Art Photos mixed

As an already contentious presidential election heats up, the Toledo Museum of Art (TMA) in Ohio has staged an exhibition that deciphers political advertising. I Approve This Message: Decoding Political Ads (until 8 November) includes over 50 ads, from the first ever television spot aired in 1952 to those from the 2012 presidential election—all projected onto the 7000-sq. foot gallery space. The show is aimed at timeliness: it opened days before the Republican and Democratic national conventions and closes on Election Day.

“Behavioural studies have informed us that [in order to] change someone’s mind, you need to let them sift through the information themselves,” says Harriett Levin Balkind, who co-organised the exhibition. By informing viewers about some of the ways that advertising manipulates their emotions, the show aims to “turn visitors into critical thinkers who want to dig deeper and become more open-minded, so that we can go forth with civil debates that are less skewed by our feelings and based on real issues,” Balkind says.

Some of the more formidable ads are those that cast past candidates in ways that differ from the public memory of them. In the Nixon Now ad (1972), images of cheerful supporters and upbeat music portray the disgraced president as an “approachable, fun candidate, which is a model that has been replicated, campaign after campaign, including in this cycle by Bernie Sanders,” says Adam Levine, the museum’s associate director.



The 1964 Peace Little Girl (Daisy) ad for Lyndon Johnson’s campaign aired only one time due to vehement protests by opponents. The subsequent broadcast news coverage of the controversy was a harbinger of the free press that comes with “going viral”

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The late 1980s and early 1990s were a heady time of transition in China, particularly for its then nascent avant-garde art scene. The Mao-era restrictions placed upon culture had only been lifted a few years earlier—and then not entirely—and the Tiananmen Square protests and crackdown in the summer of 1989 cast a pall on newfound freedoms.The photographer Xiao Quan captured that era through black and white portraits of many of China’s artistic pioneers, now on display in the exhibition Our Generation at chi K11 Shanghai (through 31 August). Xiao was a protégée of the French photographer Marc Riboud, whose 20 years in China is depicted in the concurrent exhibition of 170 images by Xiao in another room of the museum.

Combined with street shots of the era, the main show follows the early careers of figures like Raise the Red Lantern director Zhang Yimou. Chinese rock music progenitor Cui Jian is shown both off stage and on, sometimes performing to perplexed soldiers. Literary greats Wang Anyi, San Mao, Wang Shuo and Yu Hua receive cameos, and many images capture the youth of now-establishment artists like Chen Danqing, Fang Lijun, and He Duolin, and the curator Lv Peng, who organised the show.




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Tamara de Lempicka’s oil painting La Musicienne (1929) was shown in Madonna’s music video for Vogue (1990)

The Dutch art detective Arthur Brand announced on Twitter Wednesday, 27 July, the recovery of two works stolen from a private museum in the Netherlands in 2009: Salvador Dalí’s gouache Adolescence (1941) and Tamara de Lempicka’s oil painting La Musicienne (1929), which was shown in Madonna’s music video for Vogue (1990). Both works are said to be in good condition.The pieces were brazenly stolen during opening hours on 1 May 2009 from the Scheringa Museum of Realist Art, which was located in the village of Spanbroek in the North Holland province and closed in 2011. Several masked robbers threatened staff and visitors at gunpoint and made off with their loot in a matter of minutes.

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Studio of heartbeats: Boltanski's Les Archives du Coeur at a Berlin restaurant in 2008. Photo: Philipp von Recklinghausen © The artist and Kewenig, Berlin and Palma de Mallorca

Christian Boltanski’s travelling recording studio of heartbeats, Les Archives du Coeur (the heart archive), is taking up residence 12 miles west of Edinburgh. Since 2008, the French artist has captured the sounds of thousands of individuals’ hearts and stored the recordings on the “art island” of Teshima in Japan. For two months this summer, visitors to Jupiter Artland will have a chance to add to the growing library.Boltanski’s perennial themes of mortality and memory run through the other works he is presenting at the park’s indoor and outdoor spaces. For the permanent commission Animitas (little souls), the artist will arrange a constellation of 200 Japanese bells on long metal reeds that map the night sky as it was on 6 September 1944, his birthday. The work was inspired by Chilean roadside shrines to the dead. “This is where Christian wants to put the piece to rest, in one way or another,” says John Heffernan, the programme director at Jupiter Artland.

