Running time: 81 minutes. In Finnish with English subtitles. Four stars out of four.
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Art and Culture
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It's convenient to slot Brandon Taylor's The Late Americans, along with his debut novel Real Life, into the campus novel category.
But his latest book is more than this. It evokes Milan Kundera's astute observation in Immortality that the pursuit of a meaningful calling in today's world is nearly impossible due to the burdens of history and sociopolitical barriers to access.
Taylor deftly explores the myth of youth's unbound possibilities as it plays out in the face of constraints of time, space, class and wealth disparities by vividly illustrating the intersecting lives of University of Iowa students pursuing master degrees, in artistic as well as STEM-related fields, with the people living in this college town.
Defined by "lateness" — the graduate students' adolescence prolonged in part by the protective structure of academe, the persistently isolating milieu of 21st century America, and the inexorable conditions of late capitalism — Taylor's characters, while still in the seemingly untethered stage of self-discovery, are not really free. Oppressed by the lack of time and money, and driven by a series of relentless transitions between economic survival and aesthetic passion, these men and women rarely get to experience joy in their daily pursuits.
Taylor's setting of the open Iowa landscape both references and poetically subverts the campus novel's pastoral elements — those that mimic the lush milieu of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. While the harsh, wintry Midwestern setting — with its slate-colored sky, dirty, slushy snow in the winter, diseased ash trees — seems more Gothic than Romantic, this barren framing intensifies the characters' corporeal desires, manifest via their sweaty bodies in overheated, indoor space. Physical intimacy offers the characters temporary respite if not intellectual or ideological solidarity.
In a way, Iowa City is a contradiction — as a college town surrounded by barren, windswept landscape and hilly terrains, it is both coarse and rarefied, peopled by meatpacking plant workers, laborers, artists, writers, forming a racially diverse and sexually fluid population. At the same time, there seems to be little convergence or understanding between the town residents and the students, or among the students themselves.
Seamus, who works as a cook at a local hospice to finance his MFA in poetry, is undone by the hatred and violence inflicted upon him by a gay "townie" during a casual sexual encounter. Seamus' disdain for his peers' lack of aesthetic rigor masks his insecurity and corroding shame that contribute to his writer's block. Fyodor, the meatpacking worker, while an intuitive artist — since he perceives the formal beauty between a well-trimmed cut of meat and that of a modernist painting's abstract elements — is constantly derided by his vegetarian lover for his "murderous" profession and his lack of appreciation for the theoretical aspects of art.
Regardless, it appears that the cost of facile piety or "aesthetic anger" is mostly borne by the socially disadvantaged — be they laborers or artists. Fyodor's lover can denounce his meatpacking job while blithely espousing capital punishment. Fatima, a poor barista and struggling dancer, while embracing environmental causes, cannot afford the steep cost of locally sourced food. The most aesthetically sensitive, yet also most pragmatic character, is probably Ivan, a talented ex-dancer who sees art simply as a means to an end. After an injury derailed his promising dance career, Ivan shifts his studies to finance as a way to secure his own, and his elderly parents', material stability. To pay for university expenses, Ivan decides to produce "arty" porn clips with stylized, hypnotic body movements for mass consumption — thus consciously exploiting the capitalist machine for what he sees as the greater good.
Arguably, many of Taylor's "late Americans" represent the modern counterparts of characters that populate the novels of Henry James, Edith Wharton, and Theodore Dreiser — those who are shaped by their histories or confined by strict yet undefined social regulations. In this sense perhaps Taylor implies that the modern university experience has failed us, for we have not succeeded in transcending our ideological, social, and economic barriers, even in an open setting for experimental learning.
While Taylor's characters can be openly cruel to their friends or partners, their unwillingness to be emotionally transparent is not so different from the decorous, convoluted behavior of Gilded Age protagonists. At the same time, the characters constantly strive to become better versions of themselves by embracing an ideal of passionate empathy that goes beyond pity or kindness, by striving to plumb the dark, even unspeakable parts of themselves. In this sense, Taylor seems both more hopeful, and yet more pragmatic than F. Scott Fitzgerald. Many of his characters are not pursuing the green light at the end of Daisy's dock, but the arduous, Sisyphean climb of self-knowledge.
Thúy Đinh is a freelance critic and literary translator. Her work can be found at thuydinhwriter.com. She tweets @ThuyTBDinh
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Art and Culture
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Archaeologists have concluded that a series of engravings discovered on a cave wall in France were made by Neanderthals using their fingers, some 57,000 years ago. They could be the oldest such marks yet found and further evidence that Neanderthals' behavior and activities were far more complex and diverse than previously believed, according to a new paper published in the journal PLoS ONE.
As Kiona Smith previously reported for Ars, evidence that Neanderthals could think symbolically, create art, and plan a project has been piling up for the last several years. For instance, about 50,000 years ago, Neanderthals in France spun plant fibers into thread. In Central Italy, between 55,000 and 40,000 years ago, Neanderthals used birch tar to hold their hafted stone tools in place, which required a lot of planning and complex preparation. In 2016, we reported on archaeologists' announcement that a Neanderthal group wrested hundreds of stalagmites from the floor of a cave inside Bruniquel Cave in Southern France to build elaborate circular structures, their work illuminated only by firelight.
Archaeologists have also found several pieces of bone and rock from the Middle Paleolithic—the time when Neanderthals had most of Europe to themselves—carved with geometric patterns like cross-hatches, zigzags, parallel lines, and circles. That might mean that the ability to use symbols didn’t originate with modern humans.
For instance, in 2018, archaeologists claimed that uneven lines observed in the soft, chalky outer layer of a small, thin flint flake were a deliberate marking. It was found in Kiik-Koba Cave, which overlooks the Zuya River in the Crimean Mountains. The engraved flake came from a layer dating to between 35,486 and 37,026 years old. Archaeologists found the skeleton of a Neanderthal infant in the same layer, leaving no doubt about who lived at Kiik-Koba when the stone tools were made and used.
In 2021, archaeologists announced they'd found a geometric design akin to "offset chevrons" carved into the second phalanx, or toe bone, of a giant deer in a cave now called Einhornhohle in the Harz Mountains of Northern Germany. The carver was almost certainly a Neanderthal, based on the bone’s radiocarbon-dated age, because no one but Neanderthals lived in Europe until around 45,000 years ago.
The authors argued that this was a legitimate project; it took imagination to plan the design and figure out that a few individual lines would add up to a more complex pattern. It took resources and planning to assemble the tools, and it took time and effort to actually carve the pattern, as well as a good supply of small, sharp flint blades. The researchers could vouch for that because they tried it themselves, using cow phalanges and hand-knapped blades of Baltic flint, the stone a north German Neanderthal bone-carver would most likely have had access to.
Neanderthals in Spain painted the walls of caves and made shell jewelry painted with ocher pigment around 64,000 years ago. The art analyzed in La Pasiega, Maltravieso, and Ardales Caves is unequivocally Neanderthal. Uranium-thorium dating of rock deposited over paintings in all three caves indicates that the paintings can’t be any younger than 64,000 years. Unlike the first Homo sapiens, who didn't show up until 20,000 years after the rock of the caves began flowing over the art, Neanderthals had lived in the region since at least 243,000 years ago.
And in a sea cave called Cueva de los Aviones, on the southeastern coast of Spain, archaeologists found shells decorated with red and yellow pigment with holes punched in them as for a string. They’re generally assumed to be jewelry, which is another kind of symbol. Here, too, flowing water had deposited a flowstone over the layer of sediment in which these shells were found. Uranium-thorium dating said the flowstone couldn’t be any younger than 114,000 years. In fact, they predate every comparable set of artifacts found so far by at least 20,000 to 40,000 years.
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Art and Culture
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The idea is great: an exhibition of female abstract painters from the 1940s to the early 70s. Subtitled Women Artists and Global Abstraction, this show is intended, if not to overthrow the canon, then to revise the story: much of it is derived from abstract expressionism, in which the role of female artists has been consistently downplayed.
This exhibition aims to stand as a corrective, not only by focusing on the few better-known women associated with the New York school during the 1940s and 50s, but also on artists from Europe, Latin America, China, Japan, Iran and elsewhere. Most were formed during the period between the suffragettes and second-wave feminism in the 1960s. To make art at all and to have a career was an uphill struggle.
Attempting to draw together several strands of improvisatory abstract art, the exhibition takes us from New York to European art informel, from etiolated postwar École de Paris abstraction to pasty, austerity-era tachisme, and from noodling introspection, zen-like calligraphy and quietism to paint-heavy lyricism and corporate-lobby colourfields. At the show’s core is the idea of painting as an arena, an existential act as much as an object. With this idea comes a belief in authenticity and self-expression, in painting as a performance of the self and the unconscious, and as an index of embodiment.
These are foundational myths in the story of abstract art, and take on a particular resonance when the artists in question are women. The show opens with April Mood, a suave, lush and overblown widescreen 1974 Helen Frankenthaler abstract landscape, and ends with a group of dyspeptic, argumentative paintings by Joan Mitchell. These two pioneers bookend a show in which works by Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning and Grace Hartigan stand as reminders of the eclipse suffered by female artists in the story of abstract expressionism.
