Gloomy Van Gogh self-portrait in Oslo gallery confirmed authentic
52 MINS AGO - Only known painting by Dutch master while he had psychosis is ‘unmistakably’ his workAfter decades Expand
52 MINS AGO - Only known painting by Dutch master while he had psychosis is ‘unmistakably’ his workAfter decades of doubt, a gloomy self-portrait has been authenticated as a genuine work by Vincent van Gogh and the only known work painted while he had psychosis.Self-Portrait (1889) has been in Norway’s national collection since 1910 but its authenticity has been openly questioned since 1970. On Monday the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam announced it was “unmistakably” a work by the artist. Continue reading... Collapse
Smashed cars and Chinese chewing: the five masterpieces of video art
21 HRS AGO - Half a century ago, an art form flickered into life as mavericks from Nam June Paik to Bill Viola Expand
21 HRS AGO - Half a century ago, an art form flickered into life as mavericks from Nam June Paik to Bill Viola took up technology to transform the way we see the worldI was a bright-eyed young curator with a passion for the unconventional when video art first took off. Lured by its galvanising pandemonium, I jumped into its wide-open terrain. It was the mid-60s and portable equipment had just started appearing in shops. Although the gear was rudimentary, activist mavericks ran with it, suddenly able to storm a medium that had until then been the exclusive domain of broadcast TV. I was working at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and, keeping my ear to the ground, would attend events in alternative spaces housed in low-rent, rundown buildings across the city. I would race up splintery staircases just as artists rushed down them with newly completed videotapes tucked under their arms. I watched works on TV monitors and navigated my way through mazes of cables and cobbled-together equipment to Collapse
Ruth Asawa: A Line Can Go Anywhere; Benode Behari Mukherjee: After Sight – review
1 DAY AGO - David Zwirner, LondonPosthumous celebrations of two undervalued but extraordinary 20th-century Expand
1 DAY AGO - David Zwirner, LondonPosthumous celebrations of two undervalued but extraordinary 20th-century artists give them both the recognition they deserveIt hardly seems possible that there could be a major 20th-century artist still ripe for rediscovery, but so it seems with the Japanese-American sculptor Ruth Asawa (1926-2013). Her work comes as a complete surprise, and not only because she has never been shown in this country before. Everything Asawa made was so original, and fashioned mainly out of wire – an art of pure visual joy.Born in rural California, Asawa’s first exposure to art teaching came when her family and other Japanese-Americans were detained in internment camps during the second world war. After hostilities ended, she studied art at the famously experimental and non-hierarchical Black Mountain College in North Carolina. She began with ink drawing, both figurative and abstract. But in 1947, a Mexican craftsman taught Asawa how to weave baskets out of wire, and this Collapse
National Archives Caught Doctoring Photo Critical of Trump
1 DAY AGO - The National Archives is an independent government agency that’s tasked with preserving and Expand
1 DAY AGO - The National Archives is an independent government agency that’s tasked with preserving and documenting government and historical records. An authority on authenticity, it was just caught doctoring photos containing messages critical of President Trump. The Washington Post reports that the Archives has admitted to making multiple alterations to a photo of the 2017 Women’s March […] Collapse
The best home makeovers – it's not all big windows and knocking through
1 DAY AGO - The Don’t Move, Improve! awards celebrate London’s most innovative architectural home renovations, Expand
1 DAY AGO - The Don’t Move, Improve! awards celebrate London’s most innovative architectural home renovations, from twisting walls to chequerboard floorsArchaeologists of the future, should they find themselves sifting through the rubble of early 21st-century London, will find a distinctive layer. It will contain taps and door handles of Nordic design and manufacture, long sections of structural steel and the remnants of sliding glass doors. There might be chairs designed by mid-20th-century Danes, if they haven’t rotted away: by Arne Jacobsen in the older part of the layer, by Hans Wegner in the later.From this evidence the archaeologist will know that they are looking at a period that started around the dawn of the Blair era and continues until the present. It’s a long enough time – almost a generation – but one in which a remarkably consistent style of home improvement, a sort of metropolitan vernacular, has grown up. It is well represented in the shortlist for the Don’t Move, Improve! award Collapse
Working with the master glassmakers of Italy – in pictures
2 DAYS AGO - The Veneto region of Italy is home to some of the greatest glassmakers on the planet. For the most Expand
2 DAYS AGO - The Veneto region of Italy is home to some of the greatest glassmakers on the planet. For the most part, they’re located on the small island of Murano, where names such as Salviati, Seguso and Barovier & Toso have established their reputations over centuries. But there’s a new team in town: Wonderglass, launched in 2013 by father-and-son team Christian and Maurizio Mussati, to create furniture and lighting that blends craft with innovation. Continue reading... Collapse
