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GUARDIAN Wed, 16 May 2012 15:29:17 GMT
Exhibition of images of Elizabeth II, which has already visited Belfast, Edinbugh and Cardiff, arrives in capital
A fragile and rarely loaned portrait of the Queen has gone on public display for the first time in 26 years as part of an exhibition of portraiture that includes works that would not necessarily be of her majesty's choosing.
The summer-long show arrived at the National Portrait Gallery in London ahead of the diamond jubilee weekend celebrations. But its curator, Paul Moorhouse, stressed: "The really important thing to say is that it is in no sense an official exhibition. It has not been sanctioned by Buckingham Palace, the Queen did not have a say in the selection. It is a celebration and a respectful view, but it is also an inquisitive exhibition."
The show has already visited Belfast, Edinburgh and Cardiff, but for London there are two important additions: a 1955 portrait by the Italian painter Pietro Annigoni, which is going on public display for the first time....
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GUARDIAN Wed, 16 May 2012 15:37:39 GMT
A report by Riba suggests what we want from our homes – big, light-filled spaces – we just don't get. But in the current economic climate, what can architects do about it?
We all know the English like to think of their homes as castles. But according to a report by the Royal Institute of British Architects, "dungeon" could now be a more fitting medieval analogy. The architect's professional body has produced a report called The Way We Live Now, a study of what people want out of their homes and how they're using them. What leaps out from its pages is the gap between expectations and reality: people want "large windows for natural light", a "large main living area for eating and socialising" and crucially "space for private time away from other members of the household".
It's wishful thinking, of course, for most of us. The report, based on interviews with a few carefully selected families, suggested people lack space to store even basic items. Vacuum cleaners seem to be a........
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GUARDIAN Sun, 13 May 2012 16:10:15 GMT
Associated Press news photographer who captured the Vietnam war's true horror
Horst Faas, the German combat photographer for Associated Press, who has died aged 79, was the most important of all those who covered the Vietnam war, the modern crucible of photojournalism. This was not simply because of his pictures, for which he won a Pulitzer prize in 1965. They documented the war's effect on humanity: families huddled in fear in the midst of fighting soldiers; people mourning those already dead; a father confronting Vietnamese soldiers over the body of his son; the face of an American soldier staring emptily at the camera, his helmet decorated with the words: "War is hell." Faas's dictum was simple: "You can't photograph a flying bullet, but you can capture genuine fear."
Beyond his own work, he played a crucial role as chief of photo operations for AP, recruiting and mentoring other photographers, who became known as "Horst's army". Vietnam may have been the first war brought.....
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GUARDIAN Sun, 13 May 2012 17:46:01 GMT
Does sleeping in mid-air make your dreams more exciting? Lyn Gardner joins a surreal project in the Norfolk woods
On a rainy night last week, I climbed gingerly up a ladder and stepped into a red structure hanging like a balloon from a tree, deep in the woods of Holt Hall in Norfolk. The balloon began to expand as if by magic, its sides unfurling like petals; I lay down and the sky was visible through a porthole above me. There was a strange, soothing singing; a hand and face appeared at the porthole, and a smiling woman dressed in a kimono descended, set out four cups and saucers, and offered me tea.
A cross between a pop-up hotel, an art installation, a performance and a retreat, AirHotel has just embarked on its UK premiere at the Norfolk and Norwich festival. The project is the brainchild of Time Circus, a collective of Belgian artists whose previous installations include a fairground where the rides are powered by the audience, and (currently in development in Antwerp) a.....
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GUARDIAN Sat, 12 May 2012 23:06:12 GMT
The National Gallery's first major photography exhibition aims to reveal pictorial tradition held in common with classic images
Positioning a group for a family photo on a day trip, or snapping the passing landscape from the car window, you may not feel the hand of Gainsborough or Constable on your shoulder, but it is there all the same. The National Gallery's first major photography exhibition, which will open in the autumn, is to make a clear case for the strong influence of the great painters in the way we still picture the world.
