Michelangelo’s dreams of male muse go on show at Courtauld

London gallery displays finest of Renaissance artist's drawings for his friends, with loans from the Vatican and the Queen

Some of the most magnificent drawings ever executed – physical manifestations of Michelangelo's love and infatuation for a handsome and intelligent teenage boy – will on Thursday go on display as a group for the first time.

The groundbreaking show at the Courtauld gallery in London, with loans from the Vatican and the Queen, is essentially a joyously gay love story.

The drawings were done by Michelangelo when he was about 57. In the winter of 1532 the artist met ­Tommaso de' Cavalieri, a Roman nobleman celebrated for his dreamboat good looks, his superior intellect and his ­gracious manners, and fell head over heels in love with him.

Stephanie Buck, the show's curator, said it was, at heart, an extraordinary romance. "These drawings were meant to be looked at and studied, people looked at them with magnifying glasses and mirrors for hours and hours. With these drawings you can't reach higher."

The exhibition is built around The Dream of Human Life (Il Sogno, or The Dream) which was bequeathed to the Courtauld in 1978 by one of the century's most important collectors, Count Antoine Seilern. It is considered one of the finest of all Renaissance drawings. In it Michelangelo focuses on the beauty of the body, depicting a nude young man being roused from sleep, and human vices, by a winged spirit.

Buck is in no doubt The Dream is one of Michelangelo's "presentation drawings" made for Cavalieri in 1533. Others on display include The Punishment of Tityus, The Fall of Phaeton, The ­Bacchanal of Children, and The Rape of Ganymede. They would have been seen by the pope and the Medicis and on one level were teaching Cavalieri how to draw, and perhaps offering moral guidance. But they were also expressions of the artist's consuming love for the boy.

Michelangelo as an artist was at the height of his powers and fame, and almost deified. The quality is indisputable. In 1568 his biographer, Giorgio Vasari, called the works "drawings the like of which have never been seen".

Buck said it was unclear how old Cavalieri was when Michelangelo fell for him. The Courtauld research put him at between 16 and 17, she said.

The exhibition also shows that it was more than just physical infatuation. Michelangelo clearly held Cavalieri's intellect in high regard. Alongside The Fall of Phaeton is an earlier and different version on which the artist writes, saying that if the sketch does not please Cavalieri he should say so.

"The point is," said Buck, "that ­Cavalieri, although he was so young, must have played quite a role in the making of it because he was able to ­criticise it and send it back."

The Vatican has also lent for the ­exhibition ­Michelangelo's original poems, which he composed in the early stages of the friendship. Again there is little doubt as to how he felt. One reads:

"You know that I know, my lord, that you know that

I come here to enjoy you nearer at hand, and you

know that I know that you know who I really am: why

then this hesitation to greet each other, even now?

If the hope that you give me is true, if the great desire

that has been granted me is true, let the wall raised

up between these two be broken down …"

The Courtauld show is already attracting considerable academic interest, and it represents the first time that The  Dream has been exhibited alongside the other presentation drawings. The last time they were together (without The Dream) was in 1988 for exhibitions in Paris and Washington.

The debate about Michelangelo and his sexuality continues. He never made any secret of his love of male beauty – just look at David – but he always maintained it was a celibate love, a platonic love. That goes, too, with Cavalieri.

Buck said: "The whole idea, which he repeats in his letters and poems, is that he doesn't want to chase Cavalieri off. He speaks of his physical desire but it is a chaste love and he is not approaching him in a manner that would make it ­difficult for Cavalieri."

Having said that, Buck believes Michelangelo was certainly gay and that he would have slept with men. But Cavalieri was from such a ­high-ranking family in papal Rome that the two of them going to bed was never going to happen. Yet Cavalieri, who later married and had children, was clearly honoured to be held so highly in the affections of Michelangelo; they stayed close friends. He was with Michelangelo at his deathbed and was later instrumental in ensuring unfinished projects were completed.

Of course the one question that wants to be answered is what did the boy look like, how handsome was he? "We know there was a portrait of Cavalieri but it is lost," said Buck. "Unfortunately."

Posted in Art, Art and design, Culture, Exhibitions, Michelangelo, Museums, News, The Courtauld Institute of Art, The Guardian, UK news | Comments Off

Brick Lane plan for hijab gates angers residents

Tower Hamlets council has been accused of trying to force through a controversial sculpture against the wishes of locals

It is synonymous with curry and trendy bars, nightclubs and art venues. Now a plan to mark the entry points to London's cosmopolitan Brick Lane with giant arches in the shape of headscarves or hijabs has been condemned as offensive to Muslim women and a waste of £1.85m of public funds.

The proposed arches, part of a "cultural trail" through the street – immortalised in Monica Ali's novel Brick Lane – have been criticised as "misconceived" and "excluding". Locals have said they risk ghettoising a community that considers itself tolerant and diverse. Tracey Emin, who lives just off Brick Lane, is one of a number of residents in the east London area who claim that Tower Hamlets council risks inflaming racial tension by trying to force the "hijab gates" – as they have become known – through without proper consultation. After an outcry, the council has extended the deadline for complaints to 22 February.

One local Muslim woman has told the council that the stainless-steel, illuminated arches "create a stereotypical image of Islam, and endorse the practice of the veil that not all of us are happy with. It is a divisive image and one that in the present climate is highly inappropriate. Tower Hamlets should be seeking to bring communities together at this moment." Another, a hijab wearer, said that to call the gates anything other than a hijab was "just semantics". She said: "It is a huge waste of money. There has been enough conflict and tension since Brick Lane started developing after the yuppies moved in. This looks to me like a tool of aggravation and is taking a step backwards."

The Spitalfields Trust, which helped to save many of the historic Huguenot silk weavers' houses that abut Brick Lane, has urged the council to abandon its "misconceived" idea.

The cultural trail through the area is aimed at celebrating the various migrant communities – including Huguenots, Jews and now Bangladeshis – that have settled there across hundreds of years.