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The leading US artist Bill Viola is due to install another biblical multi-screen video work in St Paul’s Cathedral in London next month. Mary (2016) will be a companion piece to Viola’s Martyrs (Earth, Air, Fire, Water), which was unveiled in the South Quire aisle in 2014. The new installation, which shows Mary carrying the body of Jesus, is scheduled to be unveiled in the North Quire aisle on 8 September.Both installations have been given to the Tate by the Bill Viola studio but will be on permanent display in the cathedral. The Tate’s conservation team will help maintain the works, which were made in collaboration with Viola’s partner, Kira Perov.

The cost of producing and installing the two large-scale installations, filmed over several years, is £2.5m, says a spokeswoman for the project. This has been raised through the sale of a special edition provided by the artist’s studio as well as contributions from several individuals and trusts. Key supporters include the Art Fund, the Ruddock Foundation for the Arts and Viola’s London-based dealer, Blain Southern.

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More than 60 works drawn from the holdings of the gregarious UK private collector Frank Cohen will go on show at one of London’s most luxurious food and gifts emporiums this autumn (Fortnum’s X Frank, 13 September-15 October). The high-end department store Fortnum & Mason,*which faces the Royal Academy of Arts on Piccadilly, will be dotted with works by big-name artists such as Howard Hodgkin (first floor staircase), Paula Rego (fifth floor entrance) and Frank Auerbach (in the window along with Tracey Emin and Lynn Chadwick).

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“The Andrew Lambirth Collection” sounds rather grand. Perhaps it is: for Face to Face, an exhibition drawn from it of 65 portraits or self-portrait studies variously carried through as painting, drawing or print, represents but one of its many aspects. We can only wonder what else it holds. In quality, variety and discrimination alike, this selection is certainly impressive.We are all collectors at least to some degree, but to be a true collector bespeaks a certain commitment, if not certifiable obsession, within the chosen field. Whatever it may be—a stamp, old china, a Dinky Car, a work of art—the immediate object of pursuit is to be hooked or crooked anyway, whether there is room, or indeed the money for it, or not. The eponymous Andrew Lambirth, former art critic of The Spectator, whose art-critical hat he wore with sympathetic judgement and exemplary curiosity over many years is, by any measure, a True Collector.


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The 17th-century building known as the Rupertinum, which houses part of the Museum der Moderne in Salzburg, Austria, has re-opened on 29 July following a five-month refurbishment.The €950,000 renovation includes the addition of the new 3,800 sq. ft Generali Foundation study centre, housing a specialist library and archives linked to the art collection established in 1988 by the eponymous insurance company. The Generali Foundation comprises around 2,100 works by 200 international artists. Video works by artists including Dan Graham and Gordon Matta-Clark can be viewed in the new study centre.

The Museum der Moderne Salzburg and the foundation entered into a “unique partnership” in January 2014, which will see the institutions eventually merging together, according to a press statement. The museum now “holds one of the most important libraries and archives dedicated to contemporary art in Austria”, says Sabine Breitwieser, the museum director.

A new Franz West lounge furnished with items designed by the late Vienna-born artist is also open to visitors at the refurbished site.



Dan Perjovschi finishing his Visual Wit and Social Critique installation. © Museum der Moderne Salzburg. Photo: Rainer Iglar

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Tenants due to be evicted from a building in the Morningside Heights area of Manhattan say they are worried about the fate of a mural Keith Haring painted across three floors of a stairwell in 1983 or 84. At that time, the former convent building was leased by the Catholic youth organisation Grace House, and Haring painted the mural in one evening, watched by some of the young people there attending a retreat. The artist had visited Grace House multiple times, DJed a party there and convinced the programme director Gary Mallon—backed by the youth—to let him deck the walls.

The five-storey structure is owned by a neighbourhood parish, the Roman Catholic Church of the Ascension, which has rented out modest living spaces in the building for the past three years. Tenants were asked to vacate the premises by 1 August, DNAinfo reports, with the church citing its financial problems in a letter sent to the tenants four months ago. Tenants do not know of the church’s plans for the building, though some have told DNAinfo they have seen developers visit the building. The church did not immediately respond to The Art Newspaper’s request for comment. In late July, two tenants filed a joint lawsuit against the church, alleging the eviction is illegal according to the rent stabilisation laws of the state of New York. They remain in the building, along with some other tenants who were permitted to stay for additional time by the church.

The mural is “part of our identities”, one of the tenants who filed the lawsuit, Robert Savina, told DNAinfo. It is also a valuable example of Haring’s work; as Julia Gruen, the executive director of the Keith Haring Foundation, told the New York Times in 2007: “In terms of imagery, it’s like a lexicon of [Haring’s] vocabulary.” The line of dancing figures moving up the stairwell begins with a Radiant Baby figure and includes other recurring icons like the barking dog.


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Okay by Joe Greer