But not everything is equally distinguished, powerful, or even individual. With its clamour of voices, approaches, touches, tempos, styles, its wild differences in scale, surface treatment, materiality and intention, there are surprises and discoveries here, great things and dismal things, anxious things and angry things. There is exuberance and rage. A lot of the energy in Mitchell’s work feels ill-tempered, with its hurried fracturings and coalescences, the side-swipes and invocations of natural processes and of inner feelings. Her work is full of things coming together, things picked up then dropped or discarded. Mitchell’s forms elbow their way across their canvases. Much of the drama is heightened by her use of blank space.
The wrenching, spiky and jagged forms in Martha Edelheit’s Sacrificial Portrait, and the frightening red and white gestures exploding against black in Sonia Gechtoff’s work, have all the attack and suddenness of a punch in the face. Corinne West, meanwhile, resorted to painting under the name Michael West. George (Grace) Hartigan and Lee Krasner, whose name was originally Lena, also felt it necessary to disguise their gender. It is no wonder women get angry.
Even here, some stories are fitfully told or are only partially glimpsed. German artist Sarah Schumann, who spent her childhood in Nazi Germany, painted luminous egg-tempera fields that are full of delicate close-toned touches and variations. Then there’s Alma Thomas, an African-American art teacher born in 1891, whose 1961 Etude in Brown (Saint Cecilia at the Organ) is a mysterious, almost architectural space flecked by light. This is a large painting in miniature, painted at her kitchen table.
Elna Fonnesbech-Sandberg, born in Denmark in 1892, began painting only in her 50s, at the suggestion of her psychoanalyst. Her paintings are filled with an almost frightening turmoil. Janet Sobel used glass pipettes to drip moiling tangles and skeins of enamel on to her canvases. These were seen by Jackson Pollock in 1945 and inspired, in part, his own drip painting (he even went on to use turkey basters to squirt the paint).
Yuki Katsura adapted Japanese techniques in her strange islands of wrinkled paper, collaged on to canvas. One is a deliciously eccentric yellow blob – almost filling the canvas – over a black background. Bifurcated sprouts reach towards the painting’s edges. Odd and wonderful, it all makes you want to see more. Another of her paintings has a smaller dark blob – almost a head shape – set among rumpled golden folds. What’s going on here? There is never enough of what one might want to see, and then we’re off again.
Some artists are just fleeting presences. In her short career, Peruvian painter Gloria Gómez-Sánchez produced dense, almost monochromatic works that often incorporated detritus. They look like a kind of residue, a painting degree zero. In about 1970 she stopped painting altogether, and little of her work survives. As much as the bigger names, and bigger works, it is tantalising moments such as these that keep the show alive, and keep us looking.
Jay DeFeo is represented by one vertical painting of something like a torso. It manages to be both commanding and vulnerable. Then we come across an earlier Frankenthaler from 1951 called Circus Landscape. It is almost a clownish take on Kandinsky, in which, among the improvised shapes and swipes and splurges, we find a cartoonish, wonky martini glass and an oversize shoe.
At other points, works seem to be yelling at each other across the gallery, from wall to wall. There are paintings that boil and paintings that seem to have lizard skin. There are lumpy paintings, childish paintings, paintings that are thoughtful and paintings that want to fight. There are more than 150 here, with 80 women artists clamouring over the walls of the Whitechapel, in a show co-produced with the Van Gogh Foundation in Arles and the Bielefeld Kunsthalle in Germany.
One asks why does so much (41 out of 150 is my estimate) come from a single private collection? And why does Gillian Ayres have so much space when other arguably more important artists are jammed up against their neighbours, or are reduced to being represented by single works? It is hard not to skid over the surface of things, and to be left with too many questions.
Action! Gesture! Paint! You can imagine a film director shouting the title through a megaphone. When different artists are using unmixed and mostly undiluted paint straight from the tube, everything gets a bit homogenised. This makes it all hard work for the viewer. Some of the standout pieces only tangentially meet the show’s theme. Three small works by Bice Lazzari have little to do with action or gesture. With their discrete forms and symbols, they appear to be entirely deliberated records of her thoughts. Her fellow Italian artist Carol Rama shows an inky automatist figure incorporating a painted sac of real glass doll’s eyes. Rama’s title for this disturbing little work is great: We Moan, We Do the Bop. At its best, that is what this show does too.
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Ámsterdam, 7 feb (EFE).- La pequeña obra de Johannes Vermeer, famosa por su calma y luz, está esparcida por el mundo, pero, por primera vez en la historia, el Rijksmuseum de Ámsterdam homenajea al artista neerlandés con una exposición de 28 de sus 37 pinturas: ni siquiera el propio maestro del siglo XVII vio tantas obras suyas en un mismo lugar.
La peculiaridad y el éxito de esta exposición ya es evidente, y eso que no abre al público hasta el viernes: el museo ha vendido ya 200.000 entradas por adelantado, y ha tenido que ampliar su horario de apertura para satisfacer la gran demanda en admirar este espectáculo artístico, y periodistas de todo el mundo se han acercado hoy a capturar la presentación.
“Es realmente una oportunidad única en la vida”, aseguró el director del Rijksmuseum, Taco Dibbits, quien recuerda que ni siquiera el propio Vermeer vio toda esta colección de obras suyas juntas en un mismo lugar. El pintor murió hace casi 350 años, pero sigue siendo todo un desconocido y su obra sigue sorprendiendo a expertos, investigadores y admiradores.
Las 28 obras se exponen en Ámsterdam hasta el 4 de junio, unos 27 años después de la última exposición histórica de un total de 22 Vermeer en el Mauritshuis de La Haya.
La mayoría de la colección de Vermeer está fuera de Países Bajos, su país natal, con Estados Unidos como ganador (14 pinturas). Los extranjeros más adinerados de la época compraron las piezas en un momento en el que Vermeer no era nadie en Europa (más allá de Francia). Países Bajos tiene siete cuadros, el resto de Europa colecciona 15, y hay un lienzo en Japón.
Nadie creía que una muestra así sería posible porque los Vermeer son escasos, una joya que los museos suelen rechazar prestarse unos a otros, pero la actual renovación de La Colección Frick de Nueva York fue la excusa perfecta: aceptaron prestar al Rijksmuseum sus tres obras de Vermeer y a partir de ahí empezaron las negociaciones con otros museos.
La “Dama en amarillo escribiendo” (1664-67) viajó desde la Galería Nacional de Washington; “Alegoría de la fe católica” (1670-74) desde el Museo Metropolitano de Nueva York; “Una mujer joven sentada ante el virginal” (1670-72) desde la Galería Nacional de Londres; el “Cristo en casa de Marta y María” (1655) desde la de Escocia; y “La lección de música interrumpida” (1660) desde la Frick.
Otras obras tomaron una vía más corta: “Diana y sus compañeras” (1655-56) y “Vista de Delft” (1660-61) llegaron a Ámsterdam desde La Haya, al igual que la famosa pintura de “La joven de la perla” (1664-67), aunque esta admirada pieza se volverá a casa en abril para el inicio de la temporada turística. “La gente viene al Mauritshuis solo para verla. Es que es ella, es la joven, no hay otra”, dicen a Efe desde este museo.
Otros cuadros han viajado desde otros museos de Nueva York, Dublín, Berlín, Washington, París, Fráncfort del Meno, Tokio y Dresde, y se han sumado a piezas propiedad del Rijksmuseum: “La Carta” (1669-70), “La lechera” (1658-59),“Mujer leyendo una carta” (1663-64), y “Vista de casas en Delft”, también conocida como “La callecita” (1658-59).
También se muestra la “Muchacha con flauta” (1669), que el Rijksmuseum defiende como original de Vermeer, pero la Galería Nacional de Washington atribuye a alguien familiarizado con la técnica pictórica de Vermeer, como un estudiante o un familiar.
Hay nueve obras que se echan de menos, una de ellas es “El arte de la pintura” (1668). Adolfo Hitler la compró en 1940 de un conde austriaco, y los Aliados la descubrieron en 1945 en una mina de sal de Austria, junto a otro arte saqueado por los nazis. Cuelga en el Museo de Historia del Arte de Viena y no está en Ámsterdam debido a su fragilidad.
Ver la serie de obras de Vermeer divididas en diez temáticas a lo largo de varias salas del Rijksmuseum evidencia de golpe la conexión y la cohesión en el estilo, la técnica, el color, y las sombras del arte del maestro del Barroco, reflejadas en las figuras femeninas, los rostros de los personajes masculinos, o en los detalles de la vestimenta y la luz.
La exposición también cuenta historias especiales, como el descubrimiento de que La Lechera fue modificada por Vermeer durante el proceso. “En una etapa muy temprana, definió drásticamente la luz y la sombra, casi con pintura oscura. Ahora es una pintura perfecta, pero al principio era muy intenso y rápido dibujando. Es muy bonito”, señaló a Efe Anna Krekeler, conservadora del Rijksmuseum.
(c) Agencia EFE
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Seasons and years blow through the high Alpine peaks of the decades-spanning “The Eight Mountains." But a warm, abiding glow persists throughout this tender, even restorative epic of male friendship.
The film, by Belgian filmmakers Charlotte Vandermeersch and Felix van Groeningen, is a stunning, often profound and frequently jaw-droppingly gorgeous tale of two friends from childhood through adulthood set against the Italian Alps. Vast and intimate at once, their luminously languid adaptation of Paolo Cognetti's bestseller reaches sublime heights.