Using planning-gain funds paid to the council following the development of Bishops Square and Spitalfields market, the trail is intended to bring more tourism into the area and smarten it up. But locals complain that the focus has been too much on the Bangladeshi community, which makes up a third of the Tower Hamlets population.

At the centre of the trail is a 29 metre high minaret that has been attached to the Brick Lane mosque, a grade II listed building originally built in 1742 as a Huguenot church, then converted into a synagogue and now the Brick Lane jamme masjid [mosque]. Tower Hamlets council says the structure "is not a minaret" but a "large steel art sculpture".

Brick Lane and its side streets are also home to artists such as Emin, Gilbert and George, Jake Chapman, the actor Samantha Morton, as well as architects, designers, planners, poets, musicians and others. Many were shocked to learn only recently that the council planned to erect the veil-like structures. Some say that given the high concentration of artists in the area, the design should have been open to competition.

In a letter to the council, Emin wrote: "I sincerely object to these proposals … the proposed material has no relevance to the heritage of the area or its future. I understand that the Jewish East End Celebration Society does not approve the concept overall and neither do the Spitalfields Trust nor the Spitalfields Society, as stated in the review of the consultation. I am shocked to learn that the scheme is budgeted at £2m and I strongly feel that rubbish collections, vermin control, education and improved policing are more important to resolve."

Broadcaster John Nicolson, who lives off Brick Lane, said: "Throughout history numerous groups have passed through here and made it home. That's what makes Spitalfields so special. It belongs to all of us – atheists, Muslims and Christian, homosexuals and heterosexuals, men and women. The council's latest wheeze – metal arches in the shape of headscarves – is exclusive and excluding. They'd never dream of crucifix-inspired gates – nor should they – so why an arch that is both Islamic and representing a specifically conservative form of Islam?"

A spokeswoman for the council said the concept behind the arch was "loosely based on the sculptural form of a headscarf, reflecting the many cultural backgrounds that have occupied and sought refuge in and around Brick Lane over the centuries".

She said headscarves were worn for a variety of purposes, "such as for warmth, for sanitation, for fashion or social distinction; with religious significance, to hide baldness, out of modesty, or other forms of social convention", and not only by Muslims.

"Observant married Orthodox Jewish women, for example, are required to cover their hair, often employing scarves for the purpose, and Jewish men will use a kippah or yarmulke to cover their heads for religious purposes." She went on: "Many men and women currently wear headscarves or bandannas as a fashion statement, and with Brick Lane being a cultural melting pot both historically and now at the start of the 21st century, this design reference seems appropriate and fitting."

But Will Palin, secretary of Save Britain's Heritage, and a local resident, said: "The headscarf motif is undoubtedly faith-specific to Islam and therefore does not represent the breadth and richness of the borough's history."

At the Beigel Bake, a few metres from the site of one of the proposed arches, Sammy Minzly had been unaware of the proposals.

He said: "I have been here 50 years, and they haven't even told me about it. This used to be a Jewish area, and all my life I have been here. It is disgusting that they have not shown us the respect to ask us what we think."

Posted in Art, Art and design, Communities, Culture, Heritage, London, Monica Ali, News, Sculpture, Social history, The Guardian, Tracey Emin | Comments Off

Brick Lane plan for hijab gates angers residents

Tower Hamlets council has been accused of trying to force through a controversial sculpture against the wishes of locals

It is synonymous with curry and trendy bars, nightclubs and art venues. Now a plan to mark the entry points to London's cosmopolitan Brick Lane with giant arches in the shape of headscarves or hijabs has been condemned as offensive to Muslim women and a waste of £1.85m of public funds.

The proposed arches, part of a "cultural trail" through the street – immortalised in Monica Ali's novel Brick Lane – have been criticised as "misconceived" and "excluding". Locals have said they risk ghettoising a community that considers itself tolerant and diverse. Tracey Emin, who lives just off Brick Lane, is one of a number of residents in the east London area who claim that Tower Hamlets council risks inflaming racial tension by trying to force the "hijab gates" – as they have become known – through without proper consultation. After an outcry, the council has extended the deadline for complaints to 22 February.

One local Muslim woman has told the council that the stainless-steel, illuminated arches "create a stereotypical image of Islam, and endorse the practice of the veil that not all of us are happy with. It is a divisive image and one that in the present climate is highly inappropriate. Tower Hamlets should be seeking to bring communities together at this moment." Another, a hijab wearer, said that to call the gates anything other than a hijab was "just semantics". She said: "It is a huge waste of money. There has been enough conflict and tension since Brick Lane started developing after the yuppies moved in. This looks to me like a tool of aggravation and is taking a step backwards."

The Spitalfields Trust, which helped to save many of the historic Huguenot silk weavers' houses that abut Brick Lane, has urged the council to abandon its "misconceived" idea.

The cultural trail through the area is aimed at celebrating the various migrant communities – including Huguenots, Jews and now Bangladeshis – that have settled there across hundreds of years.

Using planning-gain funds paid to the council following the development of Bishops Square and Spitalfields market, the trail is intended to bring more tourism into the area and smarten it up. But locals complain that the focus has been too much on the Bangladeshi community, which makes up a third of the Tower Hamlets population.

At the centre of the trail is a 29 metre high minaret that has been attached to the Brick Lane mosque, a grade II listed building originally built in 1742 as a Huguenot church, then converted into a synagogue and now the Brick Lane jamme masjid [mosque]. Tower Hamlets council says the structure "is not a minaret" but a "large steel art sculpture".

Brick Lane and its side streets are also home to artists such as Emin, Gilbert and George, Jake Chapman, the actor Samantha Morton, as well as architects, designers, planners, poets, musicians and others. Many were shocked to learn only recently that the council planned to erect the veil-like structures. Some say that given the high concentration of artists in the area, the design should have been open to competition.

In a letter to the council, Emin wrote: "I sincerely object to these proposals … the proposed material has no relevance to the heritage of the area or its future. I understand that the Jewish East End Celebration Society does not approve the concept overall and neither do the Spitalfields Trust nor the Spitalfields Society, as stated in the review of the consultation. I am shocked to learn that the scheme is budgeted at £2m and I strongly feel that rubbish collections, vermin control, education and improved policing are more important to resolve."

