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China launches crackdown on social media
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A new cybersecurity law in China, which came into effect in June, is likely to push artists into deeper levels of self-censorship. In the first week of its implementation, authorities used the law to target celebrity gossip on social media platforms WeChat and Weibo. Sixty accounts were closed down, including that of the popular film blog Dushe Dianying. Younger users of social media platforms “are feeling nervous for the first time”, says Xu Wenkai, a Shanghai- and Berlin-based media artist and blogger who goes by the name Aaajiao. The new law requires companies to prohibit anonymity and to monitor and report on their employees’ activities online, according to the international organisation Human Rights Watch. The Cyberspace Administration of China said in a statement that the intention is to protect “national security, the public interest, as well as the rights and interests of citizens”.
The law specifically targets corporate accounts on the social media platform WeChat, which allows users to send messages and make payments, among other functions.
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Whitechapel Gallery to host first major Thomas Ruff retrospective in London
The Whitechapel Gallery is to stage the first major London retrospective of photographs by Thomas Ruff this autumn. Organised by the institution’s director, Iwona Blazwick, the survey will include examples of all the German artist’s key series—from his billboard-sized portraits of friends shot in Düsseldorf in the 1980s to his exquisitely coloured photographs derived from Japanese manga.“This is an artist who changed the language of photography,” Blazwick says. “His entire oeuvre is very complex, but there is one central theme running through it: what is photography?”
Early on, Ruff’s portraits cemented his reputation on the international art scene, but he rarely turned the camera on himself. The Whitechapel exhibition (27 September-21 January 2018) will include the only works to depict the artist: L’Empereur (1982), a sequence of eight images that show Ruff slumped over two chairs. At the same time, a selection of his colossal portraits from the 1980s will go on show at the National Portrait Gallery.
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Thomas Ruff's Porträt (P Stadtbäumer) (1988) (© the artist)
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Thomas Ruff's press++21.11 (2016) (© the artist)
Astronomical imagery has played a key part in Ruff’s 40-year career (after finishing high school he was faced with the decision of becoming either a photographer or an astronomer). In addition to his Sterne (stars) series (1989-92)—photographs taken by a telescope at the European Southern Observatory—the retrospective will feature photographs of the surface of Mars taken by Nasa’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Other series to go on display include studies of suburban homes, a group of works based on negatives (conceived after Ruff realised his children had never seen a negative) and pixelated images derived from*photographs taken from the internet.
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David Hockney gallery opens in Bradford ahead of artist’s 80th birthday
The city of Bradford is honouring its most famous artist son, David Hockney, by opening a permanent gallery in Cartwright Hall today (7 July) dedicated to the veteran painter. The launch of the Hockney Gallery, which will house the artist’s early sketchbooks and family photography albums, marks his 80th birthday on Sunday (9 July).
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The new space will house the largest collection of work dating from Hockney’s time as a student at Bradford School of Art (1953-57), before he moved to London in 1959. Early series of prints such as The Blue Guitar (1977) and A Rake’s Progress (1961-63) will also go on show.
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Hobby Lobby agrees to pay $3m fine for Iraqi looted artefacts
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The Oklahoma City-based Hobby Lobby is known to most Americans for its refusal to pay for health insurance that includes female contraception, but last week the arts-and-crafts vendor gained still more infamy when it was slapped with a complaint from federal prosecutors in Brooklyn that the company bought 5,500 artefacts illegally smuggled out of Iraq in December 2010.*The complaint alleges that Hobby Lobby's $1.6m purchase was rife with "red flags", not least among them the decision to go ahead with the sale despite the fact that in-house counsel advised the company's president Steve Green, that the objects' shady provenance might indicate that they were looted from Iraq.
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Rana Begum organises Yorkshire Sculpture Park show with a little help from #Instagram
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The Bangladesh-born, London-based artist Rana Begum says she has never been a particularly avid user of social media, but began to use Instagram as a way to “keep up to date” with exhibitions and what other artists were up to, especially after having children. “It is a great way to discover artists and feel connected to the art world,” she says.Occasional Geometries (15 July-29 October), which opens this weekend at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP) near Wakefield, has been primarily selected by Begum from the Arts Council collection. But the exhibition also includes works by artists that Begum discovered on Instagram, such as Nicky Hirst and Charlotte Moth. Hirst’s work in the exhibition, Instagram Feed (2016), is taken from–and named after–the social media platform. The images are taken from her feed and then organised under different hashtags, in this case #drawing63 and #abstract63.
