February 12th, 2010 Lizzy Davies
Ko Siu Lan's banners satirising Sarkozy slogan deemed 'too explosive' for public exhibition
A British curator has accused France's most prestigious art school of "unambiguous censorship" after a work satirising one of Nicolas Sarkozy's campaign slogans was taken down hours after going on display.
Clare Carolin, a senior tutor at the Royal College of Art in London, who was working on the ill-fated project at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, condemned the decision to remove the work, which was deemed "too explosive".
An installation of four banners by the Chinese artist Ko Siu Lan on the exterior of the Beaux-Arts building in central Paris featured the words "earn", "less", "work" and "more" as a play on Sarkozy's phrase "Work more to earn more".
The now notorious slogan was used by the president when he ran for election in 2007. In a country reeling from recession, it has since become a symbol of what critics say are his rightwing agenda's failures.
Sources inside the Beaux-Arts indicated that the work had provoked complaints from the ministry of education because of its politically sensitive nature.
"This is unambiguous censorship," said Carolin, who had been working with Ko on the project as part of an exhibition co-organised by the RCA, the Beaux-Arts and Singapore's Lasalle College of the Arts.
Ko, a 32-year-old artist who spent two years in Paris before returning to Beijing where she now lives, said she was shocked and saddened by the ban. "I come from China and we know what to expect there but I would not have expected this kind of brutal censorship in France," she said.
There was no indication that criticism of the work had come from the Elysée palace. A statement from the Beaux-Arts said the work had been removed because its "explicitly political" message could violate "public service neutrality".
Posted in Art, Art and design, Censorship, China, Culture, France, guardian.co.uk, News, Nicolas Sarkozy, World news | Comments Off
February 12th, 2010 Lizzy Davies
Ko Siu Lan's banners satirising Sarkozy slogan deemed 'too explosive' for public exhibition
A British curator has accused France's most prestigious art school of "unambiguous censorship" after a work satirising one of Nicolas Sarkozy's campaign slogans was taken down hours after going on display.
Clare Carolin, a senior tutor at the Royal College of Art in London, who was working on the ill-fated project at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, condemned the decision to remove the work, which was deemed "too explosive".
An installation of four banners by the Chinese artist Ko Siu Lan on the exterior of the Beaux-Arts building in central Paris featured the words "earn", "less", "work" and "more" as a play on Sarkozy's phrase "Work more to earn more".
The now notorious slogan was used by the president when he ran for election in 2007. In a country reeling from recession, it has since become a symbol of what critics say are his rightwing agenda's failures.
Sources inside the Beaux-Arts indicated that the work had provoked complaints from the ministry of education because of its politically sensitive nature.
"This is unambiguous censorship," said Carolin, who had been working with Ko on the project as part of an exhibition co-organised by the RCA, the Beaux-Arts and Singapore's Lasalle College of the Arts.
Ko, a 32-year-old artist who spent two years in Paris before returning to Beijing where she now lives, said she was shocked and saddened by the ban. "I come from China and we know what to expect there but I would not have expected this kind of brutal censorship in France," she said.
There was no indication that criticism of the work had come from the Elysée palace. A statement from the Beaux-Arts said the work had been removed because its "explicitly political" message could violate "public service neutrality".
Posted in Art, Art and design, Censorship, China, Culture, guardian.co.uk, News, Nicolas Sarkozy, World news | Comments Off
February 5th, 2010 Art and design: Art | guardian.co.uk
Late author of Jurassic Park left £20m worth of paintings including works by Jasper Johns, Picasso and Lichtenstein
Artworks collected by the late Jurassic Park author Michael Crichton and valued at £20m are being showcased to the British public before going under the hammer. Among the items is one of Jasper Johns' Flag paintings, on public view in London for the first time in 20 years. The influential work is the highlight of a Christie's sale on 11 May.
The auction house is also unveiling Femme et Filettes by Pablo Picasso, Studio Painting (Combine) by Robert Rauschenberg, and Girl in Water by Roy Lichtenstein.
The public viewing will take place at Christie's, King Street, from tomorrow until Friday 12 February.
Crichton's novels have sold more than 150m copies worldwide, including The Andromeda Strain, Timeline, The Lost World and State of Fear. He wrote and directed classic films such as The First Great Train Robbery, starring Sir Sean Connery and Donald Sutherland.
Posted in Art, Books, Culture, guardian.co.uk, Michael Crichton, News, UK news | Comments Off
February 4th, 2010 Esther Addley
Beloved centre of London's alternative art scene for a decade is set for demolition, but six-metre Banksy mural to be preserved
Pete Doherty used to host its poetry nights, the band Hot Chip formed there, and artists from Banksy to Gavin Turk have adorned its walls and propped up its bar.
