This week: we talk to Emma Brown of Just Stop Oil about why the group targeted Vincent Van Gogh’s Sunflowers in the National Gallery, London, for its climate emergency protest.
Stacy Boldrick, assistant professor of museum studies at the University of Leicester, discusses the climate protests in the context of the long history of iconoclasm and attacks on works of art. The first version of Paris+, Art Basel’s fair in the French capital, opened this week, and we ask Melanie Gerlis, a columnist for the Financial Times and The Art Newspaper, how it compares to Paris’s previous fair, Fiac, and to the Frieze fairs in London last week.
And this episode’s Work of the Week is Frank Bowling’s Suncrush (1976), which features in an exhibition of the Guyana-born artist’s work at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Reto Thüring, the curator of the show, tells us about the painting and Bowling’s 10-year stay in America in the 1960s and 1970s.
Links:juststopoil.orgStacy Boldrick, Iconoclasm and the Museum, Routledge, 212pp, £27.99, $35.96 (pb)Paris+, until 23 October.Melanie Gerlis, The Art Fair Story: a Rollercoaster Ride, Lund Humphries, 104pp, £19.99, $34.99 (hb)Frank Bowling’s Americas, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 22 October-9 April 2023; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 13 May-10 September next year. Related shows: Equals 6: A Sum Effect of Frank Bowling’s 5+1, University Hall Gallery, UMass Boston, 14 November-18 February 2023; Revisiting 5+1, Paul W. Zuccaire Gallery, Staller Center for the Arts, Stony Brook University, 10 November-23 February 2023.
England, under the volatile Tudor dynasty, was a thriving home for the arts. An international community of artists and merchants, many of them religious refugees, navigated the high-stakes demands of royal patrons, including England’s first two reigning queens. Against the backdrop of shifting political relationships with mainland Europe, Tudor artistic patronage legitimized, promoted, and stabilized a series of tumultuous reigns, from Henry VII’s seizure of the throne in 1485 to the death of his granddaughter Elizabeth I in 1603. 
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