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The Art Newspaper - International art news and eve •

Conservation of Tintoretto painting in UK reveals ‘layer of history hiding under the surface’

A two-year conservation project has revealed the complicated development of a painting by the 16th-century Venetian artist Jacopo Tintoretto, which goes back on public display in Warwickshire, UK on Monday (28 April). Research done at the National Trust’s Royal Oak Foundation conservation studio showed that the architectural setting which dominates The Wise and Foolish Virgins (around 1546) went through extensive compositional changes before Tintoretto settled on a final version.A depiction of a...
The i Paper •

‘Death is pretty exciting’: The modern artist hitting her stride at 82

“I wish I’d done a bit more painting and a little less housework,” says Maro Gorky, surveying her career retrospective, currently on show at the Saatchi Gallery. The 20 large canvases are about evenly divided between portraits and landscapes, all of them distinctive for their bold use of colour and line, dancing in happily decorative fashion across the canvas. The earliest is dated 1980, and the most recent – so recent in fact that the paint is barely dry – are a pair titled Autumn Vines and Spr...
The Art Newspaper - International art news and eve •

Guggenheim shows to champion Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, who still ‘needs to be rediscovered by many audiences’

A major survey of the Portuguese abstract painter Maria Helena Vieira da Silva (1908-92) opens at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice this April, before travelling to the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in the autumn. Though a national treasure in Portugal, and well known in France—where a 2022 retrospective toured Marseille and Dijon—the artist’s wider reputation has dwindled since her death, and she still “needs to be rediscovered by many audiences”, according to the show’s curator, Flavia Frig...
The Telegraph •

Emanations and ectoplasm: the weird world of Edvard Munch

The first UK exhibition dedicated to the portraits of Norwegian painter Edvard Munch (1863-1944) opens at the National Portrait Gallery on March 13. Featuring more than 40 paintings and works on paper, most of which have never been seen before in this country, it’s a unique opportunity to step into Munch’s social circle – and to discover a different side to the artist best known as the tormented creator of The Scream, 1893.Visitors will encounter a “more extrovert, sociable person – a likeable p...
The Art Newspaper - International art news and eve •

Medardo Rosso, an often overlooked artist who ‘revolutionised’ sculpture, gets his dues at Kunstmuseum Basel

To the Italian sculptor Medardo Rosso, the history of Western sculpture had produced little more than “paperweights”. He did not care for marble, the worthiest of the sculptor’s materials, choosing instead the poverty and impermanence of wax and plaster. Used together, as in Portinaia (1883-84), he created sculptures that appear to be disintegrating before our eyes. Even bronze he insisted on casting himself, rather than delegating the work to an elaborately staffed foundry. He also invited audi...
The Art Newspaper - International art news and eve •

National Trust paint archive promises to bring secrets to light

A new National Trust paint archive will, for the first time, bring together thousands of historic paint samples in a UK facility with a laboratory and archive and staffed by the trust’s first in-house heritage scientist.With funding awarded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the archive will be established over the next two years at the Royal Oak Foundation Conservation Studio at Knole in Kent. Paint samples taken from paintings, furniture and interiors at National Trust properties ove...
The Art Newspaper - International art news and eve •

Two-venue Tate show highlights the surreal art of Cornish occultist Ithell Colquhoun

Since her death, Ithell Colquhoun (1906-88) has been better known as an occultist than an artist. Now, her reputation as a leading figure of British Surrealism is being restored, in an exhibition exploring for the first time the connections between these two facets of her life. Between Worlds, the biggest exhibition of her work ever staged, opens at Tate St Ives this month before later travelling to Tate Britain in London. It is the first such collaboration between two Tate sites, and recognises...
The Art Newspaper - International art news and eve •

Inside Tate St Ives' plans for Barbara Hepworth's former dance hall

Semi-derelict and out of use for almost 50 years following the death of Barbara Hepworth in 1975, the former dance hall in which the artist created some of her best known works is set to reopen as an exhibition, learning, event and community space, the latest addition to Tate’s St Ives portfolio.The Palais de Danse on Barnoon Hill in the Cornish coastal town was bought by Hepworth in 1961, and used as a second studio for the monumental works that characterised her output as her international rep...
The Art Newspaper - International art news and eve •

The self-styled ‘first English abstract artist’ Paule Vézelay gets an overdue exhibition

