painting – The News Desk

A painting of Winston Churchill by an artist whose work he hated is up for auction

17Apr

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A painting of Winston Churchill by an artist whose work he hated is up for auction

LONDON -- A portrait of Winston Churchill by an artist whose work the British leader loathed went on display Tuesday at Churchill’s birthplace ahead of an auction in June.The painting by modernist artist Graham Sutherland was made in preparation for a larger portrait that Churchill hated and which was later destroyed — an episode recounted in the TV series “The Crown.”The surviving oil-on-canvas study shows Churchill’s head in profile against a dark background. It is expected to sell for between 500,000 pounds and 800,000 pounds ($622,000 and $995,000) at Sotheby’s in London on June 6.Sutherland was commissioned by the Houses of Parliament to paint Churchill to mark his 80th birthday in 1954. The full-length portrait was unveiled in Parliament that year, with Churchill calling it, with a ...

Pompeii’s ancient art of textile dyeing is revived to show another side of life before eruption

21Dec

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Pompeii’s ancient art of textile dyeing is revived to show another side of life before eruption

POMPEII, Italy -- A new project inside the Pompeii archaeological site is reviving ancient textile dyeing techniques to show another side of daily life before the city was destroyed by a volcano in A.D. 79The inspiration comes from frescoes unearthed inside the archaeological site that show winged cupids dyeing cloth, gathering grapes for wine and making perfumes.“It is very close to the actual reality,” the archaeological site’s director, Gabriel Zuchtriegel, said of the images.For the project, Zuchtriegel tapped a master dyer based in Umbria, Claudio Cutuli, who uses dyes that he makes from plants in his own clothing line.Cutuli uses the root of “rubia tinctorum,” or rose madder, for the famous Pompeiian red. He uses walnut husks for brown, elderberries for black and gray and cardamom f...

Artist Zeng Fanzhi depicts ‘zero-COVID’ after a lifetime of service to the Chinese state

27Nov

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Artist Zeng Fanzhi depicts ‘zero-COVID’ after a lifetime of service to the Chinese state

SHENZHEN, China -- In one painting, a child sits, mouth wide open, as a worker in white medical garb extends a long cotton swab toward her tonsils. In another, a masked officer and medical workers stand guard in front of an apartment cordoned off with ropes and seals reading “CLOSED,” as residents look on with frustration and despair.These are some of the portraits that Zeng Fanzhi, 85, has painted to commemorate three years of China’s strict “zero-COVID” controls, which sparked nationwide protests a year ago. But Zeng, a retired architect living in Shenzhen, is not a critic of the measures, under which millions of people were tested, locked in apartments, or carried off to quarantine centers.Zeng has spent much of his life in service to the Chinese state, designing monuments in Beijing’s...

Climate activists smash glass protecting Velazquez’s Venus painting in London’s National Gallery

7Nov

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Climate activists smash glass protecting Velazquez’s Venus painting in London’s National Gallery

LONDON -- Two climate change protesters were arrested Monday after they smashed a protective glass panel covering a famous Diego Velázquez oil painting at London's National Gallery, police said Monday. The two activists from the group Just Stop Oil targeted Velázquez's “The Toilet of Venus,” also known as “The Rokeby Venus," with small hammers. Photos showed the protective glass panel punctured with several holes.Just Stop Oil, which has previously led similar protests targeting famous artworks and public buildings, said Monday's action was to demand Britain's government immediately halt all licensing for the exploration, development and production of fossil fuels in the U.K. The group said Monday that the two activists chose to target Velázquez's 17th-century oil painting, one of the Spa...

300-year-old painting stolen by an American soldier during World War II returned to German museum

20Oct

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300-year-old painting stolen by an American soldier during World War II returned to German museum

CHICAGO -- After a stopover in the U.S. that lasted the better part of a century, a baroque landscape painting that went missing during World War II was returned to Germany on Thursday. The FBI handed over the artwork by 18th century Austrian artist Johann Franz Nepomuk Lauterer to a German museum representative in a brief ceremony at the German Consulate in Chicago, where the pastoral piece showing an Italian countryside was on display. Art Recovery International, a company focused on locating and recovering stolen and looted art, tracked down the elusive painting after a person in Chicago reached out last year claiming to possess a “stolen or looted painting” that their uncle brought back to the U.S. after serving in World War II.The painting has been missing since 1945 and was first re...

Black portraitist Barkley L. Hendricks is 1st artist of color to get Frick solo show

26Sep

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Black portraitist Barkley L. Hendricks is 1st artist of color to get Frick solo show

NEW YORK -- A dozen years ago, Barkley L. Hendricks, the pioneering portrait artist known for vivid, stylish paintings of Black men and women, stood outside the Frick Collection in Manhattan, known for its works by European Old Masters. He was explaining his love for Rembrandt.“It’s like good music,” the artist said that day. "You can be replenished every time you hear it.”By the time Hendricks died in 2017, the art world was finally giving overdue recognition to his work, which applied centuries-old traditions of European painting to depictions of Black figures — friends, relatives or strangers he photographed in the streets with his Polaroid. Still, curators say, he'd likely have never imagined that in 2023, he’d be the first artist of color to have a solo show at the 88-year-old Frick....

Cecily Brown’s Attempt to Make Impossible Art

11Sep

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Cecily Brown’s Attempt to Make Impossible Art

Cecily Brown’s art makes me feel like I’m trapped in a “Twilight Zone” episode, getting my ironic comeuppance. Everything I thought I loved in a painting—rich color, fleshy figuration, slithery abstraction, dense, macabre compositions à la Bruegel and Soutine—gets chucked into the meat grinder of her style and comes out harder to swallow. In her mid-career survey at the Met, “Cecily Brown: Death and the Maid,” comprising some four dozen works made between 1997 and 2022, you will find enough tasty morsels to confirm that she’s a formidable artist. You will also find a surprising number of images that seem muddled or distracted, as though beginning again with each brushstroke. Good abstraction has something inevitable about it—look hard enough and you find the hidden anatomy holding things ...