The impetus for the show, Seduced by Art, came from an article in the Observer in 2007 by gallery curator Colin Wiggins. Wiggins pointed out the unlikely correspondences between the searing images taken by modern photojournalists and the work of their painterly forebears.
"Photography as a narrative tool is a comparative newcomer," he wrote in 2007. "For centuries it was the painters who illustrated stories. From the Renaissance onwards, it was......
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GUARDIAN Sat, 12 May 2012 23:34:01 GMT
• Click here for step by step directions
• Click here for our interactive map of all the walks
Distance 4.5 miles (7.2km)
Classification Easy
Duration 2 hours
Begins New Inn car park
OS grid reference SP6816036425
Walk in a nutshell
You could hardly choose a greater architectural spectacle than Stowe landscape gardens, which were designed and built during the first half of the 18th century by Charles Bridgeman, William Kent and Capability Brown. Everywhere you turn there is another marvel: the elegiac temples and churches, Elysian Fields, the Gothic Temple (which is available to let), the Palladian bridge … It's just a joy to explore, with mainly flat terrain, and some short steep sections.
Why it's special
Stowe is often said to be the greatest landscape garden in the world. With more than 40 temples and monuments placed tastefully around its sculpted grounds, the ambition it displays is simply breathtaking. It is Capability Brown's masterpiece, praised by poets,........
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GUARDIAN Sat, 12 May 2012 23:37:01 GMT
With its chalk pathways and impossibly English views, it's not hard to understand why artists adore the Sussex Downs
There are mornings on the Sussex Downs when the land seems almost porous, composed of not much more than air and lark song, the sun streaming in at unexpected angles. It's this element of insubstantiality that Eric Ravilious (pictured) caught in his strange, cross-hatched paintings, in which light appears not so much to be falling from the sky as seeping up from inside the earth, like water from a sponge.
He spent much of his life exploring this hilly region between the Weald and the sea, and had a native's facility for the distinctive vocabulary of chalk. He loved the white pathways that riddle the Downs, where you can wander all day without encountering anyone except perhaps the Long Man of Wilmington, cut into the flank of Windover Hill with a walker's stave in each hand. "What quests they propose!" he wrote delightedly. "They take us away to the thin air of.....
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GUARDIAN Sat, 12 May 2012 23:04:08 GMT
London's Soho may have been cleaned up but, the photographer explains, it isn't hard to find its messy human heart
Anders Petersen first wandered through Soho back in the 1970s. "It was a different place then," he says, "full of strip clubs and peep shows. Now it is very clean and fashionable, but some traces of the older Soho remain."
A veteran chronicler of the grittier and seedier side of city life, Petersen has made the new Soho look very much like the old one. His new book, called simply Soho, presents glimpses of a place both familiar and strange, recognisable but alien. "It has my signature," he says, laughing, "which is to do with not just my way of looking but my way of approaching a subject and, of course, choosing the light."
When I first met Anders Petersen back in 2006, in his tiny, subterranean studio-cum-office in Stockholm, he described his way of looking as being imbued with "a kind of poetic sadness". You can detect this, too, in his Soho pictures: in the.......
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GUARDIAN Fri, 11 May 2012 09:55:01 GMT
How can portraits of the Queen be anything other than banal when no artist knows her well? Or is the problem that she is simply a rather dull, upper-class Englishwoman?
The 15ft-high gold-effect statue of Freddie Mercury, Queen's late lamented lead singer, that for a long time adorned the portico of the Dominion Theatre in London's Tottenham Court Road and then went on tour with the tribute musical We Will Rock You, now forms the centrepiece of a brilliantly clever and subversive touring exhibition, The Queen: Art and Image, that marks the monarch's diamond jubilee. Soon to open at the National Portrait Gallery in London, the exhibition has already visited Edinburgh, Belfast and Cardiff – and at all these locations thousands of visitors have thrilled to the vast assemblage of Queen memorabilia, and the startling range of artistic creativity that the group has inspired during its 42-year reign over the realm of rock.
