Art Photos mixed

My home away from home
photo by Marco Grassi

A boat by Nejdet Duzen

The Art Newspaper Russia’s fourth prize-giving ceremony, on 17 March, was held (as in previous years) in the vast Manege next to the Kremlin. It was an artistic spectacle in itself, as well as a discriminating sample of Russia’s art life in 2015. Inna Bazhenova, the owner of The Art Newspaper group, again employed the film director Alexey Agranovich and the pioneer of Russian video art, Kirill Preobrazhensky, to produce it.

Aliens, dressed in fluorescent Avant-Garde costumes by the engineer-artist Roman Ermakov, excitedly chattered about this thing called art, while each prize was followed by a themed turn: saucy, dancing air-stewardesses giving safety instructions for visiting a museum (prize for the best museum—Dasha Zhukova’s Garage) or ravishing early church music (best restoration—a 12th-century icon, the Bogolubskaya Mother of God).

The winner in the best publication category was the Sketches of Visuality series, edited by Galina Elshevskaya (New Literary Observer publishing house, Moscow). The best exhibition was the hugely popular 150th anniversary show at Moscow’s State Tretyakov Gallery of the painter Valentin Serov, while the prize for personal contribution went to Stella Kesaeva, who is the commissioner for, and backer of, the Russian pavilion at the Venice Biennale.

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Attacks on artistic freedom are on the rise globally, according to a report issued by Freemuse, an independent organisation based in Copenhagen that advocates for and defends freedom of expression.A study the group conducted, based on media reports and other sources, found that there were 469 cases of attacks on artistic expression last year, almost double the count in 2014. Most of the cases were issues of censorship (292), though the total also includes incidents of artists being detained (23), prosecuted (42), physically attacked (24), or even killed (3). Among the worst offenders last year were authoritarian governments, with China having registered 20 “serious violations”, followed by Iran (16) and Russia (15). The reasons for and types of restrictions on expression detailed in the study are multifarious—headings include “Turkey: Terror Legislation and a Thin-Skinned President” and “Egypt: Censorship Stifles Artistic Freedom”.



The top 10 countries the Freemuse registered as having serious violations of artistic freedom in 2015, including killings, abductions, attacks, threats and imprisonment

The data for the study was largely collected fr om publicly available sources, such as news media, partner organisations and independent reporters. Freemuse therefore say the “disturbing increase” in attacks on expression can be partially explained by improvements in documentation and awareness. But this also means that countries like North Korea, where there is strict state control of the media, have few reported incidents, a flaw Freemuse’s senior programme officer Magnus acknowledged in an interview. “The fact that North Korea is among the most censored and controlled countries in the world is not reflected in our statistics,” Ag says, attributing the lack of evidence “to the fact that it is extremely difficult for any human rights organisation to document and verify information about violations within this repressive regime”. The one case of censorship it registered in North Korean last year was a decree issued by the leader Kim Jong-un, demanding the destruction of tapes and CDs that could threaten the government.The study also classified the November terrorist attacks in Paris, which resulted in the deaths of 89 people, as the single largest attack on artistic freedom. “Without speculating about the motive of the attackers, we see the horrendous attack on the Bataclan as an attack on a music venue wh ere audiences were enjoying the right to participate in cultural life,” Ag says. He adds that an aftereffect was that many people in the city “refrained from visiting museums, attending concerts and theatres in the months following the attacks”.

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What a foggy sunset! by Thomas Blumer

Cosmic Aim by Farhan Zaidi

Morning colors
photo by Tamás Hauk

Alighiero Boetti, Per Sol, Carol, Sofia, Eva LeWitt, Oggi il nono giorno nono mese dell'anno mille novecento ottantotto (For Sol, Carol, Sofia, Eva LeWitt, Today the ninth day of the ninth month of the year nineteen hundred and eighty-eight), 1988.

Drawings from the collection of the American Minimalist and conceptual artist Sol LeWitt are at the centre of an exhibition opening at the Drawing Center in New York. The show offers a peak into the more than 4,000 works by around 750 artists LeWitt amassed before his death in 2007.

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Vincent Van Gogh’s $200m painting, The Night Café (1888), is to remain hanging at Yale University after the US Supreme Court rejected an appeal over its ownership. The decision last week ends a lengthy legal battle between the university and Pierre Konowaloff, who first wrote to Yale in 2008, arguing that the work was stolen from his family during the Russian Revolution. Yale then filed a lawsuit against Konowaloff in 2009 pre-emptively, after which Konowaloff filed a response and counterclaim.

Konowaloff’s lawyer, Allan Gerson, accepted there was nothing else he could do. “This is the end of the road,” Gerson told the student paper, Yale Daily News. “There is not much I or anyone can do except respect the rulings of the court, but I do believe there has been a miscarriage of justice.”

Alexander Dreier, the vice president and general counsel at Yale, said the university had been confident that the Supreme Court would not accept the appeal. “We don’t see any opening for a new challenge to Yale’s ownership,” Dreier said.
Konowaloff had argued that his great-grandfather, the industrialist and aristocrat Ivan Morozov, bought The Night Café in 1908. The Bolsheviks seized Morozov’s extensive collection in 1918 and the Russian government later sold the Van Gogh painting, according to court papers. Yale alumni Stephen Clark, heir to the Singer sewing machine empire, bought the painting in 1933 and bequeathed it to Yale upon his death in 1960.

Affirming an earlier decision, a federal court of appeals sided with Yale in October, citing the “Act of State” doctrine, which prevents US courts from second-guessing the policies of foreign governments. In 2012, the appeals court ruled against Konowaloff in a similar dispute with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York over a painting by Paul Cézanne, which Clark bequeathed to the museum in 1960.

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Song of Spring
Photographer : Robert Blair