But now the Foundry, an east London gallery and pub that for more than a decade has served as a focal point for the area's alternative art scene, is set to be demolished after the site's owners drew up plans for an 18-storey hotel and retail complex.
Hackney council last night approved plans to pull down the building which houses the much-loved if rather ramshackle space in Shoreditch close to the edge of the City, despite protests from the gallery's founders that it performs a vital artistic function in the London borough.
In what its supporters regard as a particularly ironic twist, the council intends to salvage a wall painted with one of the biggest Banksy murals in Britain, even as the remainder of the building is demolished. The planned redevelopment, part of the Art'otel chain, will also incorporate gallery and retail space and a spa.
Foundry founders Tracey and Jonathan Moberly expect to be evicted by April, when the site will be cleared for the construction of a circular tower block by award-winning architects Squire and Partners. The Moberlys said they were "pretty resigned" to the fact that the art space would close, and had no objections to the conduct of the architects or the developers, Park Plaza hotels. "That's fair enough. This isn't our building, we've been renting, and they have been supportive in helping us look for another premises," said Tracey Moberly.
But the couple are angry with Hackney council, which they accused of refusing to designate the Foundry as an artistic space, which they say would require the council to seek to resettle it in other premises, preferring to refer to it in planning documents only as a pub.
The council has also specified its intention in the planning officer's report for the "safe removal and retention of 'Banksy' art work" – a six-metre high painting of a rat with a knife and fork over which the building's owners have constructed a protective wooden covering. A spokeswoman for Squire and Partners said: "The aim of the client and design team is to permanently locate the artworks on site, in one of the public galleries at ground floor – this is to be agreed with Hackney council."
A council spokesman said it would not comment on any aspect of the development ahead of the planning meeting.
The Moberlys, an artist and a former art publisher, opened the gallery in the former bank building in the late 1990s, intending it to be a place where any artist, regardless of experience, could exhibit free of charge. The couple opened a bar on the ground floor to cover their expenses, but have always considered its two basement galleries and performance spaces, linked by graffiti adorned walls, to be the building's main focal point. They have forged long-standing links with artists in Russia and Haiti and regularly display works by international artists.
The comedian and activist Mark Thomas, who has performed there, said the Foundry was "one of the most truly artistic spaces in London". He described its battered sofas and graffitied walls as "the fixtures and fittings of London's underground art scene" and the Moberlys as "the Saatchis of alternative art" in the capital.
"What's unique about it is their ethos that anyone can exhibit there, from Gavin Turk to a student who just happens to have an interest in maps, or something," Thomas said. "It's totally unique. And now in its place we'll have another hotel, another shopping mall, another huge cinema."
"If you go there you realise that it's not like any other space in London," said Turk. "Shoreditch has become so commercialised, like the new West End, and there isn't really anywhere that runs like the Foundry does."
Darren Coxson, a co-founder of a welfare charity for London bike couriers, said his colleagues loved the Foundry for other reasons – namely that it offered so much space on its pavement outside to park their bicycles.
"We are quite a transient, international community and the non-corporate, artistic atmosphere fits with the courier lifestyle. For me, these modern developments completely take away the character of an area," he said.
But Squire and Partners said there was also "significant local support for the scheme, which will help regenerate this part of Shoreditch".
The Moberlys are looking for alternative premises, but are eager to stay close to the area's transport links and diverse community. "We'd like to dig our heels in and stay in this area," said Tracey Moberly. "It's not going to be easy, but it has to be possible."
First, however, they would like to talk to Tate Modern about the possibility of relocating the gallery's subterranean graffitied walls, where early murals by Banksy and New York street artists Faile have been scribbled over by countless art lovers, poetry fans and drinkers.
Posted in Art, Art and design, Culture, London, News, Planning policy, The Guardian, UK news | Comments Off
February 3rd, 2010 Mark Brown
From cleaver-wielding suffragettes to a gun-toting delusional Edwardian, the National Portrait Gallery has played host to more than portraiture in its 150-year history
They are some of the forgotten stories from the last 150 years of the National Portrait Gallery: an Edwardian murder and suicide, a cleaver-wielding suffragette and a big rat problem.
The gallery announced today the posting online of an archive catalogue along with reports, letters and photographs which give a fascinating insight into some of the less well-known chapters in its history.
