Apollo Magazine – January 2023 Issue
The painter’s house in Suffolk now tells a compelling story about his formative influence
George II gave his god-daughter a decorative silver bowl that was later put to surprisingly practical use
In Drawing Thought, artist-educator Andrea Kantrowitz invites readers to use drawing to extend and reflect on their own thought processes. She interweaves illuminating hand-drawn images with text, integrating recent findings in cognitive psychology and neuroscience with accounts of her own artistic and teaching practices.
The practice of drawing, with paper and pencil or whatever else is at hand, is a simple and accessible means to become more mindful and aware of our inner and outer worlds. Time slows down when we start drawing. Our attention shifts. Setting aside our worries and fears about the future, we can draw ourselves into stillness. Drawing provides an active way to engage deeply with the present moment, locating our thoughts, perceptions, and feelings, in time and space.
It’s our final podcast of 2022 and so, as ever, we’re looking back at the worlds of art and heritage over the past 12 months.
Ben Luke is joined by three members of The Art Newspaper team: Louisa Buck, contemporary art correspondent, Kabir Jhala, acting deputy art market editor, and Ben Sutton, editor in the Americas. Among much else, they discuss the effects of the war in Ukraine,
Just Stop Oil’s activism, unionisation in US museums, the restitution of African and Native American (and Greek) objects, and the NFT crash. They also look at the big art shows and, finally, choose a work of the year. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Watch Royal Academy curators Sarah Lea and Professor Dorothy Price discuss the pioneering work of four women making art on their own terms: Paula Modersohn-Becker, Kӓthe Kollwitz, Gabriele Münter and Marianne Werefkin.
The twentieth-century styles such as neo-gothic, art nouveau, and modernism that characterize Gaudí’s designs are reflected in the AI-generated images through vivid colors and free-flowing coral-like shapes. The digital art series are illustrated through the process of combining popular text-to-image software, Midjourney, and Photoshop for additional editing.
Ursula (Winter 2023) is the art magazine of Hauser & Wirth, featuring essays, profiles, films, interviews, original portfolios, and photography by some of the most thought-provoking writers and artists in the world.
Henry Taylor in conversation with Sheree Hovsepian about depiction and the depicted
For our first film in a new series focusing on some of the world’s best emerging and established artist-makers, we take you inside the studio of Akiko Hirai
December 8, 2022: The Parthenon Marbles; it has emerged that George Osborne, the former UK chancellor and now chair of the trustees of the British Museum, has been holding talks with the Greek government about the ancient sculptures.
So might this lead to a breakthrough in the long-running dispute over their ownership? Ben Luke speaks to Yannis Andritsopoulos, the reporter for the Greek newspaper Ta Nea who broke the story. In Afghanistan, it is more than a year since the Taliban reclaimed power—so what has become of the heritage projects and art community in the country, which is consumed by a devastating humanitarian crisis?
We hear from Sarvy Geranpayeh, who has regularly reported from Afghanistan for The Art Newspaper, about art and archeology under the Taliban. And this episode’s Work of the Week is a group of five murals by the German-born US artist Kiki Smith. The works are about to be unveiled at Grand Central Madison, the new Long Island Rail Road terminal below Grand Central on Madison Avenue, Manhattan. Smith tells us about the origin and development of her series of vast mosaics.
The miniaturist Sarah Biffen (subject of the excellent Without Hands show at Philip Mould gallery in London, until 12 December, and accompanying publication), born with no arms or legs, was one of many professional women artists to exhibit in major venues in Paris and London between 1760 and 1830, beyond the few currently celebrated (Angelica Kauffman, Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, etc.), as Spies-Gans’s exhaustive, groundbreaking research reveals in this beautifully produced book.
This year has been a particularly good one for stand-alone publishing on historic and Modern women artists, and women’s significant influence within the international art world—fingers crossed this signals a shift (at last) from niche to mainstream. Honourable mention goes to Lund Humphries’s Illuminating Women Artists series, with two books in the bag (Luisa Roldán and Artemisia Gentileschi) and two more scheduled for 2023 (Elisabetta Sirani and Rosalba Carriera). It was a brutal selection process, but the first of my top three, from the many excellent books we reviewed over the last year, is Fischer’s Käthe Kollwitz. Kollwitz’s brilliance requires no introduction, but this exquisitely illustrated survey, while exploring her many iconic works, draws attention to lesser-known imagery including her subtly erotic subjects.
