The Week In Art Podcast (May 10, 2024): We talk to The Art Newspaper’s reporter Sarvy Geranpayeh about her conversations with six Palestinian artists about their daily lives amid Israel’s ongoing military offensive in Gaza.
Frank Stella, one of the key artists in the history of American abstraction, has died, aged 87. We speak to Bonnie Clearwater, the director and chief curator of the NSU Art Museum in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, who worked with Stella on two landmark shows. And as Spring finally arrives in London, this episode’s Work of the Week is, fittingly, Vanessa Bell’s View into a Garden (1926). It features in an exhibition opening next week at the Garden Museum in London, called Gardening Bohemia: Bloomsbury Women Outdoors. Emma House, the curator at the museum, tells me more.
Glory of the World: Color Field Painting (1950s to 1983), NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale, US, until 25 August. Frank Stella: Recent Sculpture, Deitch Projects, New York, until 24 May.
At first glance, the world economy looks reassuringly resilient. America has boomed even as its trade war with China has escalated. Germany has withstood the loss of Russian gas supplies without suffering an economic disaster. War in the Middle East has brought no oil shock. Missile-firing Houthi rebels have barely touched the global flow of goods. As a share of global gdp, trade has bounced back from the pandemic and is forecast to grow healthily this year.
Elections for the European parliament are less than a month away and far-right parties are predicted to make significant gains in many of the bloc’s 27 member states. The dire shortage of housing, leading to rising rents and property prices, is becoming a unifying focus for voters’ discontent with their current political leaders.
The issue has sparked protests from Amsterdam to Prague and Milan, as the Guardian’s Europe correspondent, Jon Henley, reports. The data is undeniably worrying as young Europeans spend up to 10 times an average salary on rent and mortgage payments, and big cities from the Baltic states to the Iberian peninsula have registered average property price rises of close to 50%. As a result more EU residents live with their parents for longer and put off life-decisions later into adulthood.
While housing does not fall within MEPs’ remit, it is a visible locus for the sense of social unease that has beset the whole bloc and has become a pivot for the far right to turn on racialised minorities. But as European community affairs correspondent Ashifa Kassam discovers, it is those communities that are doubly penalised through discrimination from landlords who, research has shown, turn away potential renters with “foreign” surnames. The political and social ramifications of the housing crisis in Europe is mirrored elsewhere across the globe and is a subject we will return to in the Guardian Weekly in this year of elections.
Times Literary Supplement (May 8 2024): The latest issue features ‘Reverie and revolution’ – Ian Penman on Surrealism; Crime fiction gets political; Scorsese’s English masters, women pianists and more….
Mrs Beeton’s recipes are still followed more than a century later. Kate Green raises a spoon to the first domestic goddess
This is how we brew it
Good coffee, companionship and delectable cakes are on offer in the cafés of the Cots-wolds. Ben Lerwill takes a sip
The magnificent seven
On the 75th birthday of Badminton Horse Trials, Kate Green salutes seven heroes of eventing’s premier weekend
Mere moth or merveille du jour?
The names of our butterflies and moths owe their artistic overtones to a golden group, discovers Peter Marren
Heaven is a place on earth
From Sissinghurst to Charleston, gardens offered the women of the Bloomsbury group refuge, solace and inspiration. Deborah Nicholls-Lee enjoys a stroll
Jane Tuckwell’s favourite painting
The event director of Badminton Horse Trials chooses a hunting scene with personal resonance
Where are the food targets?
Farmers should be allowed to prioritise producing food, believes Minette Batters
An air of homely distinction
The Anglo-American artistic circle of Russell House in Broadway, Worcestershire, lives on through its current incumbents, John Martin Robinson is pleased to say
Blow the froth off
Spring has donned its lacy garb as cow parsley flowers. Vicky Liddell walks the umbellifer lanes
There is no sting in this tale
The fearsome scorpion fly is straight out of science-fiction central casting, says Ian Morton
Angels in the house
Jo Caird marvels at a rare survival in a Cotswold church
The good stuff
Hetty Lintell packs her case and runs away to the airport
Interiors
Curl up and get cosy with the comfiest bedroom accessories, chosen by Amelia Thorpe
A haunt of ancient peace
Recently renovated, the gardens of Iford Manor in Wiltshire are as idyllic today as they were when Harold Peto created the Italianate design, marvels Tiffany Daneff
Native herbs
John Wright adds tonic and raises a glass to the juniper
I don’t think you’re ready for this jelly
Quivering, crystal-clear savoury jelly is all grown up. Tom Parker Bowles braves the wobble
Dulce et decorum est
Michael Sandle is still fighting the good fight through his art as he turns 88, reveals John McEwen
Put some graphite in your pencil
A trick of Cumbrian geology led to worldwide fame for Keswick, scribbles Harry Pearson
The New Yorker (May 6, 2024): The new issue‘s cover featuresMark Ulriksen’s “Shotime” – For many fans, the real harbinger of spring is the beginning of baseball season.
In an interview, the basketball star reveals her humiliation — and friendships — in Russian prison, and her path to recovery.
By J Wortham
On the March afternoon when I met Brittney Griner in Phoenix, the wildflowers were in peak efflorescence, California poppies and violet cones of lupine exploding everywhere. Griner was in bloom too. She was practicing with some local ballers brought in by her W.N.B.A. team, the Mercury, to prepare its players for the start of the season in May. On the court, Griner was loose, confident, trading jokes with the other players between runs.
American investors are gobbling up the storied teams of the English Premier League — and changing the stadium experience in ways that soccer fans resent.
The Week In Art Podcast (May 3, 2024): After years of decreasing public funding, the lingering effects of the Covid pandemic and enduring questions around the ethics of corporate sponsorship, UK museums are facing unprecedented financial pressures.
Some commentators are suggesting that the time has come to abandon the policy of free admission to museums that is viewed by many as key to the cultural fabric of the UK. Among those arguing for charging is the critic and broadcaster Ben Lewis, who joins Ben Luke to discuss the issue.
This week, the British Museum opened the exhibition Michelangelo: the Last Decades. It focuses on the period after 1534, when Michelangelo left his native Florence for Rome, never to return, and embarked on many of his most ambitious projects. We take a tour of the show with its curator, Sarah Vowles.
And this episode’s Work of the Week is Maria Blanchard’s Girl at Her First Communion (1914). The painting features in a new exhibition at the Museo Picasso in Málaga. Its curator, José Lebrero Stals, tells us more about this underappreciated Spanish artist, who was at the heart of the Parisian avant garde in the 1910s and 20s.
Michelangelo: the Last Decades, British Museum, until 28 July.
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