It comes after two years of cataloguing previously unseen material, a project that the gallery's archivist and records manager, Charlotte Brunskill, said they were about a third of the way through: "When I first started there was a 150-year backlog of stuff that hadn't been looked at."
One of the most dramatic stories in the gallery's history was a murder and suicide in the east wing in 1909. The newspapers were full of it, the Daily Express reporting on the well-dressed man, a 70-year-old from Hove "wearing a silk hat and a fur coat", who visited the gallery with his 58-year-old wife.
When they got to Room 27 the man pulled out a revolver and shot his wife before turning the gun on himself. Two young women on a day out fled in terror. It later turned out the man was "delusional with a persecution complex" believing he was being pursued by someone not identified.
An internal report on the incident includes the detail: "Three attendants remained after the gallery was closed to clear up in Room XXVII. Men were sent from HM Office of Works to remove by scraping such stains as remained in the floors after they had been washed over by the Gallery charwomen."
Many documents relate to an incident involving a suffragette in 1914. A woman who later gave her name as Anne Hunt, a "well-known militant" as it turned out, visited the gallery with a meat cleaver hidden in the folds of her dress. When she got to a Millais portrait of the Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle – "I think they particularly didn't like him," said Brunskill – she smashed through the glass and ripped his face, shouting that it was "a protest against the re-arrest of Mrs Pankhurst."
A report said an attendant had seen the woman a few days earlier and taken her to be American "from the closeness with which she then examined the pictures". When she turned up again on the Friday he thought he must be wrong as "no American would have paid the 6d entrance fee twice over". She looked suspicious enough for him to follow and grapple with her when she attacked the Millais, possibly preventing further damage.
The gallery had no paintings during the second world war – they went secretly to Mentmore, a mansion in Buckinghamshire – but did have rats. They were everywhere, it seems, and their extermination was formalised in rat reports saying where they were killed and trapped, along with "killers' remarks". A typical entry might have read: "1 Trapped in library" - "drowned by Pitkin." Or another in the library that was "speared by Pittock with poker after it had escaped, with great excitement."
The gallery also said it had received a grant to catalogue the papers of the first director, Sir George Scharf, covering years when the gallery had no permanent home. It was originally in a private house in Great George Street, then South Kensington and briefly in Bethnal Green before moving in to its present home in 1896.
Some of the most interesting material are Scharf's pocket books packed full of drawings, including some from his visit to Blenheim palace and one of an infant Winston Churchill.
Brunskill said a lot of Scharf's diaries covered his obsessions with the weather and his health but he was also a committed campaigner against the "national disgrace" of the gallery not having a permanent home. Sadly he died shortly before the gallery moved to its home in St Martin's Place, near Trafalgar Square.
The archive also touches on the 1960s and the groundbreaking Cecil Beaton exhibition of 1968 which the gallery clearly wanted as a happening, swinging event. It was more like a concept album and there was music and incense and it was all a bit too much for a Mr Steer from Barnes who wrote a letter of complaint.
The gallery's then new young director, Roy Strong, wrote back defending the show, but adding: "You may like to know that both the next two exhibitions will have no music or smell."
Posted in Art, Art and design, guardian.co.uk, Internet, Museums, National Portrait Gallery, News, Painting, Technology, UK news | Comments Off
January 29th, 2010 Kate Connolly
German museum once dubbed the most beautiful in the world set to welcome back artworks banished by the Nazis
On a visit in 1932, Paul J Sachs, the co-founder of New York's Museum of Modern Art, referred to it as "the most beautiful museum in the world", whose influence stretched way beyond German borders. But then one of Europe's first and finest public collections of contemporary art was declared "degenerate" by the Nazis, the Folkwang was brutally broken up and 1,400 of its works – including Chagalls, Picassos, Matisses, Kirchners and Gauguins – were strewn around the world.
This weekend the museum, in the western German city of Essen, will be returned to its former glory as a temple to modern art with the opening of the British architect David Chipperfield's much-vaunted new glass and concrete space.
The building, say critics, exudes calm. One described it as "resembling a meditation centre", another likened it to "snowflakes in a glass skirt", so weightless does it appear from inside and out compared with much of the Ruhr valley's heavy industrial architecture.
Summing up what he thought important about his design, Chipperfield – who beat other celebrated architects including Zaha Hadid and David Adaye to win the commission – said: "You want to lose yourself in it, as well as being able to orientate yourself."
The Folkwang building, a series of cubes whose windows are made out of recycled glass, reinforces London-born Chipperfield's status in Germany as a darling of modern architecture. It comes hot on the heels of his highly ambitious transformation of Berlin's war-torn Neues Museum.