Off the wall: the enduring impact of the printed poster
2 DAYS AGO - The visual history of protest – and promotion – would be nothing without ink and paper A t New Expand
2 DAYS AGO - The visual history of protest – and promotion – would be nothing without ink and paper A t New York’s recently opened Poster House museum, three exhibits sum up the poster’s impact on life and culture. At one end is an ad by Raymond Savignac for French soap brand Monsavon. In the gallery next to it are hand-painted Ghanaian film posters – a rich tradition sadly falling victim to the lurid charms of digital printing. Downstairs is a display from the Women’s Marches in the US.Despite the rise of digital media, posters have retained their popularity. We like their immediacy, simplicity, the tactile quality of ink on paper. They have nostalgic appeal and a link to important cultural moments. They are satisfying to make, and nice to put on a wall. Continue reading... Collapse
Multiple Users Reporting Major EVF Issue with the Brand New Fuji X-Pro3
2 DAYS AGO - Users of Fujifilm’s brand new and much-anticipated X-Pro3 rangefinder have started reporting Expand
2 DAYS AGO - Users of Fujifilm’s brand new and much-anticipated X-Pro3 rangefinder have started reporting a troubling issue with their viewfinders. A number of users have taken to both DPReview and the FujiX Forum to report that their cameras’ EVFs have “all of a sudden” started showing a wildly overexposed image and preview, making it impossible to use. […] Collapse
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Fine Art Society, Edinburgh: The Print Show
1 HR AGO - Until 1 Feb The Fine Art Society presents its annual exhibition of Scottish printmaking, Expand
1 HR AGO - Until 1 Feb The Fine Art Society presents its annual exhibition of Scottish printmaking, featuring three centuries of etchings, drypoint, woodcuts and lithography. Collapse
‘Part-science lab, part-playground’: how kids made museums take fun seriously
1 DAY AGO - From London to California, architects are helping museums provide interactive learning experiences Expand
1 DAY AGO - From London to California, architects are helping museums provide interactive learning experiences that can’t be found on screenLast year, the Hoxton-based architecture practice AOC set up the Open Studio at the V&A Museum of Childhood in nearby Bethnal Green, east London. The 147-year-old institution was set to be renovated and initial consultation of local schoolchildren had found that they wanted the space turned into the “most joyful museum in the world”. AOC set up the Open Studio to find out how this could be done. It was a test-lab of forums and workshops for children and families, a space where visitors were encouraged to hold objects from the V&A’s collection and answer questions such as: “What is a museum?”Geoff Shearcroft, who is co-founding director of AOC and led the Open Studio, said consensus among children was that a museum is “a place for collecting and looking at objects”. But they also thought the top attractions at the Museum of Childhood were “playing on Collapse
Your pictures: share your photos on the theme of ‘dry’
1 DAY AGO - Wherever you are in the world, this week we’d like to see your pictures on the theme ‘dry’The next Expand
1 DAY AGO - Wherever you are in the world, this week we’d like to see your pictures on the theme ‘dry’The next theme for our weekly photography assignment, published in print in the Observer New Review is ‘dry’.Share your photos of what dry means to you – and tell us about your image in the description box. Continue reading... Collapse
What young women think in 2020
1 DAY AGO - Children’s charity Plan International UK and photographer Joyce Nicholls travelled across the UK Expand
1 DAY AGO - Children’s charity Plan International UK and photographer Joyce Nicholls travelled across the UK talking to young women about the issues important to them in 2020: public safety, body image, social media and feminism. Their research found that girls are fed up and frustrated with the lack of real progress on gender equality. Continue reading... Collapse
Eye candy: Jarvis Cocker on the joy of vintage sweet wrappers
1 DAY AGO - The vivid packaging of yesteryear hooked children with images of space travel, pop stars and Expand
1 DAY AGO - The vivid packaging of yesteryear hooked children with images of space travel, pop stars and smoking, as seen in a new book showcasing the bounty of avid collector John TownsendBefore we get on to aspects of design, let’s just take a little time to think about what these wrappers actually contained. A generation of children raised on bubble gum, fizzy drinks and sweet cigarettes – in the days before sugar tax, when E numbers were a signifier of quality and sophistication. It’s a wonder any of us who lived through this era have any teeth left at all.All these products were aimed at kids – but they gave a peculiar foretaste of the adult world we could expect to grow up into. It would seem the main thing we were expected to do as adults was smoke – the aforementioned sweet cigarettes, coconut tobacco (my personal favourite), liquorice pipes and grotesque chocolate cigars. Career options, meanwhile, were law enforcer, space explorer, racing driver, footballer or pop star. Failing that, Collapse