“I am the first English abstract artist (not the first female artist) to have made an international reputation,” wrote Paule Vézelay (1892-1984) in 1980. It is a bold claim, but Simon Grant, the curator of the artist’s first dedicated exhibition in over 40 years, points out that a lost 1928 drawing easily pre-dates the shift to abstraction by contemporaries Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore. “I’ve been wanting to do [an exhibition] for a long time,” Grant says, “it’s long overdue....
The Art Newspaper - International art news and eve •

The must-see exhibitions in 2025: from Leigh Bowery in London to Michaelina Wautier in Vienna

Art meets fashion in a blockbuster show at the Grand Palais celebrating the enduring Italian fashion house Dolce & Gabbana. The exhibition, curated by Florence Müller—a former professor at the French Institute of Fashion in Paris—will include more than 200 creations by designers Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana, who founded the fashion house in 1985. “Unfolding over a series of ten rooms covering 1,200 sq. m, the show explores the brand’s unconventional approach to the world of luxury … embrac...
The Art Newspaper - International art news and eve •

Window of opportunity: the artists who worked in retail display

Jean Tinguely’s early career as a window dresser is the inspiration behind a new exhibition at the Tinguely Museum in Basel this month. The Swiss sculptor’s popular designs for Basel shop windows, including those of Kost Sport, Wohnbedarf, Jehle Mode, Ramstein, Tanner and Modes Emmy, were documented by the photographer Peter Moeschlin in the 1940s and beyond, but the curator Tabea Panizzi says that Tinguely was far from unique.“There were many artists in New York in the 1950s who worked for the...
The Art Newspaper - International art news and eve •

In from the cold: Tirzah Garwood finally takes the spotlight in London

In the 73 years since her death, the artist and printmaker Tirzah Garwood (1908-51) has mostly been “Mrs Eric Ravilious”. Now, a decade after Dulwich Picture Gallery’s acclaimed Ravilious survey, Garwood takes the spotlight in an exhibition that reveals for the first time the full extent of her talent and output.The curator James Russell first saw Garwood’s work 20 years ago while researching the exhibition that would restore Ravilious to public consciousness. Ever since, Russell says, he has “b...
The Art Newspaper - International art news and eve •

In the first major UK exhibition of her works, Whitechapel Gallery places Lygia Clark in dialogue with Sonia Boyce

A major exhibition dedicated to Lygia Clark (1920-88), the Brazilian artist who in the 1960s dramatically recalibrated the relationship between artist and audience, is now open at Whitechapel Gallery. Clark had a solo show at Signals gallery in London in 1965, and has been included in various group shows, but this is the first time she has been given a significant solo show by a UK institution.The exhibition builds on the Whitechapel Gallery’s history of championing artists from all over the wor...
The Art Newspaper - International art news and eve •

'Emotion is so important in his work': National Portrait Gallery charts a personal path through the career of Francis Bacon

The National Portrait Gallery’s (NPG) first Francis Bacon exhibition is an overdue acknowledgement of one of the 20th century’s foremost figurative artists. “[The show] has been on the cards for a while,” says the curator Rosie Broadley, “but we wanted to reserve it until after the reopening of the gallery [in 2023], and then make a real splash with a major British artist.”Beginning with the anonymous, screaming heads painted in the 1940s, Bacon’s radical reappraisal of portraiture in the post-w...
The Art Newspaper - International art news and eve •

Frankenthaler’s friends: Florence exhibition sheds light on influence of the Abstract Expressionist's circle

The American Abstract Expressionist Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011) was candid about her first encounter with the work of Jackson Pollock. “It captured my eye and my whole psychic metabolism at a crucial moment in my life,” she said. “I was ready for what his paintings gave me.” Until now, the impact of the other artists in her circle has been less well understood, but this is set to change with a sweeping survey at the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence.Curated by Douglas Dreishpoon, the director of t...
The Art Newspaper - International art news and eve •

Remembering the Dutch avant-garde artist Jacqueline de Jong

Jacqueline de Jong, the Dutch artist famous for her provocative contributions to the European avant-garde in the 1960s, has died aged 85 following a cancer diagnosis last month.Best known as a painter of macabre and often surreal humour, with an idiosyncratic, expressionistic style, De Jong’s career was distinguished by her appetite for experimentation. Over six decades, she worked in sculpture, jewellery and graphic design, reflecting on themes of war and violence, sex and death. Nonsensical bu...
The Art Newspaper - International art news and eve •