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The Hive
The Hive by Peter Stewart
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Tate Impressionist blockbuster reunites six of Monet’s Houses of Parliament pictures
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For an exhibition on the Impressionists in London, Tate will be reassembling six of Monets views of the Houses of Parliament. This is the first time so many from the series have been brought together in Europe since 1973.
The show, Impressionists in London: French Artists in Exile (1870-1904), is due to open at Tate Britain in November and then travel to the Petit Palais in Paris next year. The exhibition will begin with Monet and Pissarro fleeing the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 to come to London.
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Motion to dismiss denied in copyright suit against Richard Prince and Gagosian
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A Manhattan federal court judge yesterday rejected the request of Richard Prince, the Gagosian Gallery, and Larry Gagosian to dismiss the copyright infringement lawsuit of photographer Donald Graham. Graham alleges that Prince unlawfully used his photograph Rastafarian Smoking a Joint (1996) when he enlarged an Instagram post of it for his New Portraits show at Gagosian in 2014. Four other lawsuits have been filed by other photographers alleging the defendants infringed their work in the same exhibition. Yesterday’s ruling was the first decision to address the copyright issues and the case will be closely watched for its interpretation of fair use for images posted via the social-media app.
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Tate Liverpool’s long-serving art handler (Ken) gets his own show
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Tate Liverpool is honouring its art handling manager, Ken Simons—who has been at the institution since it opened in 1988—in a special way. As he prepares to retire, Ken will present an exhibition of 30 works drawn from the Tate collection “Ken’s Show: Exploring the Unseen (2 April-17 June 29108), in the ground floor Wolfson Gallery, includes some of his favourite works, many of which he has previously installed in the galleries,” a Tate statement says. Ken’s preferred pieces include Light Red Over Black (1957) by Mark Rothko, J.M.W. Turner’s Snow Storm, Steam-Boat off a Harbour's Mouth (1842) and Equivalents for the Megaliths by Paul Nash (1935).
Ken says he has got to know the works personally. “It is through this hands-on interaction and curating this show that I learnt and understood much more about artists’ exploration of space,” he says (could this start a tradition, we wonder, whereby dedicated front-of-house*staff turn their hand to curatorial matters?).
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Italian high court gives green light to Colosseum archaeological park
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The Italian government can proceed with a plan to create a new archaeological park around the Colosseum in Rome, the Council of State has ruled. Italy’s top administrative court has also unblocked the international selection process for a new director to oversee the ancient amphitheatre and its surrounding monuments, including the Roman Forum, Palatine Hill and Domus Aurea. The decisions of 24 July overturn a challenge by the mayor of Rome through the Lazio regional administrative tribunal (TAR) on 7 June.
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Calling all Young Masters
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Plenty of the world’s most famous artists started their careers when they were still young whippersnappers — Dalí created his first work at six years old (although, ironically, it was more Realist than his later works), Michelangelo was painting intricate masterpieces from his early teens and Picasso’s artist father gave up his artistic dreams when he realised that, at 13, his son’s skills surpassed his own.
Now, a new competition to find today’s creative child prodigies will give ten young artists the chance to have their work shown on billboards across the UK this September. Launched by BIC® KIDS, in partnership with Mumsnet, the contest is open to children from the age of five to eleven.
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Harold Williams, founding president and CEO of LA’s J. Paul Getty Trust, has died
Harold Marvin Williams, the founding president and chief executive of the Los Angeles-based J. Paul Getty Trust, died on Sunday, 30 July, aged 89. Williams—a businessman who had also served as the dean of the Graduate School of Management at the University of California, Los Angeles and the chairman of the US Securities and Exchange Commission—became the president and chief executive of the Getty Museum in 1981. He took up the reins as the president and chief executive of Getty Trust when it was established that same year, and held this position until 1998 (retiring on 5 January, his 70th birthday).