Broadcaster John Nicolson, who lives off Brick Lane, said: "Throughout history numerous groups have passed through here and made it home. That's what makes Spitalfields so special. It belongs to all of us – atheists, Muslims and Christian, homosexuals and heterosexuals, men and women. The council's latest wheeze – metal arches in the shape of headscarves – is exclusive and excluding. They'd never dream of crucifix-inspired gates – nor should they – so why an arch that is both Islamic and representing a specifically conservative form of Islam?"

A spokeswoman for the council said the concept behind the arch was "loosely based on the sculptural form of a headscarf, reflecting the many cultural backgrounds that have occupied and sought refuge in and around Brick Lane over the centuries".

She said headscarves were worn for a variety of purposes, "such as for warmth, for sanitation, for fashion or social distinction; with religious significance, to hide baldness, out of modesty, or other forms of social convention", and not only by Muslims.

"Observant married Orthodox Jewish women, for example, are required to cover their hair, often employing scarves for the purpose, and Jewish men will use a kippah or yarmulke to cover their heads for religious purposes." She went on: "Many men and women currently wear headscarves or bandannas as a fashion statement, and with Brick Lane being a cultural melting pot both historically and now at the start of the 21st century, this design reference seems appropriate and fitting."

But Will Palin, secretary of Save Britain's Heritage, and a local resident, said: "The headscarf motif is undoubtedly faith-specific to Islam and therefore does not represent the breadth and richness of the borough's history."

At the Beigel Bake, a few metres from the site of one of the proposed arches, Sammy Minzly had been unaware of the proposals.

He said: "I have been here 50 years, and they haven't even told me about it. This used to be a Jewish area, and all my life I have been here. It is disgusting that they have not shown us the respect to ask us what we think."

Posted in Art, Art and design, Communities, Culture, Heritage, London, Monica Ali, News, Sculpture, Social history, The Guardian, Tracey Emin | Comments Off

Anthony Hopkins art exhibition opens

50 landscape and abstract paintings by Silence of the Lambs actor go on show at Mayfair's Gallery 27

The first British exhibition of paintings by the Oscar-winning Welsh actor Sir Anthony Hopkins opens in London tomorrow . The 50 landscape and abstract paintings by the Silence of the Lambs actor, who has exhibited throughout the US, will be displayed at Gallery 27 in Mayfair, central London, until Saturday before moving to The Dome in Edinburgh for four days on 2 March. Hopkins began painting in 2002, paints every day in his Malibu studio and "takes his art very seriously", according to exhibition promoter Jonathan Poole. Five limited-edition prints will be available for purchase.

Posted in Anthony Hopkins, Art, Art and design, Culture, Exhibitions, Film, London, News, The Guardian, UK news | Comments Off

This week’s exhibitions previews

Fiona Crisp: Subterrania, Penzance

In Fiona Crisp's spooky new series of photographs, tunnels lead the eye on and on, into the dark. Littered with decaying rafters and machinery, the rust-coloured dirt and stone walls of an old mine stretch downward into the womb-like earth in one image. Another shows the grim, sterile corridor of a German military underground hospital created on the Channel Islands in the second world war. In Crisp's compositions, these moody locations – all tourist destinations – become psychologically charged inner worlds.

Newlyn Art Gallery, Sat to 17 Apr

Skye Sherwin

Don McCullin, Manchester

A retrospective of over 50 years of frontline photography by one of the most incisive war photographers of all time. While Don McCullin has distinguished himself in landscape and still life, it is human misery that appears to bring out the great in him. Who can forget the blank-eyed look of the Vietnam soldier, photographed in 1968, staring death straight in the face? Similarly, the agonised pose of a woman mourning the death of her husband in the Greek-Turkish war hits one with the force of a great pietà. It is McCullin's ability to bring the news back home, to invest the particularity of a faraway individual's loss with momentous yet intimate significance, that marks his extraordinary achievement.

Imperial War Museum North, to 13 Jun

Robert Clark

Candice Breitz: Factum, London

With her pithy samplings of celebs and their devotees, Candice Breitz has crafted a pop culture commentary with as much spectacular pep as anything Hollywood throws at us. She has remixed the likes of Whitney and Annie Lennox to howl "I", "you" and "me" in a cacophony of self-love and emulation, and spliced actors out of context so their dialogue becomes a pantomime of gender roles. Yet Breitz's projects with everyday people show we're more than equal to mass media's iron grip on individuality: like her videos featuring Madonna fans, singing in unison, but all adding their own quirks to the repertoire. In her new video series, Factum, the South African artist focuses on identical twins and musings on selfhood, doubling and culture.

White Cube, N1, to 20 Mar

Skye Sherwin

Ian Breakwell: Elusive States Of Happiness, Derby

This is the first major retrospective of the work of Ian Breakwell, who died just five years ago after establishing his reputation as the greatest artist to come out of Derby since Joseph Wright of Derby, and one of the most mischievously spirited artworld provocateurs of the late-20th century. Working in just about every medium, his deadpan take on the world amounts to a life long series of mundane epiphanies. One of the most engaging diarists of his time, he was arguably one of the last great diarists before the blog age. Typical is The Walking Man Diary 1975-78, a series of photographic and textual observations made from the window of his Smithfield home of a lone passerby imbued with pathos.

QUAD, Sat to 18 Apr

Robert Clark

Billy Childish, London

Pitched between misunderstood genius and stubborn bugger, Billy Childish is an awkward perennial of British culture who's stayed true to his stripped back garage rock and defiantly throwback expressionist painting for three decades. If he's never reached a broad audience, it seems largely because his anti-establishment stance, nay-saying contemporary culture's power systems, would never allow it. When he recently created a cover aping an old Penguin edition for a collection of poems, the publisher slapped him with a cease and desist order. Billy's response was to ceremoniously burn the offending copies at his own book launch. Yet now he's got a survey show at the ICA, suggesting he might have finally found his moment. Painting, woodcuts, music and candid, autobiographical writings pack sincerity and obsession in equal measures, channelling a wistful yearning for a purportedly more authentic past.