That Camera Bundle on Amazon May Be Gear That Was Returned
1 DAY AGO - Here’s a 16-minute report by CNBC that looks into how Amazon returns work. At the 14:39 Expand
1 DAY AGO - Here’s a 16-minute report by CNBC that looks into how Amazon returns work. At the 14:39 mark, there’s an interesting tidbit that you may not have known: when you see third-party camera bundles on Amazon with a body, lens, and/or accessories, many of those items may have been previously returned. In addition to reselling returned […] Collapse
Illuminating: the making of Bert Frank's luxury lighting – in pictures
2 DAYS AGO - Robbie Llewellyn and Adam Yeats met by chance at a London lighting shop, and soon found they Expand
2 DAYS AGO - Robbie Llewellyn and Adam Yeats met by chance at a London lighting shop, and soon found they shared a vision. Llewellyn’s design ideas and Yeats’s industrial knowledge have been beautifully combined to create Bert Frank.In Yeats’s presswork factory in Clerkenwell, London – a high-end metalwork enterprise that has been in existence for more than a century – old-school manufacturing techniques and cutting-edge technology are used to produce the brass and copper shapes layered with alabaster, marble, smoked glass and bone china, that have become Bert Frank’s hallmark design Continue reading... Collapse
20 photographs of the week
2 DAYS AGO - The erupting Taal volcano, bushfires in Australia, airstrikes in Syria and unrest in Lebanon – the Expand
2 DAYS AGO - The erupting Taal volcano, bushfires in Australia, airstrikes in Syria and unrest in Lebanon – the best photography in news, culture and sport from around the world this week Continue reading... Collapse
We cannot let this issue go': the artists taking a stand against child separation
2 DAYS AGO - An ambitious new project brings together over 100 artists who have used the accounts of detained Expand
2 DAYS AGO - An ambitious new project brings together over 100 artists who have used the accounts of detained migrant children to create work with an urgent purposeIn June last year, a group of volunteer lawyers, doctors, and mental health experts visited a US Customs and Border Patrol facility in Clint, Texas, which held migrant children separated from their families at the border. Their task was to record the accounts of the unaccompanied minors, some as young as toddlers, in government custody to assure the US was not in violation of the Flores agreement, a 1997 legal settlement that requires the federal government to provide minimum basic levels of care to detained migrants under 18. The conditions the volunteers witnessed there – children sleeping on concrete floors, toddlers in stained clothing denied access to showers, sleeping mats next to filthy open toilets, children chilled to the point of illness – so appalled them that they filed a lawsuit against the federal government, and told Collapse
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Tributes flow for James Mollison after National Gallery of Australia founding director dies at 88
11 HRS AGO - Former NGA chief who coordinated purchase of Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles in 1973 is hailed as Expand
11 HRS AGO - Former NGA chief who coordinated purchase of Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles in 1973 is hailed as ‘one of Australia’s greatest museum directors’The founding director of the National Gallery of Australia, James Mollison, has died aged 88.Mollison was most renowned as the person who coordinated the then-controversial purchase of Jackson Pollock’s abstract expressionist painting Blue Poles in 1973. The NGA paid $1.3m for the work – now worth about $350m – a sum that required approval from the prime minister at the time, Gough Whitlam. Continue reading... Collapse
Mi casa es su casa: the family who turned their Lisbon home into a hotel
1 DAY AGO - In a 1900s building in Lisbon, António Costa Lopes and Filipa Fortunato have created an intimate Expand
1 DAY AGO - In a 1900s building in Lisbon, António Costa Lopes and Filipa Fortunato have created an intimate hotel that feels like a family home – because it is oneOver the years, Casa Fortunato in Lisbon has been many things to many people. The first floor was originally a doctor’s home, while the ground floor was divided into several shops, their glass facades facing the wide, tree-lined street. After the second world war, it served as a meeting place for the city’s Japanese community; then, from the 1960s, Lisbon diners flocked to its marble entrance when it became a fashionable restaurant. By the 1990s a financial company had put paid to that, redecorating the rooms in global-business beige.Ten years ago, António Falcão Costa Lopes and his brother Alexandre moved the Lisbon outpost of their architecture firm here (their main office is in Angola) and the building’s fortunes took an upward turn. It is still owned by the family who had it built in the early 1900s, but under the Costa Lopes’ Collapse
London’s new Centre for Music? Don’t hold your breath…
1 DAY AGO - The delay to the London Symphony Orchestra’s planned new home is growing. And unrest in Iran could Expand
