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National Trust acquires rare Isaac Oliver miniature for record £2.1m
Work depicting aristocrat as a young poet will remain on view at Powis Castle in Wales. One of the finest British miniatures, by Isaac Oliver, has been bought by the National Trust. Valued at £5.2m, it has been acquired for £2.1m, because of tax concessions on a sale to a public collection. Even at the lower figure, it is probably a record price for a British miniature. Depicting Edward Herbert, 1st Baron Herbert of Cherbury, the miniature (around 1610-14) will remain on display at the National Trust-owned Powis Castle, near Welshpool in Wales. The sitter was a poet, philosopher and statesman. He is shown as a fashionable and melancholic young…
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Crowds Are Out, Crates Are In as Louvre Takes Flood Precautions
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/video/players/offsite/index.html?videoId=100000004451691 PARIS — The square at the center of the Louvre, dominated by I.M. Pei’s glass pyramid, was desolate early Friday morning, save for a few tourists taking selfies. The museum was closed to visitors, as Paris experienced its worst flooding since 1982 — but inside, staff members and volunteers had worked around the clock to remove artworks from the threat of the rising waters of the Seine River. I was part of a small group of journalists whom the French culture minister, Audrey Azoulay; the museum’s president, Jean-Luc Martinez; and other officials took on a tour of the strangely vacant museum on Friday afternoon. (Broadcast journalists were given priority;…
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Botticelli Reimagined review – Venus in the gutter, more beautiful than ever
Victoria & Albert Museum, London By submerging Botticelli and his Venus in the trashy pool of pop and tourist culture they have inspired, this landmark show elevates them both A dolce and Gabbana dress covered with prints of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, a clip of Uma Thurman emerging from a shell in The Adventures of Baron Munchhausen, graffiti art, Bulgari, a golden Italian racing car wheel that quotes a Botticelli brooch. I have wandered into some wonderland suspended between beauty and kitsch, where the Renaissance has morphed into trashy pop culture. One version of The Birth of Venus, by Vik Muniz, is literally made of trash, an assemblage of junk…
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This is what Art tells us about our History
Ask the question of the week – what does it mean to be British? – and the answer you might get from our metropolitan art galleries might be at once polymorphic and paradoxical, but also strangely consoling, in the way of the best culture, about the dark times in which we live. From the British Museum (The Celts), to the V&A (European Arts and Crafts, 1600-1815) to the Royal Academy (Ai Weiwei) and Tate Britain (Artist and Empire), many great British collections present a magic tapestry open to almost infinite reinterpretation. This dazzling collage of portraits, jewellery, sculpture, rare photographs, wax tableaux and sumptuous oriental prints underlines a simple, and…
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The meltdown of Europe – as told by toys
When contemporary Art meets the sad European news It all started in 2013, when Nikos Papadopoulos was playing with his eldest son John-Marios. “We were pretending to go to bed using Playmobil – and it gave me the idea to recreate scenes not only about home life, but the whole of society,” he says. Since then, the 36-year-old comedy writer from Thessaloniki has become Greece’s latest art star. He’s spent around €900 on Playmobil to make dozens of artworks in his living-room studio. He approaches the work like a satirist – setting up the figurines to express his political opinions (he could be called a visual columnist or a toy…
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Free and easy: how European drawing finally caught up with China
Recently I was looking at Renaissance drawings with a Chinese friend. The works we were looking at were vast and made with a complex mix of coloured media. She explained that it’s hard to describe drawings like this in Chinese because there is just one word for “drawing”, which simply suggests a flowing sketch. China’s art has always been based on this kind of free drawing, while European art has a long history of being tightly disciplined and studious. Today, as this year’s Jerwood drawing prize shows, the west has caught up with China: this drawing is so open, free and unpredictable it can be almost anything – from the…
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When art becomes sound: Soundscapes in the National Gallery
Exhibition from 8th of July in The National Gallery, London: 6 sound artists choose one painting and compose music in response to that painting.
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If you don’t care about art, you may still call yourself intelligent
The fine arts don’t matter any more to most educated people. This is not a statement of opinion; it is a statement of fact. As recently as the late 20th century, well-educated people were expected to be able to bluff their way through a dinner party with at least some knowledge of “the fine arts” — defined, since the late 18th century, as painting, sculpture, orchestral or symphonic music, as distinct from popular music, and dance/ballet. (“Starchitects” notwithstanding, architecture has never really been one of the fine arts — it is too utilitarian, too collaborative and too public). A few decades ago, in American gentry circles, it would have been…
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Machine Vision Algorithm Chooses the Most Creative Paintings in History
Creativity is one of humanity’s uniquely defining qualities. Numerous thinkers have explored the qualities that creativity must have, and most pick out two important factors: whatever the process of creativity produces, it must be novel and it must be influential. The history of art is filled with good examples in the form of paintings that are unlike any that have appeared before and that have hugely influenced those that follow. Leonardo’s 1469 Madonna and child with a pomegranate, Goya’s 1780 Christ crucified or Monet’s 1865 Haystacks at Chailly at sunrise and so on. Others paintings are more derivative, showing many similarities with those that have gone before and so are thought of as less creative.…
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Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres – Antiochus and Stratonice (1866). In HD!
Click on the image to see Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’ Antiochus and Stratonice in High Resolution, with all its amazing details!
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