The Folkwang redesign, which to the Germans' delight was completed on schedule and within budget, will come into its own in March with the opening of the exhibition The Most Beautiful Museum in the World. The show will bring together for the first time in more than 70 years the artworks that were stripped from the gallery's walls by the Nazis in 1936.
Among the returning treasures will be works by Oskar Kokoscha, Wassily Kandinsky and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. Marc Chagall's vibrant Purimfest, a dusky self-portrait by Giorgio di Chirico, Paul Gauguin's Contes Barbares, as well as Grazing Horses by Franz Marc, currently in the Harvard Art Museum, will hang once again in Essen.
The Folkwang collection – the name derives from Hall of Freyja, the Norse goddess of love and beauty – was first established in 1902 by the cultural philanthropist Karl-Ernst Osthaus, whose vision was to anchor modern art in the centre of urban life. The Folkwang model subsequently inspired many art museums around the world.
The €55m reconstruction was made possible by Berthold Beitz, a philanthropist and former steel baron whose name is inextricably linked with the fortunes of industrial Germany and who initiated his Krupp Foundation to finance the project.
The 96-year old, who greatly plays down his little-known role in saving 800 Jews from the Holocaust by convincing the Nazis they were vital to the war effort, said returning the museum to its former status was his gift to the citizens of Essen. "My only wish had been that I'd be alive to see it, and now my dream has been fulfilled," he said.
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January 26th, 2010 Maev Kennedy
The exact spot from which John Constable painted The Stour Valley and Dedham village almost 200 years ago, one of his best loved scenes, has been traced by a researcher poring over old maps and modern hedges.
It is not just the horse drawn carts and the straw hatted agricultural labourers who have vanished: changes in field boundaries and agricultural use, new lines of hedges and more recent tree planting mean that the serpentine bends of the river and the little village itself have almost disappeared from view.
The scene is a rural idyll with a typical Constable dash of earthy realism. The beloved landscape around Constable's birthplace at East Bergholt provided the artist with inspiration for the rest of his life.
This painting, now in a Boston museum, was commissioned as a gift to comfort the homesickness of an exile: Philadelphia Godfrey, born only a few hundred yards away, who was marrying and moving to north Wales. She would certainly have identified the occupation of the men, and remembered a characteristic country smell: they are breaking up an old dung hill which has been maturing nicely for months, before spreading it as fertiliser on the fields.
The land, like other iconic Constable landscapes on the Suffolk-Essex border, including Flatford Mill and Willy Lott's House – seen in the background of The Hay Wain, once voted Britain's favourite painting – is owned by the National Trust.
The spot where he made the drawings or oil sketches has been traced for most of the paintings, allowing for his trick of sometimes moving features to achieve the effect he wanted, but the high perspective bringing into view two churches, Langham and Dedham, and the Fen Bridge over the river Stour, remained a puzzle until National Trust land agent Martin Atkinson started to compare a copy of the painting with a patchwork of local maps in the Suffolk Records Office.
Atkinson soon realised that the scene changed dramatically even in the artist's lifetime, in the decades after he painted it in 1814-15. Field boundaries shown in an 1817 enclosures map of the area changed dramatically by the time a later map was made in 1830. Some fields had disappeared completely, and new hedges at completely different angles, many now with fully grown trees, plotted the new boundaries.
He was probably painting at the edge of a road which he would later follow down the hill to continue working at Flatford Mill.
Constable's paintings are now among the most beloved and valuable in 19th century British art, but in his lifetime he struggled for financial success and recognition, and could never have married his beloved Maria without money inherited from his corn merchant father. Millions now go on pilgrimage every year to the scenes he painted.
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January 26th, 2010 Charlotte Higgins
Turner prize-winning artist evolves from dealer in shock to purveyor of colourful perception, as new exhibition shows
In pictures: Chris Ofili retrospective
Think of Chris Ofili and you would be forgiven for imagining the following: elephant manure; the weeping profile of Doreen Lawrence; a black, dung-breasted Virgin Mary that enraged the mayor of New York.
But, when a major, mid-career retrospective opens on Wednesday at Tate Britain in London, visitors will see a new Chris Ofili.
His recent work may, frankly, come as a shock. There is no dung and no glitter. There are no richly-collaged, jangling surfaces. Instead, in the last room in the exhibition, unexpected swathes of colour lash down the canvases: imperial purple dissonant against citrus orange, saffron squealing against sea green.