1 DAY AGO - The delay to the London Symphony Orchestra’s planned new home is growing. And unrest in Iran could trouble a V&A showWanted: a philanthropist to cough up about £145m towards London’s proposed Centre for Music. For that amount – about half the total cost of what will be the London Symphony Orchestra’s new home – you’ll get naming rights. The plan for the centre was put forward in 2015, just as Simon Rattle was announced as the LSO’s new music director. It is to be built on the site of the existing Museum of London, at the western edge of the City – 500 metres from the Barbican, the LSO’s longtime base.But only last Monday did the museum finally submit its planning application for its own new location, at the disused end of London’s Smithfield market. Assuming the City corporation gives the green light later this year to the stylish proposed design, the museum will begin the very complicated process of transforming the historic market buildings before it can move. Continue Collapse
The big picture: Alfred Eisenstaedt’s people-watching at the opera
1 DAY AGO - A moment’s inattention at a La Scala premiere made just the shot the pioneering photojournalist Expand
1 DAY AGO - A moment’s inattention at a La Scala premiere made just the shot the pioneering photojournalist neededAlfred Eisenstaedt, the prime mover of candid photojournalism, took this picture at the La Scala opera house in 1933. Eisenstaedt was experimenting with a new Leica camera that allowed him to do away with much of the clunky paraphernalia of his craft. That night, at the gala premiere of Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh, he was looking for a way to find some intimacy among the theatre’s grand architectural curves.Scanning the boxes in the upper tiers of the opera house he saw a young woman whose attention to the progress of the Russian epic on stage did not seem absolute. Better still, the box next to her was empty. Eisenstaedt was an unobtrusive man, only 5ft, and he inveigled his way into the empty box and got his shot. “Without the girl there would have been no picture,” he said. Continue reading... Collapse
The magic of mushrooms in arts – in pictures
1 DAY AGO - “I noticed so many artists working with fungi,” says curator Francesca Gavin, “I wanted to learn Expand
1 DAY AGO - “I noticed so many artists working with fungi,” says curator Francesca Gavin, “I wanted to learn why.” This has led to a new Somerset House show, Mushrooms: The Art, Design and Future of Fungi (30 January to 26 April), a 130-year cultural history featuring artists and designers including Cy Twombly, Carsten Höller, Beatrix Potter, Tom Dixon and Takashi Murakami. “I want people to leave the show inspired by fungi,” Gavin says, “and with a little more knowledge of their importance to the planet’s survival.” Continue reading... Collapse
How Linder went from Orgasm Addict to Chatsworth House
1 DAY AGO - The art maverick first made her name in the punk era with collages fusing fashion and pornography, Expand
1 DAY AGO - The art maverick first made her name in the punk era with collages fusing fashion and pornography, and a major retrospective proves her work still provokesIt’s not easy to celebrate female sexuality and vaginas on public transport, but Linder, the British artist known for her uncompromising photomontages, managed it at Southwark Underground, a station that sees 16.7 million people pass through its barriers each year. The 85m-long billboard she installed there last November – a luscious and cinematic sequence of roses, lips, female faces, food and Roman votaries that emerged from research into local figures and places and the archive of London Transport – is called The Bower of Bliss. And that, as it happens, is a quaint old phrase for vagina. “It suddenly came back to me when I was filming at Chatsworth last year,” she says of the term she had first discovered years before in an issue of Oz magazine edited by Germaine Greer. The work is a reminder that women don’t just need safe Collapse
Pedal power: behind the scenes at Bristol's Temple Cycles – in pictures
2 DAYS AGO - Temple Cycles is an independent firm inspired by Britain’s long tradition of bicycle manufacture, Expand
2 DAYS AGO - Temple Cycles is an independent firm inspired by Britain’s long tradition of bicycle manufacture, which has blossomed from a one-man startup into a thriving business in the space of six years.Mears’ mission is to create sustainable products that will last a lifetime. He has opened a shop on Brick Lane in Shoreditch; and there is a thriving online business, especially in Europe. But the heart of the company remains in Bristol, in the workspace where his small team continue in their quest to create high-quality bicycles, each made to order – and built to last. Continue reading... Collapse
Wedding Photographer Sues Venue for $577K After She Fell and Broke Her Knee
2 DAYS AGO - A wedding photographer in Australia is suing a wedding venue and styling company for over $500,000 Expand
2 DAYS AGO - A wedding photographer in Australia is suing a wedding venue and styling company for over $500,000 after she slipped on a piece of fabric and shattered her knee—an incident she says could have been avoided and has cost her hundreds of thousands in lost work. In 2017, photographer and cinematographer Bernadette Draffin was shooting a […] Collapse
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