ICA, SW1, Wed to 18 Apr

Skye Sherwin

Ron Mueck, Manchester

Any show of Ron Mueck's hyper-real sculptural figures is bound to bring up the age-old artworld dilemma: can art this immediately attractive and intriguing really be much good as art? Does its very popularity signal an over-reliance on sculptural special effects? Does its considerable wow factor indicate a sensationalist and shortlived significance? And, indeed, are such questions, by their very nature, elitist? Whatever Mueck's eventual historical standing, it is undeniable that his work has a great charisma. Walking into this show of three of his fleshy tableaux, one cannot be taken aback by their spooky embodiment of human magnetism. Irresistibly inspecting a semi-naked couple curled up asleep involves at least a twinge of voyeuristic guilt. Staring at naked strangers in public isn't really on, is it? Mueck reminds us that embarrassment is a perfectly worthy response to art.

Manchester Art Gallery, to 11 Apr

Robert Clark

Jitish Kallat: The Astronomy Of The Subway, London

Jitish Kallat's work has become as mercurial, big and bright as the city he draws inspiration from: Mumbai. He made a name for himself as a painter in the early noughties, with political subject matter hand-rendered in a pop graphic style, and has since produced video, sculpture and lenticular prints – as seen in last year's survey of Indian art at the Serpentine and the Saatchi's current show. In this exhibition exploring the relationship between the individual and the crowd, contrasts abound. A sculpture of a kerosene stove is enormous, while rioting crowds of tiny figures appear in danger of being trodden on.

Haunch Of Venison, W1, Mon to 27 Mar

Skye Sherwin

Party! Walsall

After a mixed history, New Art Gallery Walsall is back on track as a contemporary art venue of international significance. It celebrates its 10th anniversary with a flamboyant array of work ranging from the early-19th-century duende of Francisco de Goya, through the booze and dope sodden excesses of Michael Andrews's 1960s demimonde. Martin Creed's get-together of some 2,000 balloons updates the event with its hedonistic conceptualism, while Zhang Peng's photo of a little manga girl slicing into a bloody birthday cake is plain queasy.

New Art Gallery Walsall, to 17 Apr

Robert Clark

Posted in Art, Art and design, Culture, Editorial, Exhibitions, The Guardian | Comments Off

Celebrated art of Haiti is buried under rubble

The earthquake that killed so many also demolished the island's galleries and destroyed thousands of paintings

Number 18 Rue Bouvreuil was once a mecca for lovers of Haitian art. Outside the Musee Galerie d'Art Nader, perched on a hillside overlooking Port-au-Prince, a sign greeted visitors. "On top of the town, top in the arts," it boasted. Inside, the walls were plastered with thousands of paintings recording nearly a century of Haitian history.

Now the three-storey art gallery is gone, reduced to a dusty heap of rubble and torn canvases. Broken picture frames from irreplaceable local masterpieces poke from the gallery's ruins.

"My dad has about 12,000 paintings here and we are trying to save what is left," said Georges Nader, the son of Haiti's best-known art collector and the owner of the gallery, as he scanned the debris. "We have only been able to save about 2,000 of them."

The human cost of Haiti's worst earthquake in more than 200 years – at least 150,000 lives lost – has been well documented. But the disaster also struck a knockout blow to the heart of Haiti's vibrant arts community.

Several galleries were destroyed and thousands of paintings lost under the rubble of flattened government buildings and art museums.

The Cathédrale Sainte-Trinité, built in the early 1920s, was almost completely destroyed, taking with it a series of celebrated 1950s murals depicting scenes from the life of Christ. A painting by Guillaume Guillon Lethière, the 18th century French neoclassical painter, is thought to have been destroyed when the presidential palace collapsed.

"There are paintings from 1905 that have been lost," said Cedoir Sainterne, an artist from the city's Pétionville district. "It's terrible. We are going to have to start all over again."

Nowhere was the destruction greater than at the Musee Galerie d'Art Nader, Haiti's largest private collection of Haitian and Caribbean art.

"When it [the earthquake] started I said, 'What the hell is that?' And I ran out," said Nader, whose father, also called Georges, was one of the biggest patrons of the local art scene. "I was in an 11-storey building and I saw the building shaking and shaking and moving in all directions.

"The next day when I came here and I went downtown I saw everything. I don't think there is any word to explain that [what happened] to the world … You have to be here to see what is going on."

Nader's parents, both 79, survived. When the quake struck they were sleeping in the only room of the museum that emerged unscathed.

Stunned, they fled to the neighbouring Dominican Republic, where Nader says his mother suffered a heart attack. They then headed to Miami. "The first day my reaction was that anything material was not that important for me. When you see your dad is safe and your mum is safe I was OK," said Nader.

"But when I came it was very sad. My dad loves Haitian art. He lives for Haitian art. His life is Haitian art. This is a guy that won't buy a house [because] he would prefer to buy Haitian art."

Nader quickly called in some Haitian friends from New York in an attempt to save some of the collection. Several paintings by Hector Hyppolite, Haiti's most revered painter, have already been plucked from the wreckage.

At the Musee Galerie d'Art Nader dozens of men were wading through the rubble. Occasionally they emerged clasping canvases depicting scenes of rural life or voodoo ­ceremonies. Some of the paintings were by Alexandre Gregoire, one of Haiti's first generation of naive artists, whose work has been sold at Sotheby's in New York.

Also among the rubble was an information card from an exhibit by the Haitian artist Adam Leontus. "Leontus has taken part in many national and international exhibitions," it read in black typewriting. Leontus's paintings were nowhere to be seen.

Nader said the museum's losses, estimated at up to $30m (£19m), could not be replaced with any amount of money. "We have lost the biggest collection of Haitian art, not only in Haiti but in the world," he said, clambering down from the roof of what was once his family gallery. "There are pieces that you won't be able to find any more. This is finished."