With the exception of two paintings previously exhibited in New York, none of these eight works has ever been seen in public. They come fresh out of the artist's studio. The exhibition is the first major survey since 1998 of the often controversial 41-year-old's work. Almost a third of the 45 paintings on display have never been shown in the UK before.
All the big hits are here, including the Doreen Lawrence painting, No Woman No Cry, which was exhibited in Ofili's Turner prize exhibition in 1998. There is also a fresh chance to see the famous installation The Upper Room – 13 paintings of chalice-bearing monkeys, a reimagining of the Last Supper.
But it is in the final two rooms of the exhibition that audiences will see a different artist from the one whose last solo show in Britain was in 2002 (when the Victoria Miro gallery showed The Upper Room).
These works reflect new surroundings. Ofili has left the crowded London art scene and, since 2005, has been working in Trinidad and Tobago, living in a cottage in the hills above Port of Spain.
"I felt in some way things had closed down," the Manchester-born artist says in the Tate exhibition catalogue. "London was an exciting place to work at one point, because socially it was very progressive – a catalyst... But it got to a point where the social aspect became claustrophobic ... It also got to a point where I felt the work was really known in a public sense, that the division between public and private was like a thin membrane. And I didn't feel that gave me a greater sense of freedom."
The penultimate room sees Ofili, like Picasso, going through a "blue period". Giant canvases swirl with a dictionary-defying battery of midnight shades: ultramarine, indigo, smoke, bilberry. The colours are so deep and dark that images are hard to read. The only texture comes from the flat paint surface: sometimes velvety, sometimes reflective.
In one, Iscariot Blues, two men play musical instruments under a bridge while a hanged man dangles from a gibbet – all are enveloped in tendrils of lush foliage.
In these and the most recent paintings, the one recognisable aspect of the work is the mysterious figures that inhabit the paintings. Ofili has always created his own semi-mythological dramatis personae, whether the cartoonish, faux-superheroic character he called Captain Shit in the early work, or the simian saints of the Upper Room.
In a painting that has something of William Blake about it, a shower of egg-yolky, lemony blossoms is surrounded by an almost-black ground. On further inspection, the blackness resolves itself into a curious and possibly terrifying creature that appears to be devouring the flowers.
Ofili calls this figure The Healer, and imagines it gorging itself on the blossoms of the yellow poui tree, which flower in Trinidad with intense vividness and fall overnight. "I imagined that The Healer feasts on the poui flowers feverishly, and in the frenzy many of the flowers fall off," he has said.
The Ofili who was once painting phalluses and porn stars in a King's Cross studio is now painting en plein air – he began The Healer, he has said, outdoors during a lunar eclipse, inspired by "the forms in the clouds hovering over the hills that night".
Where once he was bringing all the clamorous life of London into his exquisite paintings as a self-conscious visual analogy of gangsta rap (aggressive lyrics, sweetly sung), he is now more likely to spend his days kayaking or observing the beauty of a Trinidadian waterfall.
In other words, Ofili is still transforming what surrounds him into paint, but these days that's the thick, fertile vegetation of the Caribbean rather than the urban jungle.
He has said of his new environment: "It has a mystical quality to it. The landscape is hilly, the vegetation is dense and you have the constant feeling that things are happening on the other side of the hill or deep in the forest."
By moving to Trinidad he has also retreated from the public gaze. In 1999, the year after he was the first black artist to win the Turner prize, his work attracted controversy when the then mayor of New York, Rudy Giuliani, objected to the exhibiting of The Holy Virgin Mary at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. The painting was touring as part of the Sensation! exhibition of works owned by Charles Saatchi.
In 2005, the Tate bought the installation The Upper Room for £600,000, when Ofili was a trustee of the gallery. The Charity Commission published a report critical of the institution's mismanagement of the conflict of interest involved in the purchase.
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January 25th, 2010 Art and design: Art | guardian.co.uk
New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art says a Picasso painting damaged by a visitor will be repaired in time for its exhibition of his work in April.
The Actor, from Picasso's rose period, now has a 15cm (6in) tear in the canvas's lower right-hand corner after a woman lost her balance and fell on the painting on Friday during an art class.
The restored painting will be displayed as planned in the exhibition of 250 Picasso works drawn from the museum's collection, which will run from 27 April to 1 August. The museum has owned the painting since 1952.
Posted in Art, Art and design, Culture, Museums, New York, News, Pablo Picasso, The Guardian, United States, World news | Comments Off
January 25th, 2010 Martin Wainwright
Martin Wainwright meets Pavel Büchler, winner of 2009 Northern Art prize
Posted in Art, Art and design, Cultural trips, guardian.co.uk, News, UK news | Comments Off