Features
'There's never been a great woman artist'
Women artists face prejudice and discrimination, with their works selling for a fraction of the price of their male counterparts, one of the world's leading art dealers claimed yesterday.
Inside Features
Was Wyndham Lewis the greatest portraitist of his time?
Monday, 7 July 2008
"The greatest portraitist of this or any other time", Walter Sickert once called Wyndham Lewis. Blimey. It's a rare artist-to-artist compliment, and the National Portrait Gallery makes much of it at the entrance to "Wyndham Lewis: Portraits". Not entirely wrong, though. He's certainly one of the the greatest.
Yinka Shonibare: The battle of Trafalgar
Wednesday, 25 June 2008
When Yinka Shonibare accepted his MBE from the Prince of Wales in 2005, there was a certain irony to the situation. Shonibare's work explores British history – and colonialism in particular. Born in Britain to Nigerian parents, he uses traditional African fabrics in his work, which express the entangled relationship between Africa and Europe. The cloth is used as critique of the history of Empire, yet an MBE brought Shonibare to the heart of the Establishment. He wasn't mocking the award by accepting it – he is genuinely proud of it – although he feels there is a critical element to his attitude.
How did Richard Prince produce the most expensive photograph ever?
Sunday, 22 June 2008
As you'd expect of a compulsive collector, Richard Prince's study is full of stuff: you know the kind of thing – a Warhol Car Crash, a custom-bound first edition of Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho, an original copy of Sylvia Plath's verse with handwritten notes by Ted Hughes. Prince isn't gesturing at these, though, but at an issue of French Vogue with a cheesy-looking model on the cover – a pseudo Bad Girl, faux-sneering from the seat of a Harley. "It's a 'Girlfriend'!" Prince yelps, his voice breaking with indignation. "They stole this from me! Well, I'm going to steal it right back."
Over exposed: Is Annie Leibovitz worthy of a retrospective at the National Portrait Gallery?
Thursday, 19 June 2008
In the announcement of the National Portrait Gallery's forthcoming retrospective of work by the celebrated New York-based portrait photographer Annie Leibovitz, one of the sponsors of the show lets us know how proud he is to be working with Annie (note the personal touch) again. Words such as trust, respect, service are bandied about. These are words that are at odds with what many of us think photographers are up to quite a lot of the time. But surely Leibovitz is not one of these? Surely Leibovitz, photographer of an entire, all-too-well-known world of stars and starlets, is not quite like this?
Art of darkness: Dave Brown’s merciless satire
Wednesday, 18 June 2008
I'm a visual journalist. I provide a personal view of a news story, just like the other writers on The Independent's comment pages. But, whereas an 800-word article is easy to put to one side and think, "Maybe I'll read that later," the thing about a cartoon is that you can read it in seconds. That's the cartoonist's strength – I can make a point very rapidly. Hopefully, of course, you can go back and get a bit more from the cartoon later as well (perhaps once you've finished reading the rest of the day's paper).
Mile-high tower wars: How tall is too tall?
Wednesday, 18 June 2008
Prince Charles famously doesn't care for skyscrapers. He sees them as a vain attempt to assert masculinity, like a rock star with a cucumber down his trousers – or, as he puts it: "Trying to make them ever taller than the other person's building is surely taking the commercial macho into the realms of adolescent lunacy".
Bridge over troubled water: Zaha Hadid's latest architectural creation
Tuesday, 17 June 2008
Zaha Hadid's latest architectural creation, the 270m-long Bridge Pavilion across the Ebro river in Zaragoza, Spain, has brought the ghost of the legendary 1920s Russian artist Kazimir Malevich to a conservative city that once garrisoned Franco's troops and was marched on by the 2,000 anarchists of the legendary Durruti Column during the civil war. So is the bridge's architecture revolutionary, or anarchic, or something else entirely?
The 5-minute Interview: Cornelia Parker, Artist
Saturday, 14 June 2008
Shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1997, Parker, 51, has works in the Tate Collection and all over the world. She will be in conversation with Ron Arad as part of a series of talks at the Jerwood Space, in London, on 16 June.
Ahead of the herd: Norman Foster redesigns the elephant house at a Denmark zoo
Thursday, 12 June 2008
Norman Foster, the world's most celebrated hi-tech architect – the Sultan of Seamlessness, so to speak – has just completed an elephant house at Copenhagen Zoo that is not just low-tech but, to an almost shocking degree, earthy in its materiality. If this building had been designed by masters of architectural texture and surface such as Herzog and de Meuron, or Peter Zumthor, that quality would have been a given. The fact that Foster + Partners created this tough and strangely pre-eroded domain is a bolt from the blue. In its way, the elephant house may be as seminal for the practice as the black glass amoeba in Ipswich, known as the Willis Faber building, was in 1974.
Another side of Bob Dylan
Tuesday, 10 June 2008
When you spend so much of your time on the road, there are so many spaces between the spaces. So, some time between about 1989 and 1992, Bob Dylan took up drawing again. He'd drawn in the past, a great deal in the 1960s. In fact, after that mysterious motorcycle accident of his, he even spent some time in the bowels of Carnegie Hall being tutored in art by a Russian professor of painting. We'd seen his artwork on the sleeves of his albums, too – that strange, startled moon face that stares out at us from Self Portrait, for example, or that bristling sheaf of stark faces on the cover of Planet Waves.
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In pictures: Earthworks 2008
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1 Scandalissimo! Puccini's sex life laid bare
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8 'There's never been a great woman artist'
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FIVE BEST EXHIBITIONS
The Courtauld C�zannes (Courtauld Gallery, London)
Card Players, Man with a Pipe, Mont Sainte-Victoire and several more feature in this showcase of the gallery’s collection of the French master painter.
Radical Light (National Gallery, London)
Segantini, Volpedo, Previati? Discover the Italian Divisionists who, between 1891 and 1910, linked their pointillist painting techniques with left-wing politics.
Cy Twombly (Tate Modern, London)
An overview of the past 50 years for an old American artist doing romantic gestural painting: burning colours, gnarled splurges, shimmering streaks, mythic resonance.
The Fabric of Myth (Compton Verney, Warwick)
The theme is mythology and textiles: legendary threads, carpets and cloaks by Beuys, Bourgeois and Moore.
Antony Gormley’s Field for the British Isles (St Helens College)
One of the hits of the 1990s: a sea of 40,000 pint-sized clay folk – obedient, expectant, all eyes, stopping dead in a line at your feet.