Amid the destruction and despair, some Haitian artists are seeking inspiration in the disaster. One graffiti artist has taken to daubing a map of Haiti on walls around the city: a weeping eye looks out from Port-au-Prince's location, above the words "We need help".

Artist Frantz Zephirin has painted more than a dozen canvases inspired by the quake, showing distraught faces trapped in ruined buildings and hands reaching up through a sea of blood.

Elise Francisco, an artist who has sold paintings to Nader's father, said it was important artists registered the ­earthquake. "I'll paint the houses that have fallen, the buildings that are destroyed, the cracked land," he said. "We are going to show our children what happened here. This is our history."

Cultural wealth

Haiti may be the poorest country in the western hemisphere, but fans of its art say it is the Caribbean's most culturally wealthy nation.

From the intricately crafted tap-tap buses that clatter through Port-au-Prince to the explosively colourful paintings that once adorned the walls of its many art galleries, it is impossible to miss the creative spirit of the world's first independent black republic.

While there are records of art schools dating back to the early 19th century, Haitian artists only began to gain international recognition in the 1940s, following the creation of Port-au-Prince's Centre d'Art. Dozens of "naive artists", among them voodoo priests and small-time farmers, gathered there to depict Haiti's turbulent history in unmistakably colourful and often surreal paintings and patchworks of "voodoo flags".

The centre's role in promoting Haitian art is disputed. Some say it discovered and nurtured a generation of talented but untrained artists; ­others say it merely helped already skilled artists make contact with overseas buyers, bringing much-needed funds to the local art scene.

Through the centre, Hector Hyppolite, a one-time shoemaker and voodoo priest, became Haiti's most internationally revered artist, leading a generation of local painters whose instantly recognisable canvases featured religious imagery and scenes of the country's life.

More than 60 years after his death, Hyppolite's works fetch six-figure sums while several other Haitian folk artists, including Philome Obin and Wilson Bigaud, have become well-known. The Haitian-American artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, a one-time collaborator of Andy Warhol, often alluded to his Haitian roots in his paintings, which have been sold for millions at auctions.

Posted in Architecture, Art, Culture, Haiti, News, The Guardian, World news | Comments Off

It was a stunning work of art – so why is the Wall hanging in a Las Vegas loo? | Germaine Greer

The greatest artwork of the 20th century was 100 miles long and nearly 12ft high. A multitude of hands took 13 years to make it, out of house paint, vehicle paint, spray paint, any paint they could find. They had to work fast to evade the ­border police, for they were working three metres inside the perimeter of East Berlin. Defacing any part of the border installation was streng verboten.

The rough stone and cement blocks of earlier Berlin walls had offered ­little opportunity for anything but slogans, awkwardly lettered with a broad brush, and the odd wobbly sight joke. ­Border Wall 75, which began to replace them in 1976, was made of smoother cement panels that were, unwisely, painted white. Gradually, artists began to cover the western face with words and ­images, some vivid, some feeble, some ­accomplished. There were no rules, beyond the subtle discipline of graffiti everywhere. Good stuff would be respected, but weak stuff would be drawn and painted over, making a ­palimpsest of protest old and new.

In April 1984, two Frenchmen living in a squat not far from the wall began to paint on it on a larger scale. Thierry Noir painted over the existing graffiti, rapidly covering whole panels. When passers-by objected, he pretended not to understand. Christophe ­Bouchet preferred to use the earlier graffiti as bases for his own designs. The ­eventual aim was to produce a painting five kilometres long.

In 1989, the wall began to come down. At first, the mauerspechte ­(wall-peckers) chipped off small pieces, eventually making holes big enough to walk through. The East German government then took the wall down. There was no outcry. Berliners were only too glad to see the wall go. Most of it was smashed up to make road base, but the more striking panels were placed in storage. Small sections were deliberately left, at Potsdamer Platz, on Bernauer Strasse and on ­Mühlenstrasse. Artists from all over the world were invited to paint the eastern face of the fragments left standing, in a visual enactment of reunification, and so posterity was granted to the Wall Park and the East Side Gallery, a 1.3km ­section of wall.

Celebration does not fire the ­imagination or drive the arm the way protest does. In 1990, even Noir and Bouchet could only manage to parody their earlier work. Other ­artists used the ­opportunity to promote ­themselves, in profound contradiction to the spirit of the wall. The cement panels are now sagging and crumbling, and the paint is flaking off. The East Side Gallery has been restored, for the second time, at a cost of €2m – money well spent as it is now Berlin's leading visitor attraction. Many of the tourists are unaware that the slick images they have come to see were no part of the historic wall.

When artist Edwina Sandys ­arrived in Berlin in February 1990, she was told by the East German minister of culture that, if only she had come a few weeks earlier, she could have taken whatever she wanted and no ­questions would have been asked. As it was, ­government agents were ­preparing to sell panels off at $60,000 each (10 times what the last ­authenticated panel ­actually fetched when it was auctioned in 2008). Sandys, who is a granddaughter of Winston ­Churchill, was hoping to use sections of the wall as the basis of her own sculpture for the Churchill ­Memorial and ­Library at ­Westminster College Fulton, ­Missouri (where Churchill made his famous "iron ­curtain" speech). She was ­eventually allowed to choose eight from 400 ­"better pieces" of the wall for shipping to New York, where she had male and female silhouettes cut out of them by high-pressure water jets to make her own sculpture, Breakthrough, ­unveiled by Ronald Reagan in November 1990. The pieces also became part of a ­second sculpture called Breakfree, now at the Roosevelt Library in New York.

Sandys was probably the last or even the only person to persuade the East Germans to let her have bits of the wall for free. In June 1990, 81 segments from the Waldemarstrasse, including 33 painted by Thierry Noir and 12 by Kiddy Citny were put up for auction in Monaco, where they fetched €1.5m. Noir immediately sued for a share of the proceeds. Litigation dragged on until February 1995, when his claim was upheld.