“The Eight Mountains,” which last year won the jury prize at the Cannes Film Festival, isn't hurried. The ebbs of its two-and-a-half hours are sometimes a little too placid. But the passage of time — what changes, what endures — is much the subject of the movie. Just as the film's near-sole setting — a remote mountain cabin beneath the peaks of northwestern Italy — beckons Pietro (Luca Marinelli) and Bruno (Alessandro Borghi) throughout their lives, the intoxicating atmosphere of “The Eight Mountains” is a cherished retreat I'm already eager to revisit.
When we first encounter Pietro and Bruno, they're 11-year-olds. They come from different backgrounds. Pietro's family is middle-class, lives in Turin and only vacations in the Alps. Bruno's family is hardscrabble and working class, and live year-round in the mountains. They become fast friends immediately, though, and it would hard to imagine a more idyllic rendering of childhood than Pietro and Bruno's mountain playground. (One honorable mention: Pixar's “Luca," just a little further south from here.)
As wide-screen as the surroundings are, the Belgian filmmakers Vandermeersch and van Groeningen, with cinematographer Ruben Impens, shot “The Eight Mountains” in boxy Academy ratio. Somehow, this only enhances the high-mountain splendor of the film, while at the same time drawing its characters closer together. The hills, you might say, are alive.
And the music is a big part of that. “The Eight Mountains” is scored by the Swedish songwriter Daniel Norgren, whose dreamy, organ-inflected folk songs radiate throughout the film. It might seem too much to compare the effect to Leonard Cohen soundtracking “McCabe and Mrs. Miller." But in a similarly rural film where much goes unspoken, Norgren's serene music voices something ethereal, compassionate and timeless. The songs combined with such magnificent images produced a soulful, magical alchemy.
Most of the film takes place when Pietro and Bruno are in their 30s. By young adulthood, they've grown apart. They live in different economic realities. The mountains mean different things to them. It's not a vacation or a refuge for Bruno; it's his life. Pietro's father (Filippo Timi), a pivotal figure in the early childhood scenes, dies having spent his life a workaholic. We get the impression his fleeting few weeks at the mountain cabin were the only ones that mattered to him.
But Pietro's strained relationship with his father — and Bruno's closeness to him — continues to shadow the movie. “The Eight Mountains” is richest in its first half, when it's foremost a father-son tale. After years away, Pietro, a writer, returns to help Bruno (now a bearded mountain man) rebuild the cabin. It's a project of rehabilitation, inside and out, and of reconciliation with his father's unrealized Alpine dreams.
But in tracking the book, Vandermeersch and van Groeningen go for something more novelistic. Some pains melt away. New ones emerge. Pietro travels the world. Bruno stays, stubbornly. He falls in love, starts a family, but struggles to make ends meet. Pietro resolves to return every summer. Different as they are, the bond they share is immense.
Their lives remain irrevocably intertwined — Marinelli, the talented “Martin Eden” actor, and Borghi, have a stirring rapport — even if their inherent differences are never resolved, and never could be. I'm tempted not to say too much about how “The Eight Mountains” evolves, though, at the same time, the few plot points matter little. Life moves along, with fluctuations of fortune, shifting definitions of home and cyclical drifts from summer to winter, and back. The Alpine idyll that Pietro's father pined for and that Bruno devotes himself to, ultimatley, remains tragically out of reach. Only the mountains endure.
"The Eight Mountains,” a Janus Films and Sideshow release is not rated by the Motion Picture Association. In Italian. Running time: 147 minutes. Three and a half stars out of four.
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Joey Soloway, Karyn Kusama, and Rosanna Arquette also appear in the documentary from filmmakers Kristy Guevara-Flanagan and Helen Hood Scheer. “Body Parts”Courtesy Shout! Factory What is the effect of sex scenes in film? Who decides what is “sexy”?
Jane Fonda is among the many artists featured in the documentary “Body Parts,” which addresses what it means to undress onscreen. While some movies act as an informal sexual education for audiences, others act as vehicles to deepen the patriarchal straight male fantastical definition of what it means to be “sexy.”
Filmmakers Kristy Guevara-Flanagan and Helen Hood Scheer capture Fonda, Rose McGowan, Karyn Kusama, Rosanna Arquette, Joey Soloway, Alexandra Billings, Angela Robinson, Emily Meade, and David Simon in the latest doc from Shout! Factory.
“I was at a place in my life where if you were asked to do something, especially by a man, you did it,” Fonda says in the film about filming the iconic “Barbella.”
Per the official synopsis, for too long cinema has been dominated by the male gaze. Innovative and incisive, “Body Parts” explores the evolution of desire and “sex” onscreen from a woman’s perspective. Demystifying the often invisible processes in creating intimacy for the screen, the film sheds light on the most closely-guarded secrets of an industry now at a crossroads. Deftly illustrated with movie clips stretching back to Eadweard Muybridge’s motion studies, “Body Parts” is part film-history lesson on the dominance of the heterosexual male gaze and part clarion call for employing intimacy coordinators across the industry. It neither shies away from uncomfortable conversations nor ignores image-makers trying to set a higher, more inclusive bar on set and onscreen in the wake of the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements. “Body Parts” debuted at the 2022 Tribeca Film Festival, where IndieWire critic Jude Dry wrote that the film covers iconic works like “Boogie Nights,” “The Graduate,” and “Showgirls,” placing segments in context within the male gaze and #MeToo.
“The film manages to lay out its concise thesis without digressing too far into the nitty gritty,” Dry wrote. “It’s a simple and powerful message, executed economically. This time, it’s not the women, but the emperor who has no clothes.”
“Body Parts” premieres in theaters and on VOD February 3 from Shout! Factory.
Check out the trailer below. Sign Up: Stay on top of the latest breaking film and TV news! Sign up for our Email Newsletters here.
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Art and Culture
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My original story in January 2022 on Mo’min Swaitat, a Palestinian actor and film-maker living in London, originally from the occupied West Bank city of Jenin, described how he was stranded there when the pandemic began. It was during that time that he found himself drawn to a closed-down music shop he remembered from childhood. The former owner let him while away the lockdown days searching through the archive of tape cassettes on the second floor.
Swaitat uncovered thousands of hours of long-forgotten music that animated Palestinian life during the 1980s, when the first Palestinian uprising broke out. Synth, funk, disco, Bedouin and revolutionary tracks inspired by the intifada were among the treasure trove.
When restrictions eased, Swaitat bought thousands of the tapes and brought five suitcases of them back to London, making it his mission to digitise and rerelease this window into the past. Funding from Jerwood Arts allowed him to start the Majazz Project, a new archival Palestinian label, and the Palestinian Sound Archive, an online database dedicated to restoring Palestinian musical heritage. The story, A Journey Through the Past, went viral, sparking dozens of follow-up pieces and a documentary which will be released next year.
“The exposure we got from the Guardian story was amazing. I have been so surprised and touched by the reception from audiences, particularly Palestinians in the diaspora who were not really exposed to this stuff before and are interested to know and hear more,” Swaitat said. Majazz has now rereleased seven albums and is working on another five. The latest is by Al Fajer, or the Dawn, a Palestinian band formed in Kuwait in the 1980s who became known for their transparent style and the use of acoustic oud, guitar and percussion in patriotic and liberation songs, and the unusual presence of a female band member.
The Palestinian Sound Archive is not finished yet: Swaitat estimates it will take another three years to go through all the material rescued from Jenin. He plans to work with young musicians and poets exploring the database, and is now applying for a PhD at the National Archives in London, which he hopes will help him expand his research with access to documentary and visual evidence dating back to British control of the region in the first half of the 20th century. “I never thought my life would go in this direction,” he said. “The lockdown stopped all my playwright and acting work, but opened this door to the past and the future.”
• Comments on this piece are premoderated to ensure the discussion remains on the topics raised by the article. Please be aware that there may be a short delay in comments appearing on the site.
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The oldest-known engravings in Europe, discovered in a French cave sealed up for tens of thousands of years, likely weren't crafted by modern humans but rather Neanderthals, a new study finds.
Within the cave of La Roche-Cotard 150 miles (240 kilometers) southwest of Paris, the researchers analyzed a series of non-figurative markings thought to be made by ancient human fingers, according to a study published Wednesday (June 21) in the journal PLOS One.
The cave had been sealed up by sediments until the late 19th century. Modern excavations at the site have yielded numerous stone tools whose style is associated with the Neanderthals, suggesting they created the art.
Ancient figurative art, including wall paintings, is well-known from European sites, with drawings of horses, lions and handprints representing famous examples of Upper Paleolithic culture dating back 35,000 years. For decades, researchers thought that these creations were hallmarks of modern human behavior, but recently, researchers have unearthed older examples of non-utilitarian objects and art in Europe and in other areas of the world, such as a 51,000-year-old chevron-engraved bone in Germany created by Neanderthals; however, Homo sapiens are credited with a 45,500-year-old drawing of a warty pig in Indonesia and a 73,000-year-old hashtag drawing in South Africa.
At the cave of La Roche-Cotard, researchers found eight panels with more than 400 traces of abstract lines and dots. The researchers call these traces "engravings" because they represent deliberate removal of material carried out with a tool or finger. "This removal of material is neither accidental nor utilitarian," they wrote in their study, but rather "intentional and meticulous."
To figure out how the engravings were made, the researchers set up an experiment at a similar cave, in which one person created marks using their fingers, bone, wood, antler, flint and metal points against the rock wall. Another person then recorded what those marks looked like and used photogrammetry methods — a technique that uses hundreds of photos to create virtual 3D models — to compare the experimental marks with the prehistoric ones.