Salisbury Cathedral conservation offers window into William Morris’s workshop

Since its installation in 1879, the stained-glass Burne-Jones Window in the south choir aisle of Salisbury Cathedral has often gone unnoticed, obscured from view by the polychrome stone bulk of the 17th-century Mompesson Monument. Designed by Edward Burne-Jones and made by the William Morris workshop, the window has now been removed for conservation—for the first time in its 145-year history.As well as cleaning away accumulated dirt, the treatment, anticipated to cost nearly £120,000, will resto...
The Art Newspaper - International art news and eve •

Peggy Guggenheim's time in Petersfield before she purchased her Venice palazzo

New York, Venice… Petersfield? The art collector and patron Peggy Guggenheim is famously associated with many of the world’s great cities, but an exhibition opening this month reveals the transformational five years she spent in the West Sussex and Hampshire countryside.Here, between 1934 and 1939, Guggenheim found solace after several difficult years, in which her divorce from Laurence Vail, the father of her children Sindbad and Pegeen, was followed in 1934 by the sudden death of her partner J...
The Art Newspaper - International art news and eve •

New direction: the leaders of Basel’s Kunsthalle and Kunstmuseum discuss their visions for their institutions

In her nine years as the director of Kunsthalle Basel, Elena Filipovic championed the most exciting contemporary artists, including Tiona Nekkia McClodden, P. Staff, Wong Ping and Deana Lawson to name a few. Following the retirement of Josef Helfenstein last year, in April Filipovic took the helm at the world’s oldest public art collection, Kunstmuseum Basel, underscoring her commitment to under-represented artists by hanging Helen Frankenthaler’s newly donated painting Riverhead (1963) in the p...
The Art Newspaper - International art news and eve •

A move to London, the famous logo and liquid lunches: a short history of Thames & Hudson

Seventy-five years after its famous dolphins logo made its debut, Thames & Hudson is among the world’s leading publishers of illustrated books. Its list of more than 2,000 titles in print covers topics from cathedrals to street art, lifestyle to food. And while it is famed for art books, such as the pioneering Subway Art (1984), popular collaborations with David Hockney, and the first commercial edition of The Book of Kells (its best-selling title), Thames & Hudson’s identity is most securely ro...
The Art Newspaper - International art news and eve •

Forgotten photojournalist Bert Hardy revisited in new London show

The UK photojournalist Bert Hardy (1913-95) shot some of the defining images of mid-20th century Britain—his two cheeky boys in Glasgow’s Gorbals and countless memorable images of the Blitz were among those published by the celebrated British photo-magazine Picture Post, where he was chief photographer between 1941 and 1957.Bert Hardy: Photojournalism in War and Peace, which opens at the Photographers’ Gallery this week, offers a corrective to Hardy’s longstanding reputation as “the man who took...
The Telegraph •

Giant vulvas and a flying hippopotamus: when the world’s greatest artists make opera

This weekend, 7 Deaths of Maria Callas arrives at English National Opera. Timed to coincide with the centenary of the soprano’s birth, it has garnered attention because of the involvement of performance artist Marina Abramović, its designer, director and star performer.Reports from the Munich premiere in 2021 suggest less a meeting of two great divas, and more a battle royal – the makings of an excellent plot, perhaps, but a disaster when applied to the production itself. According to Joshua Bar...
The Telegraph •

The domestic abuse survivor who sought refuge in her garden – and became an inspirational artist

In Jean Cooke’s pencil sketch Garden & Sea at Birling Gap II, c.1975, the blasted remnants of plants give us our bearings and a sense of scale: the ‘garden’ is on the very edge of a cliff and we are peering over the crumbling edge to the sea below.“Ungardening” was how Jean Cooke RA (1927-2008) described her approach to horticulture, at Birling Gap on the Sussex coast, where from 1973 she had a holiday cottage, and in Blackheath, southeast London, where she lived at 7 Hardy Road with her husband...
Gagosian •

Friends and Relations: Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, Michael Andrews | Gagosian Quarterly

In this candid interview with Richard Calvocoressi, the painter Frank Auerbach reminisces on his friendships with Michael Andrews, Francis Bacon, and Lucian Freud. The two spoke during the planning of the exhibition Friends and Relations, a show that examines the interconnected lives and art practices of this group of London painters.

In this candid interview with Richard Calvocoressi, the painter Frank Auerbach reminisces on his friendships with Michael Andrews, Francis Bacon, and Lucian Freud...
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