Until recently, no concerted attempt was made to document the wall. There are few colour photographs beyond those taken by Noir to record his and Bouchet's activities. Now, German documentary film-maker Hartmut Jahn has traced fragments of the wall as far as the US, where they can be seen in a men's room in a Las Vegas casino, in a floating restaurant in Maine, in the Microsoft cafeteria in Redmond, Washington, at Fort Knox, at the Hard Rock Cafe in Orlando, in the headquarters of the CIA in Virginia, on Ronald Reagan's ranch – and to Poland, Italy, Spain, and Japan. Since mid-2009, Jahn has been mounting exhibitions of panoramic photographs called variously The New Owners of the Wall and The Berlin Wall – Sold Out. His photographs are the final proof that a stupendous human artefact has been lost forever.

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My hero Francisco Goya by Diana Athill

My hero is Goya – hard to explain when so little is known about him, his very few extant letters being so flat (like those of a cabinet-maker, someone said). And given a "fact", such as that he knew French, because he once signed a letter written in that language, it is promptly contradicted by an old friend of his who said he arrived in Bordeaux as an old man "without a word of French". But we do know that when near death he made the splendid statement: "And still I learn." And his work never ceases to demonstrate his loathing of cruelty and stupidity. Never does he romanticise horror, he is not frightened, he is disgusted almost (but, heroically, never quite) beyond expression. And when he loves – oh, the life quivering in his portraits of the doctor who saved him, his friends Sebastián Martínez and Tiburcio ­Pérez y Cuervo and, above all, in that exquisitely tender portrait of the young and pregnant Condesa de Chinchón, first caught by him as a charming child peeping out of a family group. When I think of that I have to say that perhaps he is less my hero than my love.

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My nine to five: Nasser Azam

The painter and sculptor on skipping breakfast, working through the night and a forthcoming trip to paint in Antarctica

My day is split in two: the creative part and the administrative part. I'll be working on my admin from 9am, but I'll be painting during the night – I'm lucky if I get more than four hours sleep. I live and work from my studio in north London. I've been here for four years; it's an old printing press conversion with a glass roof. It's like a loft apartment – except for the fact that I'm on the ground floor.

My fridge is usually empty. I never have breakfast but I do drink about 20 cups of tea or coffee a day. I end up eating one meal a day. I never exercise, but then again, when I'm painting, I'm on my feet all day.

I've just finished my time as artist-in-residence at the County Hall Gallery after two and a half years. It was tremendous to be given the artistic freedom to exhibit what I wanted to. Most of my paintings are allegorical and my inspiration is all personal. Painting is a private relationship between me and the canvas, and the only time I can do that uninterrupted is during the night. There have been times when the creative juices are flowing that I really can't stop – once I stayed awake all weekend and produced a dozen paintings.

I worked in banking for Merrill Lynch for 20 years. I travelled extensively and worked long hours. That routine of working until late has really stuck with me. I don't miss office life though.

The BlackBerry habit from Merrill's hasn't changed – I'm still always checking my emails and often in front of the computer. I'll liaise with galleries, and I'm a patron of several art societies and charities so there are always emails to go through.

I'm heading to Antarctica for five days to paint; I'll literally be painting nine foot canvases standing on the snow in sub-zero conditions. The aim is to explore the creative limitations of the environment, something really raw in a wild, strange landscape. It'll be light 24 hours round the clock, which I'm not used to at all, so I'll be sleeping even less. The snow we had in London made me realise I don't have enough of the appropriate clothing at all – I've been doing a few practice runs of painting in extreme cold in a huge heavy duty refrigerator. The application of paint while wearing gloves is yet to be determined, but I've been exploring the use of anti-freeze paint.

I'm divorced, and my ex-wife and teenage children live outside of London. My daughter and son sometimes come down on the weekends, although it's less now that they have their studies. When they are here, I don't paint – I never paint in front of anybody. I'm probably not an easy person to live with.

When I paint, I usually put trance music on in the background. I used to live in Tokyo and DJed with Paul van Dyke and Nick Warren who were just starting out then. I still have the mixes. I love to watch cricket while I paint too – it's usually on in the background. Maybe my love for cricket is part of my Pakistani roots, although I've been here for most of my life.

I don't really have a five-day working week set up; I don't really have a concept of a weekend. But I do try and take Sundays lightly, which means no evening appointments with gallery owners – I'll see my children or my parents, relax and chill out.

Nasser Azam (azam.com) will be travelling to Antarctica to complete a series of performance paintings from 18-27 February.

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Crash: JG Ballard’s artistic legacy

Shortly before JG Ballard's death last year, Iain Sinclair made a pilgrimage to the author's Shepperton semi, a shrine to his surreal tastes and happy family life. A new exhibition of his favourite paintings and of art work he has inspired honours this distinctive vision

Coming away from the official path, on a walk from the mouth of the Thames to Oxford in October 2008, I diverted through Shepperton. Light rain misted my spectacles. An uncertain detour was blocked by a two-tonne Jaguar saloon, white and racing green: XJ MOTOR SERVICES. The upstream settlement has evident 21st-century loot, as well as Edwardian weekend villas and chalets. There is a blue plaque to the literary giant they choose to commemorate: THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK LIVED HERE, 1823-1866. Modernist white cubes with big windows are attracted by reflections of light on water. Natural metaphors for unnatural liquidity in a time of recession.

I head for the station. That's where JG Ballard met me when I visited him. I never saw the inside of his house. We drove to a riverside pub and sat under whirring fans. I wondered why, after his great success with Empire of the Sun, he didn't relocate to one of those balconied, sharp-angled properties that were so attractive to the convalescing architects and blocked advertising men who populate his books. Foolish thought. Ballard was a working writer, first and last; the where of it was not to be disturbed. Fixed routines served him well; so many hours, so many words. Breakfast. Times crossword. Desk overlooking a natural ­garden. Stroll to the shops to observe the erotic rhythms of consumerism. Lunch standing up with The World at One on the radio. Back to the study. Forty-minute constitutional down to the river. TV chill-out meditation: ­Hawaii Five-O and The Rockford Files rather than Kenneth Clark.