The researchers concluded that the experimental finger markings were most similar to the prehistoric engravings.
The researchers also found no direct link between the numerous stone tools discovered in the cave and the engravings, further supporting the finding that Neanderthals created the engravings with their fingers, just as the researchers did. For the most part, the engravings on the cave wall are lines called "finger flutings," made when someone swiped their fingers flat along the silt-covered wall, the team concluded.
To further refine the date the cave was used and figure out if the finger flutings were those of modern humans or Neanderthals, the researchers used optically stimulated luminescence of the sediments to determine when they were last exposed to daylight. The analysis revealed that the cave closed up at least 57,000 years ago and possibly as long as 75,000 years ago.
These early dates mean it's "highly unlikely" that anatomically modern humans had access to the inside of the cave, the researchers wrote in their study, as current evidence suggests they were not present in France until at least 54,000 years ago, whereas Neandertals appeared there around 330,000 years ago. "We conclude that the LRC engravings are unambiguous examples of Neanderthal abstract design," they wrote.
April Nowell, a paleolithic archaeologist at the University of Victoria in Canada who was not involved in this study, told Live Science in an email that "this study is important because it extends the antiquity of digital [finger] tracings and, for the first time, associates them with a hominin species other than Homo sapiens."
But the significance of these engravings remains unclear. "Although the finger tracings at La Roche-Cotard are clearly intentional," the researchers wrote, "it is not possible for us to establish if they represent symbolic thinking."
Nowell agreed that "these tracings do not have to be symbolic any more than when someone traces their fingers in the sand on a beach." The engravings are, however, important new information about the behavior of our Neanderthal relatives, whose culture was more complex and diverse than previously realized.
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Kristina Killgrove is an archaeologist with specialties in ancient human skeletons and science communication. Her academic research has appeared in numerous scientific journals, while her news stories and essays have been published in venues such as Forbes, Mental Floss and Smithsonian. Kristina earned a doctorate in anthropology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and also holds bachelor's and master's degrees in classical archaeology.
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The Donmar’s last production, Watch on the Rhine, showed a wartime family grappling with an ethical dilemma in the midst of a bleak historical moment and making a heroic collective stand. This drama about a Welsh family and their principled act of courage in the second world war might be seen as its companion-piece.
Set in Cardiff’s multicultural Butetown, otherwise known as Tiger Bay, Diana Nneka Atuona’s play dramatises a racial segregation enforced by white American servicemen, when Black American GIs were prevented from integrating with the white community.
Its plot revolves around a fugitive GI, Nate (Samuel Adewunmi), who enters a family home. Gwyneth (Sarah Parish), its matriarch, runs a “mixed” boarding-house and has two mixed-race daughters. She is a far more textured character than Queenie, from Small Island. The drama sets up its dilemma as her household decides whether to help Nate or turn him in. Caribbean cargo-man and boarder Norman (Zephryn Taitte) speaks ironically about America’s part in the war against fascism when the nation perpetuates its own racial fascism. Though this is a valid point there is arguably a false dichotomy set up between American racism and its apparently lesser equivalent in Wales.
Nevertheless, this is a fascinating and eminently entertaining production, directed by Tinuke Craig, which unpicks its issues with a lovely lightness of touch. Peter McKintosh’s set design shows the boarding house in and out, and there is song, dance and humour that is all genuinely charming despite the horror in this story.
The script is deft, never preaching, but some elements are one step removed from a final polish: the winning humour jars in the later, darker scenes when the stakes are raised; a love story feels tacked on and a surge of melodrama comes with clunky plot-turns toward the end.
Many of these cracks are smoothed over by the luminous cast. There is an easy rapport between characters and every actor brings charisma and joy to their role. Adewunmi captures our sympathies as a cornered man who never loses his goodness. Taitte’s Norman is winning, so is Rita Bernard-Shaw as Gwyneth’s daughter, Connie, who has a beautiful singing voice, while Ifan Huw Dafydd oozes natural ebullience as her friend Patsy. Rosie Ekenna, as the youngest daughter, Georgie, is splendid in her kookiness while Parish plays the matriarch with a fabulous mix of steel and softness. Together they breathe humanity into every line, and make this play sing.
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A portrait Pablo Picasso made of his eldest daughter, Maya, in the late 1930s has sold for more than £18 million at auction.
The painting, Fillette au bateau, which translates to "girl on the boat," was originally estimated to sell for between £12m to £18m, but was bought for almost £18.1m at Sotheby's auction house in London on Wednesday.
Maya was born on 5 September 1935 in secrecy to Picasso's mistress and greatest love Marie-Thérèse Walter, while the artist was still married to his first wife, former ballerina Olga Khokhlova, according to the auction house.
Her birth was a source of happiness for the artist, who was going through what he later called "the worst period of his life", helping Picasso return to painting after an almost year-long hiatus.
Painted on 4 February 1938, the playful and bold portrait is one of 14 that Picasso made of Maya, his second child, between January 1938 and November 1939.
"In his portraits of Maya, Picasso reached for his most joyful, brightly coloured palette, and employed a combination of styles to elevate his daughter to the same level as his paintings of her mother, Marie-Thérèse - the artist's greatest love, with whom we associate his most romantic pictures," Samuel Valette, senior specialist at the Impressionist & Modern Art department at Sotheby's London, said before the auction.
Maya was two years old at the time the artwork was created. Her father depicted her fidgety nature and, as was common in his work at the time, recreated her face with cubic distortions.
Picasso often expressed the freedom and spirit of childhood in his paintings. As a young girl, Maya spent a lot of time in her father's art studio, the auction house said.
It added that the renowned Spanish artist would sing songs to his daughter, dance with her, use matchboxes to make paintings for doll's houses, use paper to make puppet theatres, and create small fabric figures with heads made of chickpeas.
After Picasso's death in 1973, the portrait of his daughter was owned by Italian fashion designer Gianni Versace, and was later sold by Sotheby's in 1999.
Almost a quarter of a century later, it has reappeared on the market following Maya's death in December at the age of 87.
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187 years ago today, Ralph Waldo Emerson published his famous essay Nature, in which he attempts to lay out the case for transcendentalism. His chief argument is that god and spirituality are suffused in nature, but that in everyday life, man lacks the ability to perceive it as a whole because we are distracted by concerns of survival. Henry David Thoreau had read Nature as a senior at Harvard College and took it to heart. It eventually became an essential influence for Thoreau’s later writings, including his seminal Walden. In fact, Thoreau’s cabin existed on land that Emerson owned.
In the essay, Emerson explains that to experience the wholeness with nature for which we are naturally suited, we must be separate from the flaws and distractions imposed on us by society. Emerson believed that solitude is the single mechanism through which we can be fully engaged in the world of nature, writing “To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars.”
When a person experiences true solitude, in nature, it “take[s] him away”. Society, he says, destroys wholeness, whereas “Nature, in its ministry to man, is not only the material, but is also the process and the result. All the parts incessantly work into each other’s hands for the profit of man. The wind sows the seed; the sun evaporates the sea; the wind blows the vapor to the field; the ice, on the other side of the planet, condenses rain on this; the rain feeds the plant; the plant feeds the animal; and thus the endless circulations of the divine charity nourish man.”
Emerson used spirituality as a major theme in the essay, and referred to nature as the “Universal Being”; he believed that there was a spiritual sense of the natural world around him.
Emerson believed in reimagining the divine as something large and visible, which he referred to as nature; such an idea is known as transcendentalism, in which one perceives a new God and a new body, and becomes one with his or her surroundings. Emerson confidently exemplifies transcendentalism, stating, “From the earth, as a shore, I look out into that silent sea. I seem to partake its rapid transformations: the active enchantment reaches my dust, and I dilate and conspire with the morning wind”, postulating that humans and wind are one. (1836)
MORE Good News on this Day:
- 66 years ago, Elvis Presley appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show for the first time (1956)
- The first U.S. civil rights bill was signed into law by US President Dwight Eisenhower (1957)
- British Ambassador Geoffrey Jackson was freed 8 months after capture by guerrillas in Uruguay (1971)
- In Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave National Park, a Cave Research Foundation exploration and mapping team discovered a link between the Mammoth and Flint Ridge cave systems, making it the longest-known cave passageway in the world (1972)
- Tajikistan gained Independence from USSR (1991)
- The Palestine Liberation Organization agreed to recognize Israel’s right to exist, and Israel returns mutual recognition for the PLO as the official representative of the Palestinian people (1993)
- The Irish Republican Army‘s political arm, Sinn Fein, formally renounced violence and took a seat at the table with British and Irish leaders to plan a negotiated settlement to end Northern Ireland’s civil unrest—seven 7 later, that’s exactly what happened (1997)
231 years ago, America’s capital was named after her beloved first president, the loyal servant and general who led a motley army against the British to gain independence: George Washington. Washington, D.C. became famous worldwide for its awe-invoking monuments laid out around a grand mall, with free museums lining every side of the plaza.
Buildings have been prohibited from rising any higher than those monuments, which preserves the historical feeling and photographic vistas in all direction inside the federal city.
Also 15 years earlier on the same day, the Continental Congress officially named its new nation the United States. (1791)
Harland David Sanders began selling fried chicken from his roadside restaurant in North Corbin, Kentucky, during the Great Depression. Commissioned as a Kentucky Colonel by the governor, he had a “Secret Recipe” for frying chicken in a pressure fryer, which cut cooking times. He recognized the potential of the restaurant franchising concept, and, with a product that evoked the imagery of Southern hospitality, the first KFC franchise opened in Utah in 1952. At age 65, Sanders had little money so decided to search for new franchisees, often sleeping in the back of his car as he traveled the country. Sanders later used his stock holdings to create the Colonel Harland Sanders Trust and Charitable Organization, which used the proceeds to aid charities and fund scholarships.