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Ai Weiwei’s refugee film Human Flow picked up by Amazon
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Human Flow, Ai Weiwei’s first feature film about the global refugee crisis which premieres at the Venice International Film Festival at the end of this month, is due to be released in American theatres this autumn. The US distribution rights to the film have been acquired by Amazon Studios, the media production arm of the online retailer giant owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos, so fans of the Chinese artist-activist could soon expect to stream the documentary at home.
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Garage Museum founders split
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The Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich and Garage Magazine founder Dasha Zhukova—one of the contemporary art scene’s biggest power couples—have split. In a statement released to the media on Monday, the couple said: “We are committed to jointly raising our two children. We will also continue to work together as co-founders of the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow and the New Holland Island cultural centre in Saint Petersburg.”Abramovich, the owner of England’s Chelsea Football Club, is ranked 12th on the 2017 Forbes list of Russian billionaires, with a fortune estimated at $9.1 billion. Zhukova, who sits on the boards of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Metropolitan Museum in New York, was ranked 98th on ArtReview magazine’s 2016 Power 100 list of “most influential people in the contemporary art world”.
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American Furniture & Decorative Arts: Deacon Benjamin Titcomb and his wife (1798)
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13 August: American Furniture & Decorative Arts
Pair of Portraits of Deacon Benjamin Titcomb and his wife Anne Pearson Titcomb (1798) by John Brewster
Est. $30,000-$50,000
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Winter is coming to Madison Square Park
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As daylight grows shorter this winter, Madison Square Park’s central Oval Lawn will be blanketed by a small blizzard of incandescent light when the Austrian-born artist Erwin Redl installs his public art work Whiteout (13 November-18 April 2018).
Commissioned by the park’s non-profit group Mad Sq Arts, the installation will be made up of hundreds of white spheres embedded with LED lights and suspended from steel poles. The projects aims to evoke “the phenomenon of a whiteout that, in nature, disorients the viewer by compromising our perception”, Redl told The Art Newspaper.
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Olafur Eliasson’s Room for one colour (1997) is installed in its Sainsbury’s Wing
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The National Gallery’s engagement with contemporary art will take an immersive turn when Olafur Eliasson’s Room for one colour (1997) is installed in its Sainsbury’s Wing as an “epilogue” to Monochrome, a show about the artist’s decision to paint and draw in black, shades of grey or other single colours since the Middle Ages (30 October-18 February 2018). The room, which is illuminated by yellow mono-frequency lamps like those that bathed Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall during Eliasson’s The Weather Project in 2003-04, will transport visitors into a monochrome world. In the white room bathed with yellow light viewers' spectral range is limited to yellow and black.
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Museum visitor steps on Yves Klein work at Bozar in Brussels
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The Centre for Fine Arts (Bozar) in Brussels had a colourful day on Wednesday (16 August) when a visitor trod upon on and damaged a work in the Yves Klein exhibition, Theatre of the Void (closed 20 August). While approaching another work across a gallery space, the visitor inadvertently walked on Pigment bleu sec (Dry Blue Pigment), a shallow wood basin spread with sand and the artist’s signature matte pigment, International Klein Blue (IKB), leaving white footprints on the work and blue material on the floor.
“Even though we have several safety measures (warning signs, a partial barrier and a guard), the man was too fascinated [with the other work] to notice all of that,” a museum spokeswoman tells The Art Newspaper. Bozar employees fully restored the work in-situ the same day, re-arranging the sand and adding more IKB. Dry Blue Pigment, first conceived in 1957, must be re-installed with new sand and pigment each time it is shown, the spokeswoman adds, “so it’s not the same as damage to a ‘unique piece’”.
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Reflection Of Mount Rainer In Calm Lake
'Reflection Of Mount Rainer In Calm Lake'
Photography by Bill Hinton
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Bizarre Pollock forgery scam targets unwary collectors in the US
A forgery scam that poses a “significant threat” to unsuspecting art buyers has been uncovered by the International Foundation for Art Research (IFAR), which has identified four fakes purportedly by Jackson Pollock that were brought to it for authentication by three different owners. All the works surfaced starting in 2013, and are said to have come from the collection of James Brennerman, who, as far as IFAR can determine, is a fictitious identity.