The interior landscape of the suburban semi was a mirage. The more you studied it, the cannier the decision to settle the family in Shepperton, all those years ago, appeared. It was far enough out of London to limit the pests, the time-devourers. When journalists gained access they were mesmerised by the reproduction Delvaux canvases propped on the floor, the ­aluminium palm tree, the lounger in the front room; dutifully they repeated the standard questions about surrealism and how The Drowned World was saturated in Max Ernst. The house in Old Charlton Road was a premature ­installation; a stage set designed to confirm the expectations of awed pilgrims. But it was also a home in which the widowed author brought up three children who are always laughing in family snapshots.

Ballard may be the first serious ­novelist whose oeuvre is most widely represented in books of interviews. And whose future belongs as much in white-walled warehouse galleries as the diminishing shelves of public libra­ries. He was so generous to those who found his phone number, so direct: he rehearsed polished routines – and ­always agreed, with unfailing courtesy, that the world was indeed a pale Xerox made in homage to the manifold of his fiction. A late moralist, he practised undeceived reportage, not prophecy: closer to Orwell than HG Wells. Closer to Orson Welles than to either. Closer to Hitchcock. Take out the moving ­figures on staircases that go nowhere and stick with hollow architecture that co-authors subversive drama.

Spurning critical theory, Ballard joined his near-namesake Baudrillard as the hot topic for air-miles academics. Off-highway universities, indistinguishable from hospitals or hotels, approve infinite theses. A hall of mirrors in which students, who have lost the habit of literature, recognise, in the Shepperton master's exquisitely calibrated prose, intimations of a hybrid form capable of processing autopsy ­reports and invasion politics into accidental poetry. The incantatory manifesto, "What I Believe", deploys Ballard's favourite device, the list, as he curates a museum of affinities: "I believe in Max Ernst, Delvaux, Dalí, ­Titian, / Goya, Leonardo, Vermeer, Chirico, Magritte, / Redon, Dürer, ­Tanguy, the Facteur Cheval, / the Watts Towers, Böcklin, Francis Bacon, and all the invisible artists / within the psychiatric institutions of the planet."

It was almost dark when I got there, after walking down a street occupied by Indian ­restaurants, Chinese take­aways, charity and novelty shops. A man spotted me as I lined up the shot.

"A writer bloke is supposed to live in that house. We've been out here 25 years and I've never set eyes on him, tell the truth. But he's on the box."

The silver Ford Granada is tilted at a drunken angle, like a sinking cabin-cruiser, in the vestigial driveway. The privet hedge has been trimmed, the napkin of lawn made tidy. The Crittall window of the front room is overwhelmed by the sinister fecundity of a yucca. There is a cheerful yellow door with an inset panel of dark glass. The rear elevation is gritty with pebbledash. Perched on the wooden fence is a cutout Sylvester, the Loony Tunes cat, waiting to pounce.

It is easy to understand how Ballard, after he lost his driving licence in the 1970s, found everything he required within an hour's walk, in any direction, out from this house. The ford where Martian invaders from The War of the Worlds crossed the river. Film studios. Reservoirs. Airport perimeter roads. And the footpaths, playgrounds, woods and streams he never felt the need to describe. Territory in which his three children grew up and thrived. That is the particular magic of his final book, Miracles of Life: how, through minimal changes of emphasis, he revises his mythology to give readers the illusion of being guided, at last, close to the heart of the mystery. A mystery that is somehow incarnate in the ­hidden spaces of the bereaved Shepperton property.

Even now, when Ballard was unwell and removed to the care and comfort of his partner, Claire Walsh, in Shepherds Bush, the house seemed possessed by a form of illumination not on stream to the rest of Old Charlton Road. The afterglow of decades of scrupulous composition. Physical ­effects we impose, in default of sentiment, to compensate for the writer's troubling absence. Fay, Ballard's elder daughter, told me that in her childhood the house did indeed stand out from its shrouded neighbours.

"When I was young, the lights used to be on the whole time, even on bright summer days. Daddy loved the idea of brightness, intensity, as if we were living in the Med."

In too much pain to take the wheel, Ballard returned to the old house with Fay. It was strange now, this installation her father had created from the objects of his private obsessions: Ed Ruscha postcards, Paolozzi silkscreen prints, a lurid corduroy sofa. A domesticated Kurt Schwitters assemblage, in which the writer could actually live and work. And thrive.

"I hadn't visited Shepperton for many years, until the summer of 2008, when Daddy was quite ill," Fay said. "I remembered a dried-up orange sitting on the mantelpiece in the nursery. I walked through the door and it was still there. I said, 'Oh my goodness, you still have the orange.' He looked at me and he said, very quietly but seriously, 'It's a lemon'. It must have been there for at least 40 years. I don't see the lemon as something eccentric. It's not a relic. It's covered in dust. It hasn't been moved. It's obviously important to him. And it's very beautiful."

The front room, guarded by the spiky fronds of the yucca, was known, in an echo of colonial times, as the nursery. Fay presented Ballard with the plant, his Triffid-like co-tenant, in 1976; a Christmas present from Marks & Spencer. It was re-potted several times and addicted to regular hits of Baby Bio. Fay reckoned that, over the years, influenced by that story "Prima Belladonna", the yucca learned to sway and sing. The nursery was the family tele­vision room, where supper was taken. An unused exercise bike, now a junk sculpture, faced the substantial set.

When royalties and film rights rolled in, Ballard, modest and circumspect with consumer durables, commissioned copies of two Delvaux paintings destroyed in the second world war. Brigid Malin, who undertook this project, wanted to paint a Ballard portrait. He agreed, visiting the artist in her studio in Hemel Hempstead, and inviting her, in return, to recreate the lost works. One of which, The Violation, was placed in his study. Fay ­remembered how her father loved ­feeling "as if he could walk into the painting and be part of the landscape with these beautiful women". The propped-up Delvaux stood like a permanently occupied mirror to the left of the author's desk; with a long window, looking over the undisturbed garden, to the right.