22 years ago today, Band of Brothers premiered and demonstrated the power of the miniseries to tell a story better than a motion picture. Produced by Spielberg with Tom Hanks as his advisor, it premiered on HBO and went on to win the Emmy and Golden Globe for best miniseries. The story was based on the 1992 non-fiction book of the same name written by Steven E. Ambrose.
The series dramatizes the history of “Easy” Company, 2nd Battalion, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, of the 101st Airborne Division, from jump training in the United States through its participation in major actions in Europe, up until Japan’s capitulation and the end of World War II. The events are based on Ambrose’s research and recorded interviews with Easy Company veterans.
Historical accuracy was, since the book was based on a collection of memoires and interviews with actual soldiers, paramount to be perceived success of the miniseries. Hanks, himself a lover of all things history, said at the time “we’ve made history fit onto our screens.”
“We had to condense down a vast number of characters, fold other people’s experiences into 10 or 15 people, have people saying and doing things others said or did. We had people take off their helmets to identify them, when they would never have done so in combat. But I still think it is three or four times more accurate than most films like this.”
As a final accuracy check, as many veterans from “Easy Company” as cared to do so were given a final screening of the series to address any grievous liberties. (2001)
Happy 63rd Birthday to actor and film producer Hugh Grant. The befuddled rom-com movie charmer first achieved international success in 1994 for his appearance in Four Weddings and a Funeral, for which he won a Golden Globe and BAFTA for Best Actor.
Other notable Grant films to check out: Notting Hill, Mickey Blue Eyes, Bridget Jones’s Diary, About a Boy, and period pieces such as The Remains of the Day and Sense and Sensibility. Most recently, he won BAFTA and Golden Globe nominations for Florence Foster Jenkins in 2016 and A Very English Scandal in 2018.
He is married to a “great wife”, Anna Eberstein, and he has thought of running for office, but, so far, chooses to campaign for other candidates. WATCH a rundown of his ‘Top 10’ films… (1960)
82 years ago today, the soulful singer Otis Redding was born. At 15, he quit school to work in music and support his parents in Macon, Georgia. Three days before his tragic death in a plane crash at age 26, he recorded the iconic song, (Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay,’ which shot to #1 on the charts. The year prior, he released ‘Try a Little Tenderness,’ the song that epitomizes his signature sound.
He also wrote ‘Respect,’ and had a major influence on Aretha Franklin. Artists from many genres have named Redding as a musical influence, like the Rolling Stones. George Harrison called “Respect” an inspiration for “Drive My Car”, and others have covered or mixed his songs, notably Kanye West and Jay-Z in their Grammy-winning “Otis”.
His bandmate and co-writer on Dock of the Bay, Steve Cropper, said, “I don’t think anybody I’ve ever worked with had the impact that Otis Redding did. He was the only artist on the label that everybody–all the musicians, all the secretaries, all the employees–looked forward to seeing at the studio. Otis was your best friend when he was with you and he made you feel wanted, needed and all that.” (1941)
184 years ago today, the superstar British scientist Sir John Herschel, who first used the word ‘photography’, took the first photograph on a glass plate. The ‘negative’ photograph (a term he also coined) used a layer of silver chloride to react with light—and it still survives today. The image, now faded and kept in The Science Museum in London, shows the structure used to support a 40-ft telescope owned by his astronomer father in Slough, England.
Herschel’s glass-plate method was ideal for photographing the skies and it was used well into the 1990s. The astronomer, mathematician, chemist, inventor, musician, and artist, also named seven moons of Saturn and four Uranus moons. During his work with color and light waves a few years later, Herschel invented the ‘Cyanotype’ printing method, isolating ferric salts through a photochemical process that produces the cyan—Prussian blue—color for use in printing images, thus inventing blueprints. WATCH a video about Herschel’s influence on Darwin—and mentorship of a great female photographer… (1839)
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Art and Culture
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When Tracey Emin’s cat Docket went missing in 2002, the “Lost Cat” posters she pasted around her east London neighbourhood were pilfered and valued at £500. Her gallery, White Cube, argued that they didn’t count as works, though some art historians said otherwise. Whomever you believe, they still occasionally turn up on eBay.It is Emin’s self-portrait with Docket that I love the most, however. (That and her handmade cat photo book, Because I Love Him, a dream art purchase should I ever make it rich.) In the photograph, Docket faces the camera with that deadpan, slightly morose expression that is particular to cats, his impressive whiskers shooting out beyond the artist’s fingers, which frame his face as she nuzzles him from above. It’s a strikingly maternal image, and indeed Emin has in the past referred to the cat, who has sadly now left this earthly plane, as her “baby”. It comes in a long line of artistic depictions of women or girls with cats.Cats are almost as old a subject for visual art as art is itself – there are felines painted in the Lascaux cave. In antiquity, they graced ancient Egyptian tombs and the mosaics of Pompeii. The old, old association between cats and fertility, and their status as mother-goddesses from the ancient Egyptian Bastet to the Greek Hecate, means that women and cats have been seen as interlinked for millennia. So it’s no surprise that they have been so often paired together as a subject by everyone from Morisot to Picasso, Matisse to Kirchner, Kahlo to Freud. They pop up in annunciations by Rubens, Barocci and Lotto, representing femininity, domesticity and sometimes the devil – or what the Jungian psychologist Marie-Louise von Franz calls the “feminine shadow”, the dark side to the Virgin Mary, the mother of God.It’s no surprise that cats appear so frequently in paintings: artists tend to love them, maybe because they are so defiant and independent. Plus, it is easier to paint while caring for a cat than a dog: they do not require walking, though they can still get in the way, as a gorgeous photograph of the painter Lois Mailou Jones standing at an easel with a kitten on her shoulder shows. Leonor Fini, meanwhile, kept two dozen cats, so it’s no surprise that their fur sometimes ended up melded with the paint on her canvases.Demanding companion … Woman With Cat by Pierre Bonnard. Photograph: Heritage Images/Fine Art Images/Getty ImagesThere are some fabulous photographs of Fini with her pets. In a 1961 portrait by Martine Franck, her wild dark hair is an eccentric counterpoint to the white cat’s refined appearance, while in another image she is shown wearing an evening gown as she kneels to feed six cats in her kitchen. Dora Maar’s image is perhaps the most deliberately erotic. Fini wears a sort of low-cut corset, and a long-haired black cat is held between her open legs in a visual pun that is not lost on the viewer.As anyone who has owned one knows, cats are promiscuous and unfaithful, roaming the streets at night in ways that women historically could not, and in Japanese art cats and courtesans sometimes come hand in hand. One netsuke even shows two cats embodying the figures of sex worker and client. Maar, meanwhile, was a cat woman herself, and when Picasso painted his lover with a black cat on her shoulder, it could be read as a symbol of her sexual, passionate self. Their relationship was tempestuous, and Maar’s clawlike hands, to me at least, seem to allude to those of a cat.I used these images as a sort of visual mood board while I wrote my memoir, The Year of the Cat, which is about how adopting a cat made me think differently about motherhood, but also has a strong art-historical line running through it on the theme of female artists and their cats. One of the first paintings I saw of a woman with a cat was at school, by the artist Gwen John. In Girl with a Cat (1918-22), the subject sits with a black cat nestled in her arms. The young woman gazes off into the distance, her expression almost desperately sad. The cat, meanwhile, gazes directly at the viewer with yellow eyes. John loved her cat, Tiger, and when he went missing, she slept outside in the hope of tempting him home; like Emin’s Docket almost a century later, he did eventually return. The love that John felt for her cat, when she was so unhappy in love of the more human variety, has moved me ever since.Two of Picasso’s earlier pictures of women and cats have a similar emotional effect. In his 1900 Woman with Cat, the subject bends forward in her bed towards the small cat that she holds in her arms, as though trying to take solace in it. Meanwhile, his 1901 Nude with Cats, sometimes called Madwoman with Cats, feels to me merciless in its depiction of its vulnerable subject. In my book, I look at the myth of the “crazy cat lady”, which has its origins in the fear of witchcraft, and how it has been used to stigmatise single and childless women. This image, painted in an asylum, felt too uncomfortable to include, but I held it in my mind as I wrote.Fanatic … Leonor Fini and her persian, in front of her portrait of dancer Raymond Larrain. Photograph: Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone/Getty ImagesFar more cheering are Suzanne Valadon’s cat paintings. Another cat lover – she used to feed them caviar – Valadon painted her cat Raminou several times, as well as other cats. Though she treats them with the respect due to a proper subject for a painting, there’s a playfulness in the way she conveys their stony expressions. She succeeds in capturing the daft haughtiness that is essentially the essence of cat. Her pictures of women with cats are even better, 1919’s Jeune Fille au Chat being my favourite, perhaps because the girl in it looks so happy to be holding the animal, while the animal itself appears to be merely tolerating the interaction, reminding me of my own cat Mackerel’s standoffish nature.To see Valadon herself with her cat – in this case a white one – we must rely on Marcel Leprin’s painting of her, in which she wears a formidable expression. She may not have claws, but much like the animals she so loved, Valadon, a laundry maid’s daughter who astonished Degas with her talent when she showed him her drawings, was rebellious and not to be trifled with – a far cry from the demure dancer she played when modelling for Renoir.That male artists should use cats as a means of eroticising the objectified female nude will come as a surprise to no one. In Félix Vallotton’s La Paresse, a naked woman is sprawled on a bed, her hand extended to stroke the cat. In a Masaya Nakamura photograph, we see only the curve of her backside and her pointed feet as a black cat gazes in the direction of her genitals. I’d far rather Pierre Bonnard’s more humane depiction of an irritated-looking woman, sitting fully dressed at the table with a plate of food while the “demanding cat” of its title harasses her. Or even better, Lotte Laserstein’s 1928 Self-Portrait with a Cat, wherein her head-on gaze appears to challenge the viewer as the disgruntled-looking animal she holds in her lap seems ready to pounce if necessary. It’s as though they are both daring you to say something: call Laserstein a crazy cat lady at your peril.Using cats to eroticise the female nude … Laziness by Félix Vallotton, from 1896. Photograph: Heritage Images/Getty ImagesYou could say that cats and artists have something in common: both groups have historically maligned and refused to adhere to the rules that society attempts to impose upon them. Women artists have, of course, been especially marginalised, and how one might go about juggling a creative career with motherhood remains a perennial question, one of the many I pose in my book. Emin, who does not have children, has said she would have resented leaving her studio for them if she had any. It would be rude to suggest that a cat can be a kind of surrogate child, had Emin not made this explicit herself.Centuries after the witch-hunts, the love that women – particularly childless women – have for cats is mocked and stigmatised to this day. That is why I take such delight in the photographs of Brooke Hummer, who asked various cat women to pose in the style of historical paintings, their styles ranging from 19th-century colonial to surrealist. These funny, celebratory images subvert the shaming stereotype of the cat lady. My favourite is a pastiche of a medieval painting of the Madonna and child, but instead of a baby, the Virgin Mary holds a tabby cat. Laugh if you like, she appears to be saying, but cat love is real love. Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett’s The Year of the Cat is published by Headline on 19 January, price £18.99
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Art and Culture
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When Enrique Vera opens the door to his workshop, an array of gleaming gold and silver matadors’ jackets shine in the sun.