The organisation, which has helped authenticate works by the artist since the Pollock-Krasner Authentication Board was disbanded in 1995, outlined its investigation into the forgeries in the most recent issue of its IFAR Journal. It has seen photographs of ten other fake Pollocks and spotted another one online, all apparently from the same cache. To date IFAR is aware of less than two dozen possible fakes, but it fears there may be many more, since the paintings submitted to it were accompanied by a hefty dossier of documents referring to Brennerman’s collection of more than 700 works by Pollock. Those documents also refer to paintings by artists including Kline, De Kooning, Renoir, Monet, Hassam, Rothko, Manet, Hopper, Motherwell and Gorky, which Brennerman envisioned would “eventually form the core of his own art museum”, the IFAR Journal reports.
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A photo from the Brennerman dossier said to depict the collector as a young man (Photo courtesy International Foundation for Art Research (IFAR))
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The Biennale de Montréal has cancelled its 2018 edition due to debt
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There will be no 2018 edition of the Biennale de Montréal due to a deficit of C$200,000 after the close of the last edition, Le Grand Balcon (19 October 2016-15 January 2017). “Despite having had artistic successes, we had to cancel the biennale,” the chairman of the board, Cédric Bisson, tells The Art Newspaper. The event first announced the cancellation in July.Bisson says the board was given “inaccurate figures by the management team” during the event, and so they did not know the full scope of the financial difficulties until January, after the biennale ended. He says that issues with the management team, led by the Biennale’s executive and artistic director Sylvie Fortin, contributed to the deficit. Fortin, who took up her post in 2013, when the event was re-organised as an independent entity, resigned at the end of January after the issues came to light.
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Berkshire Museum board turns down $1m to pause art sale
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A $1m offer from an anonymous group of donors to pause the Berkshire Museum’s planned sale of art from its collection has been turned down by the board of trustees, the Berkshire Eagle reports. The cash came with the stipulation that the museum hold off for at least a year on auctioning 40 works of art, including two original paintings by Norman Rockwell. The sales would raise money for a $40m endowment and an ambitious $20m “reinvention” that would turn the 114-year-old curio cabinet-style natural history and art museum into a cutting-edge interdisciplinary institution.
“Although we must decline, we are grateful for the offer,” Elizabeth McGraw, the president of the museum’s board of trustees, said in a statement.The museum’s administration says the art sale and overhaul are necessary to help shore up a precarious financial situation, including an annual deficit of around $1.2m for the past ten years.
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Tonight's Sunset at Simonside Hills
Tonight's Sunset at Simonside Hills UK
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La Vi
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The Traveller by René Algesheimer
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Marlen by Martin Kühn
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Saline Worker by Camilo Otero
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Tremble by Timothy Poulton
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The black and white suit by Julien Oncete
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Core Temp and Symmetry by Bradley Huchteman
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Westrenen Photography by René van Westrenen Photography
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..whose pumpkin?.. by Elena Shumilova
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Meline by Lods Franck
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South America from the International Space Station
Stunning picture of South America taken from the International Space Station
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Breaking the Sky by Marc Adamus
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my dreams by Mehmet Emin Ergene
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Chair - The Hepworth Wakefield
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The Hepworth Wakefield, the Art Fund Museum of the Year 2017, is seeking to appoint a new Chair from the Spring of 2018.
The Hepworth Wakefield (THW), run as an independent Charitable Trust, is at the heart of the city-wide regeneration project that Wakefield Council set out in 2007. Its building, opened in 2011, designed by the award-winning architect, Sir David Chipperfield, is a testament to the ambition of Wakefield and the relationship between the architecture, the works of art on display and the strong sense of place that are all part of the unique experience that more than 200k visitors in 2016/2017 encountered. Providing a permanent public legacy for the art of Barbara Hepworth in her home city, the Gallery has achieved national and international recognition for its exhibition programme and its learning and engagement activity while remaining firmly rooted in its locality.
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The last sunset
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Early morning by Jari Ehrström
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barber by Andrea Schuh