Ballard was fascinated by technique, craftsmanship. When Fay, herself a painter, became a student of art history, he would discuss the anonymous interior spaces of Francis Bacon compositions and enthuse over the synthetic colours of carpets in hotel lobbies and airport lounges. As a young girl, Fay perched on the corduroy sofa in the study, fascinated by a Max Ernst poster, The Robing of the Bride, in which the fur-feather cloak of a naked birdwoman reprised the blood-orange tones of the ridged ­material on which she was sitting. She trawled through the shelves of reference books: Dalí, Warhol, Bacon, ­Helmut Newton. And other less obvious interests. Reviewing a Stanley Spencer biography in 1991, Ballard ­proclaimed the Cookham painter as the last representative of an "innocent world before the coming of the mass media". In a gesture of recognition, he said: "Small Thames-side towns have a special magic, each an ­island waiting for its Prospero."

Playing along with telephone interrogators, Ballard claimed that, like William Burroughs, he would have preferred to be a painter. Meaning that he lived by the discipline of the studio, infinite variations on a menu of established themes and motifs; that his books were sometimes collaged and cut-up like The Atrocity Exhibition, so that the texture of friable newsprint and degraded scene-of-the-crime photographs was palpable beneath the charged surface. He could move a narrative through time and space by a forensic cataloguing of objects, buildings, machines. Burroughs, in his final period in the red cabin in Lawrence, Kansas, did indeed become a painter and an elective surrealist, a recorder of dreams. He would tend the cats, pick up his prescription, and blast away at cans of paint. The house, through vanity portraits by visiting celebrities, remembers him.

"Daddy produced two sculptures in the garden," Fay said. "I was very young, four or five. Sculptures made with milk bottles, chicken-wire and concrete, slightly in the style of Henry Moore, but moving towards Paolozzi."

I imagine an accretion of convenient materials inspired by the eccentric Facteur Cheval with his free-form towers, the lime-mortar-cement Palais idéal, that suburban temple of quotations. The Shepperton sculptures have vanished, they will not be part of the Crash show, the "Homage to JG Ballard", at the Gagosian Gallery in London. It is the first major gathering after the ­writer's death in April last year of work by ­artists he admired and by younger ­contemporaries challenged or seduced by the microclimate of the novels, ­essays and interviews.

The only record of the sculptures is a family photograph, taken in the garden, and reproduced in cropped form on the jacket of Miracles of Life. The three children, school-blazered, hair-ribboned, are delighted by something out of shot. Ballard, in dark sweater, white shirt, neat tie, smiles indulgently. Behind the fat cigar dangling from his hand, a minor sculptural ­intervention can be located: three ­diminishing Dalí mouths stacked one above the other. The cement used in this work was also employed to make a monument for his son's pet rabbit.

There were Ballard oil paintings too, much later, with strong primary colours. And painstaking Dalí copies undertaken to find how it was done: the bread, the rocks, the clouds. These things have disappeared. But typographical collages, like ransom notes to an alien culture, will be shown, in reproduction, at the Gagosian show; along with the provocative ­advertisements Ballard contrived for Dr Martin Bax's Ambit magazine. The ads display oblique fragments of text against found images. Walsh, Ballard's conduit to the information super-­highway, is presented in these pieces as an early muse. One of the photographs was taken by Ballard in his Ford Zephyr – he was loyal to Ford – after Walsh came close to drowning, when she plunged into the sea in ­Margate wearing a coat and wellington boots.

A grid of monochrome snaps, ­recording the after-effects of a rollover accident in the Zephyr, will feature in the exhibition. The younger Ballard had ­active contacts in the London ­subterranea of the 1960s. Michael Moorcock, collaborator in mischief, ­editor of New Worlds, joined Ballard on a whirling carousel that led them ­towards Burroughs, Borges and Paolozzi. But the two writers were never more than tourists on the skirts of the hive at Muriel Belcher's Colony Room. "There were a couple of ­drun­ken days around Bacon," Moorcock told me, "but Jimmy and I tended to make our excuses and leave, because we were really family men and wanted to get home in time to fetch the kids."

Anecdotes proliferate and overlap, but shows like the necessary Ballard tribute at the Gagosian are made from hard evidence. Kay Pallister, who ­curated the exhibition, drawing on Walsh's archival scholarship, was surprised when I pointed out that the handsome and ­informative catalogue, in shocking pink with stencil-­effect block title, was a reprise of ­Wyndham Lewis's Blast from 1914-15. ­History, in the white-walled bunker, is pyramid-based: the closer to the present moment, the more we are ­permitted to know. The warehouses and factories of the metropolis, solid Victorian ghosts outside Ballard's ­remit, are processing tanks for ­securing his posthumous reputation. The ­Gagosian's Crash assemblage, while ­respecting ­genealogies of peer-group influence, is most assiduous in showcasing the range of practising artists who ­deploy Ballardian themes. A steady-stare at signature metaphors: Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty, the ­colonnades of abandoned surrealist ­cities, acid-­attacked hoardings of movie-star faces. Faithful to the ­perverse doctrine of the "What I Believe" manifesto, disciples hallucinate a spinal topography of death-roads, ­minatory power plants and the flesh-pink atolls of inner-space.

The Ballard of Brigid Malin's portrait is a St Jerome of Shepperton: bare ­table, pencil and manuscript. He ­undertook numerous European ­pilgrimages with Walsh, as they ­investigated the genius of Velásquez, Goya, Dürer, Manet. "He loved Netherlandish art," Walsh reported, "especially Van Eyck." In London, on Sunday afternoons, they haunted the National Gallery. When I followed their footsteps, to search out the Malin portrait, it was not on display. "We've left him in the dark," the man at the desk said. "Much better for preservation. We can only show writers the general public request. Like Jane Austen."

I looked for a lemon by Francisco de Zubarán to represent the decaying object on the nursery mantelpiece. The closest I came was a still life of ­oranges and walnuts by Luis Meléndez. It wouldn't do, Ballard was nothing if not precise. He said what he meant and he meant what he said. The lemon, according to Lucia Impelluso, is a potent antidote to poison and a symbol of "amorous fidelity".

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