“It is little bit like a cave full of treasure,” he says.
Vera painstakingly fashions the brilliant trajes de luces (suits of lights) which are worn by bullfighters when they face half-ton bulls in the ring.
One of only seven sastres (bullfighting tailors) in the world, he used to be a matador. But he swapped the sword used to kill the bull for a needle and followed a family tradition to become a tailor.
The iconic status of the matador’s suit has meant it has passed from the bullring to mainstream popular culture.
Vera and his mother, Nati, also a seamstress, were called on to make matadors suits for films and the catwalk, working with Pink Panther star Peter Sellers, designer John Paul Gaultier and the late ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev.
From the moment a matador steps through the door into Vera’s office in Seville, southern Spain, it sets in motion an intricate process of measuring, sewing, ironing, and finally fitting the suits which can cost as much as $6,000 each.
Meticulous process
Vera’s team of 15 specialist seamstresses spend a-month-and-a-half making each suit, which is made to measure. Up to 300 drawings are made before a suit is finished.
The golden, blue or red jackets, trousers and capotes de paseo — the huge cape which the bullfighter carries when he emerges into the ring — are filled with rhinestones, beads and gold or silver thread.
One essential quality is all Vera’s suits must withstand bloodstains — from the bull or the matador.
“It is like drawing a work of art. You must capture the vision of the bullfighter for his suit, then make it a reality. It must be like a second skin,” Vera says in an office filled with photographs of famous bullfighters wearing his creations.
Ancient art dying?
But as attitudes toward bullfighting change in Spain, confecting these suits, whose design has remained the same for the past 150 years, is an art in decline.
Some Spaniards consider bullfighting to be an essential part of the culture, while others say it is a cruel spectacle.
In recent years, the number of bullfights has declined partly because of the pandemic, but also because Spaniards have a raft of different ways to amuse themselves and the animal rights movement is on the rise.
“The problem is that we have changed the concept of animals to humanize them. There is no one more environmentally conscious than breeders of fighting bulls,” Vera told VOA.
“The bulls spend three or four years living free. They are not being slaughtered for meat. But there are plenty of bullfights in Spain, Latin America, and France.”
He was not so sure, however, about his own job.
“There are less sastres because it takes a lot of time. The older ones are retiring and not being replaced,” he admitted. He hopes his 14-year-old son will follow him into the trade.
Polls show less support for bullfighting in recent years.
Some 46.7% of Spaniards were in favor of prohibiting bullfighting, while 18.6% backed the tradition and 34.7% had no opinion, according to a 2020 survey for Electomania, a polling company.
The number of bullfights fell from 1,553 in 2017 compared to 824 in 2021, according to government figures. Only 8% of the population attended bullfights in 2018-2019, compared to 45% who said they went to the theater or 70.3% who said they spent spare time reading.
The first bullfight in Spain was held in 711 A.D. in honor of King Alfonso VIII. Originally, the pastime was reserved for the nobility and took place on horseback. The present version of bullfighting started in Ronda at the start of the 19th century.
A bill to end bullfighting in France failed last year after a member of parliament withdrew the proposed legislation. Portugal allows fights where the bull does not die.
In Latin America, the tradition has been banned in some Mexican states, but is still legal in Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia.
Tradition breaking
Paco Ramos, who runs trajesdeluces.com, which sells second-hand suits of lights, fears a younger generation of tailors may not emerge to replace the likes of Vera.
“For younger people it takes too long to make each suit and is too much work. But for now, there are not many tailors and there is enough demand,” he told VOA.
However, he was confident there was no chance bullfighting would be banned any time soon.
In 2013, the then conservative government introduced a law which declared bullfighting part of the national heritage which should be protected throughout Spain, effectively preventing any attempts to ban the practice.
Animal rights groups are planning to challenge the legal protection of bullfighting by introducing a bill through a people’s petition.
Marta Esteban, president of Torture Is Not Culture, an animal rights collective, told VOA she believed that public opinion was behind banning bullfighting.
“There is no doubt that it is coming to an end, but governments are not willing to give it a coup de grace,” she said.
Aldara Arias de Saavedra, a tour guide who grew up within the shadow of La Maestranza bullring in Seville, has never been to a bullfight.
“I can understand why some people like it. My father did. But it is not for me. You have to kind of grow up with it to be into it. It is like football, I suppose,” she told VOA.
Walk around the narrow streets near the bullring and there is a mini-economy which depends on this pastime, from bars to restaurants to those selling souvenirs like fake suits of lights.
“I think down here in the south, not everyone will go to bulls, but it is so associated with the big ferias and smaller ones in villages that it is not going to be banned soon,” said Marcos Alvarez, a cinematographer.
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Art and Culture
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The next Lego set to celebrate humanity's fascination with the cosmos uses the toy bricks to capture the visual style that inspired exploration.
"Tales of the Space Age," Lego Ideas set no. 21340 (opens in new tab), was announced Wednesday (April 12), on the 62nd anniversary of the first human spaceflight and 42 years after the first space shuttle launch. The simple but engaging set of four postcard-size space artworks is scheduled to go on sale to Lego VIP members on May 5 and for all at Lego Stores and on the company's online shop on May 8 for $49.99 (£44.99 or €49.99, though Euro prices will vary by country).
"Our search for truth for the meaning of our existence takes us way beyond the limits of what's known," says the unseen narrator in a video accompanying Lego's announcement of the "Tales of the Space Age" (opens in new tab) set's upcoming release. "So much has been learnt, and yet life is still a nebulous marvel. Curiosity fuels our journeys out into the cosmos, beyond pulsating stars, blinking constellations from which we look back knowing now that like everything, we are made up of infinitely small parts, borrowed stardust, ephemeral slices of space-time, joined, connected into something bigger, something astonishing. We are all built from stars."
The four 5.5-inch-tall by 3.5-inch-wide (14 by 9-centimeters) vignettes, which are built from a total of 688 pieces, can be displayed either together or separately as self-standing units or wall hangings. They depict a meteor shower falling over a pair of satellite dishes; a planetary rover and lander under two moons, each in eclipse; a rocket launch backdropped by the stars that form the constellation Ursa Major (the Big Dipper); and the light-bending event horizon of a black hole.
That last display was an addition made by the Lego designers who adapted the proposal for a three-piece set submitted by Polish fan Jan Woźnica to the Lego Ideas website in 2021. After reaching the prerequisite 10,000 votes on the site, Woźnica's idea was reviewed and approved for production by Lego a year later.
"When The Lego Group released the Art theme, I realized it had a lot of potential," Woźnica said in a statement released by Lego. "Then came the 'Out of This World' contest on Lego Ideas (opens in new tab) and since I'm a sci-fi nerd I decided to participate. These two inspirations resulted in the brick-built picture format and the first of the 'tales.'"
Woźnica built two additional "postcards" after winning a runner-up spot in the 2021 "Out of This World" challenge, after which he submitted the trilogy to Lego Ideas (opens in new tab) and qualified for a review in less than three months.
"Jan's three-piece product idea intrigued our review board, and we're certain it caught the fascination of the community, too," Jacob McQuillan, a Lego Ideas community specialist, said at the time that the "Tales of the Space Age" set was announced for production. "He's managed to create stunning poster-style sci-fi themes filled with action and serenity, showing that you don't need a lot of bricks or loads of details to create awe-inspiring Lego models.