Chicago University Press’s first English translation of the Parisian art dealer Berthe Weill’s 1933 memoir was pipped to the post by this superb biography of the equally extraordinary Jo van Gogh-Bonger. So much has been written on Vincent van Gogh that you wonder what more can be said. It turns out much more on the woman who was the early driving force behind the Dutch artist’s legacy.
More and more commentators are making their voices heard in the clamour around today’s so-called “culture wars”, outlining the ideologies behind the destruction of, for instance, historic statues. Bevan astutely argues that those who manipulate our cultural past are shaping our future, making the case that historic buildings have become battlegrounds for right-wing and nationalist political arguments. Interestingly, he also questions the authority of Unesco. In one of many polemics, he says: “At the same time as its role in protecting culture has become suffocated by national interests, Unesco now appears to operate on the premise that any wartime damage should be undone.”
This updated version of The Value of Art, first published in 2012, features important new material, focusing on, for instance, the rise of NFTs. Findlay asks, “where are the NFT art critics?… there is little discourse on the relative aesthetic qualities of the images themselves”. He also has strong opinions on “protest art”, saying: “In very broad terms, artists represent the protesting class while collectors represent the museum trustee class, and while the cultural ecosystem needs both, on issues of social justice they are often on different sides of the barricades.”
As a key member of the activist group Gulf Labor Coalition, Gregory Sholette has a unique perspective. Sholette examines this fascinating subject “from the perspective of an artist and activist who has been active in the field since the 1980s,” writes the art historian Marcus Verhagen in the introduction. This informed analysis spans more than 60 years of art activism, from the Situationist International group of social revolutionaries (1957-72), which directly engaged with the student uprisings in Paris in May 1968, to Black Lives Matter today, which has “unquestionably set a new high bar for protest aesthetics”, Sholette says.
Neville’s photobook of Ukrainian life before Russia’s invasion in February is both a call to arms—the photographer sent 750 free copies to influential people who might “have it in their power to help Ukraine”—and a stark reminder that Ukraine was already at war in its east, as depicted in the photographs of soldiers manning trenches and checkpoints. However, it is the tender portraits of everyday life—people at the beach, in school, at a rave, eating ice cream—that really bring home the tragedy that has unfolded in Ukraine.
While most of the case studies in this book are from the literary world, the opening section on Alice Neel is a searing account of the complexities of balancing (or not) being a mother and an artist—and the often heavy price women pay. Neel, for example, can sometimes come across as brutal and uncaring, but these labels would rarely be used to describe an artist father in the same situation. Neel said that for much of her life she felt she “didn’t have the right to paint because I had two sons”. The book explores the difficult issues around the subject with no judgment and or neat conclusions—and is all the richer for it.
If you missed the standout Raphael show at London’s National Gallery earlier this year, its catalogue is the next best thing. The rich imagery and texts make it the perfect coffee table book for art history buffs to dip into over the holiday season. There are also tasty titbits to tell the family over Christmas lunch, such as the belief that the Vatican’s foundations began cracking at news of Raphael’s death. Or when Munich’s Alte Pinakothek sold Raphael’s masterpiece Bindo Altoviti because it was believed at the time to have been painted by his assistant Giulio Romano, to buy what turned out to be a discredited Matthias Grünewald…
As Art Basel returns to Florida for the 20th anniversary of its Miami Beach art fair, Aimee Dawson, the acting digital editor at The Art Newspaper, talks to Anny Shaw, the acting art market editor, about the sales, news and talking points at the event that has become most synonymous with art-world excess.
December 2, 2022: Meanwhile, after Arts Council England announced its funding allocation in November, arts organisations across the country, and especially in London, are reeling. Ben Luke talks to Jenni Lomax, the former director of the Camden Art Centre—the north London non-profit gallery whose funding has been cut by more than 30%. They discuss the effect of the cuts, and why the response from the visual arts community is relatively quiet compared to the uproar in the worlds of theatre and opera.
And this episode’s Work of the Week is Oleksandr Bohomazov’s Sharpening the Saws (1927), a work from the National Art Museum of Ukraine in Kyiv. The painting is among a host of works moved from the war-torn country to the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum in Madrid for the exhibition In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900-1930s. Katia Denysova, the co-curator of the show, tells us about the picture, and the extraordinary journey it took from Kyiv to the Spanish capital.Art Basel in Miami Beach until 3 December.In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900-1930s, Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum, Madrid, until 30 April 2023.
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