"Now we've got our minds wondering about outer space," said McQuillan.
Lego's designers also made some changes to Woźnica's original builds, adding a lander to the rover vignette, raising the altitude of the rocket's climb in the Big Dipper and, most notably, changing the trajectory of the comet (or meteor) from falling into the atmosphere to pointing away from the planet.
"Tales from the Space Age" is the sixth space-themed Lego Ideas set to go for sale after models of Japan's Hayabusa asteroid sample return probe (2012); NASA's Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity rover (2014); NASA Apollo Saturn V rocket (opens in new tab) (2017); "Women of NASA" minifigures set (opens in new tab) (2017); and the International Space Station (opens in new tab) (2020).
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Art and Culture
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Two culturally significant artefacts have been returned to the Mexican government after they were recovered by Australian authorities.
Key points:
- A 100-year-old painting and copper bowl, estimated to be 800 years old, were seized upon entry to Australia
- The Mexican Ambassador to Australia said Mexico, like Australia, had artefacts stolen from the countries due to colonialism
- According to UNESCO, the theft of indigenous artefacts is most common when a country is experiencing conflict
The Australian government today handed back a 100-year-old painting and a miniature copper bowl, estimated to be up to 800 years old.
The objects were bought by private collectors in Australia from a company in the United States.
But the items were seized by the Australian Border Force, the Australian Federal Police and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade when they arrived in Australia and questions were raised about their origins.
Mexican Ambassador to Australia Eduardo Peña Haller was given the artefacts at a ceremony at the Mexican Embassy in Canberra today, and said the "illicit trafficking of cultural arts" was something that could "destroy culture".
"These objects are not merely things.They are an important part of our culture and history," Ambassador Haller said.
"And, above all else, they tell particular stories about Mexico's peoples and our livelihoods.
"Protecting our heritage is like embracing the essence of our culture, feeling the beat of our traditions and listening to the whispers of our ancestors."
The painting, dated back to 1923, was crafted on tin by a Mexican worker who sought to capture the ordeal of being "trapped for 52 days" while relying on his faith for survival.
Meanwhile, the tiny bowl was created almost 800 years ago by indigenous Mixtecs in southern Mexico, where working with valuable metals was a revered skill.
Ambassador Haller said being able to preserve the pieces was "like a love letter to the past, a message of hope to the present, and a promise for the future".
He lamented similarities between Australia and Mexico's history, leading to the theft of many culturally significant artefacts as a result of both countries being colonised.
"In the case of Mexico, Spain conquered Mexico, and in the case of Australia, the English did the same — and I think that has contributed towards the fracturing of our indigenous cultures."
"Now, both societies are recognising that all those pieces of art are valuable for the young people of Mexico and Australia so that they know about their ancestors.
"I want to thank the Australian government, with whom we closely collaborated, for the safe return of these objects to our country where they can be protected for generations."
'Heritage is our legacy from the past, what we live with today, and what we pass on to future generations'
Arts Minister Tony Burke acknowledged the links between the experiences of indigenous Mexicans and Australians, and the commonplace theft of art that had left First Nations people bereaved.
"We are both from nations where many objects have been stolen and are still housed around the world," Mr Burke said.
"Sometimes, in places that are working cooperatively towards repatriations and sometimes in places with people who obstinately believe they have a right to continue the theft.
"What we're saying today goes beyond our friendship with Mexico, what we're saying today goes to the nature of how we should deal with objects that are stolen.
"We will never see every object that should be returned to countries around the world returned, but hopefully today, we help right a wrong."
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) has promoted international conventions to stop the illicit importing and exporting of cultural property for decades.
In a statement, the organisation said the theft of indigenous artefacts was most common when a country is experiencing conflict.
"Heritage is our legacy from the past, what we live with today, and what we pass on to future generations," UNESCO said.
"Our cultural and natural heritage are both irreplaceable sources of life and inspiration."
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Art and Culture
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Listening to Rozi Plain is like searching for shapes in the clouds. In her mirage-like lyrics and mix of gently warped folk and nomadic jazz, you can stumble on moments of sharp recognition. A former art student, Plain is a longtime member of Kate Stables’ luminous folk band This Is the Kit and a fixture of the Cleaner Records collective, which she founded with fellow folk artist Rachael Dadd. All the while, she has nurtured her own ambitions. Prize, her fifth record, is a document of her evolution over the past 15 years, and, with its sprawling supporting cast, a tribute to the collective spirit that has defined her career.The album cover for Rozi Plain: PrizePlain’s lyrics are simple, but their meaning remains just beyond a listener’s grasp – as if she is trying to articulate the depth of a dream. On Prove Your Good, subtle word shifts tempt a thousand meanings: “Prove you did, prove you do / Proving it to who?” Her thicket of riddles would almost be frustrating were it not for the clarity brought by her vibrant music, aided by her many collaborators, such as Stables, jazz musician Alabaster DePlume, and harpist Serafina Steer.On Help, familiar instruments behave in curious ways: a saxophone mimics strings; guitars masquerade as accordions. Steel drums ripple sweetly on Complicated as synths hum like a heart tremor. The effect is as communicative as any words, elevating the emotion in her uncomfortable inquiries such as “What is it if it’s not? / Is it love when it stops?” on Conversation. Moving far beyond the cotton-soft folk of her previous records, with Prize, Plain chooses to lean into her eccentricities – and the risk pays off.
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Art and Culture
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The bang of an auctioneer's hammer at Sotheby's London on Tuesday brought a 10-minute bidding battle to an end and set a new record for the most expensive work of art ever sold in Europe. Austrian painter Gustav Klimt's "Lady with a Fan" sold for 74 million pounds, plus a buyer's premium, bringing the total to 85.3 million pounds, or about $108.77 million.
The 1918 painting was appearing on the market for the first time in 30 years, and the crowded sale room at The Modern and Contemporary Evening Auction was "abuzz with anticipation," Sotheby's said in a news release.
"Found on the easel in his studio at the time of his death, the captivating depiction of a nude figure reveals Klimt exploring a new approach to colour and form, resulting in a masterpiece by an artist at the height of his powers," Sotheby's said.
After a bidding battle between four clients, some in the room and some calling in, the painting was sold at a price that beat the previous European auction record of $104.3 million in 2010, which was for Alberto Giacometti's sculpture "Walking Man I," the Associated Press reported.
The sale was the second-highest price for any portrait ever sold at an auction in the world.auctioned off in 2017 for $450 million, remains the most expensive painting ever sold — though about the masterpiece's true origins.
"Dame mit Fächer (Lady with a Fan) is an absolute testament to Klimt's artistic genius — a work that captured the imagination of everyone who saw it. It was an honour to see that high level of enthusiasm play out here in London tonight, and to see the painting so hotly pursued," Helena Newman, auctioneer and chairman of Sotheby's Europe, said in a statement.
"Of course, the greatest honour to bring down the hammer on a work that has, quite fittingly, made auction history," Newman said.
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Art and Culture
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Below the rolling heath on the Isle of Arran’s south-west coast, overlooked by harriers and the occasional peregrine, a monument to ancient ceremony is being uncovered.
In August, archaeologists working alongside local volunteers began their excavation at Drumadoon of what is almost certainly the only complete Neolithic cursus monument found in Britain.
These vast rectangular enclosures, which date back to between 4000 and 3000BC, are believed to have been built as spaces for procession, ceremony and gathering, deliberately separate from quotidian settlements or farming land.
Ranging in size from 200 metres to 10km long and bordered by ditches and banks, or sometimes large oak posts, they represent the biggest and earliest monumental constructions known to the isles.
The Arran cursus, approximately 1.1km in length, sits close to the stone circles of Machrie Moor, which was clearly a significant ceremonial site for ancient peoples, though it pre-dates their erection.
“It’s strategically located to take people from the coast up to the interior of the island and to showcase Macrae Moor,” says Kenny Brophy, a senior lecturer in archaeology at Glasgow University and a cursus specialist.
The people who built the cursus, who would have been some of the first farmers in Scotland, may have used it to guide visitors but they were mainly created for spectacle.
They also involved “a crazy amount of labour”. Having only excavated about 1% of the cursus bank using modern implements, Brophy says there is a remarkable story to be told of Neolithic people creating the site using sticks and bone tools.
He believes the cursus was either constructed over decades by a small local group, or by visiting teams of workers as part of a pilgrimage. There must have been a “phenomenal social glue” binding people to realise what was likely the vision of a religious or political leader of the time, he said.
The remains of the cursus, unusually well-preserved thanks to its upland location away from intensive farming areas and the presence of peat bog, were first discovered by a Lidar survey – a laser-light method used to examine the surface of the Earth – conducted by Historic Environment Scotland five years ago.
Nicki Whitehouse, an archaeological scientist at Glasgow University, says the initial discoveries revealed a highly unusual combination of ceremonial alongside farming landscape. “It’s also part of a continuum that likely linked to the ritual site at Machrie Moor, so the whole Drumadoon landscape probably forms part of something much more extensive.”
The dig was assisted by a dedicated team of Glasgow University archaeology students and archaeologists and academics from across the UK, but was also an opportunity for the local community to get involved, says Gavin MacGregor, the director of Archaeology Scotland.
“Having that number of people looking and thinking about the monument for the first time in potentially several thousand years created a real energy,” he said.
“There’s a phrase about ‘the theatre of excavation’ and bringing people together to congregate on the hillside, working through questions together, in a strange way has an affinity to those people making the sense of the world when the cursus was first constructed.”
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Art and Culture
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Ten years ago, artist Grahame Hurd-Wood set himself a huge challenge.
He resolved to paint an individual portrait of every resident of the city he lives in.
Fortunately for him that city is St Davids in Pembrokeshire, the smallest in the UK, with about 1,800 residents.
But it is still an enormous task.
A decade on from his decision, Grahame is 1,000 portraits in, and the aptly titled City of Portraits project, rather than getting smaller, is increasing as the scope of his ambition broadens.
He had already assembled about 100 portraits of people he knew a decade ago, when a personal tragedy intervened to give life to the epic journey he is undertaking.
A good friend and fellow artist who had cancer asked him to paint her, not knowing that the portrait would end up being completed after her death.
Grahame explained: "I met this lovely girl called Debbie more than 10 years ago.
"When she realised she had cancer, she said 'oh you have to do a portrait'.
"She didn't think that was the end. So I did a whole series of drawings and things and the portrait unfortunately became a posthumous one.
"One of her legacies for me was actually to carry on with the portraits as something to really focus on.
"The whole story starts off with [her]. Although I'd been doing some portraits before, the actual project, the City of Portraits, came into fruition around about the time she died."
At the time Grahame thought the work would take him about five to 10 years.
But now he says the project, an homage to his adopted home town, will keep going.
Originally from Gosport in Hampshire and partly raised in Northern Ireland he moved to the diminutive city after finishing studying art at Camberwell School of Art and the Royal Academy in London.
He was "a little bit lost" at this point and although he had only been to St Davids once, he thought he would come down for one summer in the 1980s.
"So I did, and I sort of settled down here. I bought a house and that was the start of my venture in St Davids basically," he explained.
What makes it more remarkable is City of Portraits is a labour of love which is a side project to Grahame's main work.
He said: "I'm concentrating on other projects as well, which is based on painting landscapes around here, seascapes, and they are quite big so everything's quite time consuming.
"When I'm doing the little portraits, it's about the essence of the character.
"It's about the ephemeral contact with somebody, and each portrait has a little story, whether it be somebody talking about their life, or talking about something which is amusing, but it's a particular account of each character.
"They're quite intense, but beautifully intense."
His subjects arrive in different ways. Some is through word of mouth, sometimes are as simple as approaching people at the shops and asking if they would like to sit for a portrait.
"Invariably people say yes. I've only had one or two who've said no," he explained.
"It accumulates that way."
Having started with just a focus on St Davids, Grahame is now expanding his horizons.
"The whole project is evolving. I've actually brought in the peninsula around St Davids. It's very much part of the community.
"So I'm doing people who are involved in St Davids, who I know, people who say 'well I live in Trefin, I live in Porthgain, do I count?'"
Now that he has assembled about 1,000 portraits - "enough to show people I am dedicated" - he is in discussions with St Davids Cathedral about hosting a dual exhibition of the work there within in the next year.
"I've been talking to the cathedral having an idea about projecting them on to the tower of the cathedral," he said.
"There's been a lot of very positive response about that as well. I'll probably co-ordinate it with having a show of the portraits either in the cathedral - there's a place where they have exhibitions - or maybe having them in the city council which has a very big exhibition space."
His oldest subject, now 100, was in her 90s when painted, and although Grahame has mostly focused on adults, he also painted the city's under-11s rugby team as part of the project.
Not everyone talks about themselves while being painted, but one sitter, Klaus, has stayed with him across the years.
"There was this character who had been a refugee in the war, and he talked about his past, and talked about how he had to leave Germany. It was a very moving story, and it empowered me," he said.
"I think this particular portrait took me eight hours and he talked gently through the whole eight hours.
"He was probably 83 at the time, and to listen to stories like that it made me think of what other people have been through in the past. It made me feel humble. When I left I was very emotional."
Although Grahame had already lived in St Davids for a long time, undertaking the project has brought him closer to his adopted home.
"Each portrait has made me feel part of the community," he said.
"One thing this elderly lady said to me when she came to sit for me. She said, we're really proud of you bach (dear), and that really meant a lot to me."
There is one face still missing from the community, that of Grahame himself. He is hoping to get another artist to paint him as part of it.
He does not see any end to the project.
"I'm never going to retire. It's a passion that will hopefully never leave me."
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Art and Culture
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U2's inaugural performance at the opening of Las Vegas's Sphere included a generative AI video collage projected hundreds of feet into the air — showing hundreds of surreal renderings of Elvis Presley.
An anonymous reader shares this report from Time magazine: The video collage is the creation of the artist Marco Brambilla, the director of Demolition Man and Kanye West's "Power" music video, among many other art projects. Brambilla fed hours of footage from Presley's movies and performances into the AI model Stable Diffusion to create an easily searchable library to pull from, and then created surreal new images by prompting the AI model Midjourney with questions like: "What would Elvis look like if he were sculpted by the artist who made the Statue of Liberty...?"
While Brambilla's Elvises prance across the Sphere's screen — which is four times the size of IMAX — the band U2 will perform their song "Even Better Than The Real Thing," as part of their three-month residency at the Sphere celebrating their 1991 album Achtung Baby... Earlier this year, U2 commissioned several artists, including Brambilla and Jenny Holzer, to create visual works that would accompany their performances of specific songs. Given U2's love for the singer and the lavish setting of the Sphere, Brambilla thought a tribute to Elvis would be extremely fitting. He wanted to create a maximalist work that encapsulated both the ecstatic highs and grimy lows of not only Elvis, but the city of Las Vegas itself. "The piece is about excess, spectacle, the tipping point for the American Dream," Brambilla said in a phone interview.
Brambilla was only given three-and-a-half months to execute his vision, less than half the time that he normally spends on video collages. So he turned to AI tools for both efficiency and extravagance. "AI can exaggerate with no end; there's no limit to the density or production value," Brambilla says. And this seemed perfect for this project, because Elvis became a myth; a larger-than-life character..." Brambilla transplanted his MidJourney-created images into CG (computer graphics) software, where he could better manipulate them, and left some of the Stable Diffusion Elvis incarnations as they were. The result is a kaleidoscopic and overwhelming video collage filled with video clips both historical and AI-generated, that will soon stretch hundreds of feet above the audience at each of U2's concerts.
"I wanted to create the feeling that by the end of it," Brambilla says, "We're in a place that is so hyper-saturated and so dense with information that it's either exhilarating or terrifying, or both."
Brambilla created an exclusive video excerpting from the larger collage for TIME. The magazine reports that one of the exact prompts he entered was:
"Elvis Presley in attire inspired by the extravagance of ancient Egypt and fabled lost civilizations in a blissful state. Encircling him, a brigade of Las Vegas sorceresses, twisted and warped mid-chant, reflect the influence of Damien Hirst and Andrei Riabovitchev, creating an atmosphere of otherworldly realism, mirroring the decadence and illusion of consumption."
An anonymous reader shares this report from Time magazine: The video collage is the creation of the artist Marco Brambilla, the director of Demolition Man and Kanye West's "Power" music video, among many other art projects. Brambilla fed hours of footage from Presley's movies and performances into the AI model Stable Diffusion to create an easily searchable library to pull from, and then created surreal new images by prompting the AI model Midjourney with questions like: "What would Elvis look like if he were sculpted by the artist who made the Statue of Liberty...?"
While Brambilla's Elvises prance across the Sphere's screen — which is four times the size of IMAX — the band U2 will perform their song "Even Better Than The Real Thing," as part of their three-month residency at the Sphere celebrating their 1991 album Achtung Baby... Earlier this year, U2 commissioned several artists, including Brambilla and Jenny Holzer, to create visual works that would accompany their performances of specific songs. Given U2's love for the singer and the lavish setting of the Sphere, Brambilla thought a tribute to Elvis would be extremely fitting. He wanted to create a maximalist work that encapsulated both the ecstatic highs and grimy lows of not only Elvis, but the city of Las Vegas itself. "The piece is about excess, spectacle, the tipping point for the American Dream," Brambilla said in a phone interview.
Brambilla was only given three-and-a-half months to execute his vision, less than half the time that he normally spends on video collages. So he turned to AI tools for both efficiency and extravagance. "AI can exaggerate with no end; there's no limit to the density or production value," Brambilla says. And this seemed perfect for this project, because Elvis became a myth; a larger-than-life character..." Brambilla transplanted his MidJourney-created images into CG (computer graphics) software, where he could better manipulate them, and left some of the Stable Diffusion Elvis incarnations as they were. The result is a kaleidoscopic and overwhelming video collage filled with video clips both historical and AI-generated, that will soon stretch hundreds of feet above the audience at each of U2's concerts.
"I wanted to create the feeling that by the end of it," Brambilla says, "We're in a place that is so hyper-saturated and so dense with information that it's either exhilarating or terrifying, or both."
Brambilla created an exclusive video excerpting from the larger collage for TIME. The magazine reports that one of the exact prompts he entered was:
"Elvis Presley in attire inspired by the extravagance of ancient Egypt and fabled lost civilizations in a blissful state. Encircling him, a brigade of Las Vegas sorceresses, twisted and warped mid-chant, reflect the influence of Damien Hirst and Andrei Riabovitchev, creating an atmosphere of otherworldly realism, mirroring the decadence and illusion of consumption."
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Art and Culture
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