There are literally thousands of images of Brian May, Roger......
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GUARDIAN Thu, 10 May 2012 15:53:43 GMT
The king of artistic overshare splurges his carefully crafted composite of truth and fiction over legal pads, giant canvases and ad hoc videos
Sean Landers has built his artistic career on oversharing. In the 1990s, he splurged his innermost thoughts about art, money, sex, friends, family and business associates, first in ballpoint pen on yellow legal notepads and later in painted slanting script on giant canvases. His stream-of-consciousness digressions-cum-confessions typically veer between painfully honest stuff about his art dealer, critics, popularity and market value to even more painful assertions of his own brilliance, often both at once ("I represent the ass-end of the artworld, at least I hope I do", reads a cheeky line from 1993's Patches).
The writing meanders through philosophy, rock music, masturbatory musings and hilarious waffle ("I just caught myself talking to an electrical chord", he admits in that same early work). Landers's novel [Sic] , a 400-plus-page.......
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GUARDIAN Sun, 06 May 2012 15:03:30 GMT
Decision means Oxford museum needs to raise further £908,000 to acquire Édouard Manet portrait of woman in white dress
A grant of £5.9m from the Heritage Lottery Fund has brought the Ashmolean museum a step closer to owning a painting of a wistful young woman in a shimmering white dress by Édouard Manet.The Oxford museum now needs to raise a further £908,000 by the 7 August deadline.
The portrait of the violinist Fanny Claus, who would die eight years later of tuberculosis at the age of 30, is a study for Manet's more famous painting Le Balcon, now in the Musée d'Orsay collection in Paris and a key image of the impressionist movement.
The painting, Portrait of Mademoiselle Claus, has always been in private collections. It was bought in the studio sale after Manet's death by an admiring fellow artist, John Singer Sargent, and had only been exhibited publicly once since then before it resurfaced at auction last year, when it was sold to an overseas collector for more than £28m.....
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GUARDIAN Sat, 05 May 2012 23:09:04 GMT
This year's Milan Furniture Fair combines traditional craftsmanship with clever technology – to superb effect. Becky Sunshine chooses her favourite design innovations
The Milan Furniture Fair, held every April, is arguably the most intense week on the design calendar. If your world is rocked by chairs, a nice lamp or some unfeasibly expensive made-to-order piece of furniture, this is the place to be. It's the scene of frenzied trend spotting, where a huge amount of business is conducted, concepts are trialled and vast quantities of prosecco are consumed. This year, despite the economic climate, the crowds were in (more than 300,000 people descended on Milan for the week). Chatter at the endless cocktail parties was that dramatic new directions were few and far between (save some softer colour palettes, a hint of 70s styling and a taste for comfort in the form of loose upholstery and quilting – perhaps a sign of a need to nest), but instead there were loads of collaborations, such..
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GUARDIAN Sat, 05 May 2012 23:05:56 GMT
If it goes ahead, the multibillion-pound Liverpool Waters scheme will destroy the city's historic character
"We just want to be left alone, to make our own judgments," says Joe Anderson, the forthright, newly minted, directly elected mayor of Liverpool and before that leader of the city's council. He is talking about Liverpool Waters, a development at the scale of Canary Wharf and designed like Dubai, covering 60 hectares with clusters of skyscrapers and 1.7 million sq metres of offices, homes and shopping. It will create, says Anderson, 17,000 jobs and bring in £5.5bn of investment.
His only problem is that the proposed development partly straddles a world heritage site, and includes within its boundary some of the mightiest docks and warehouses of the Industrial Revolution. Just outside are the Three Graces, the majestic Edwardian commercial buildings that, along with its two cathedrals, define the image of the city. Being a world heritage site means that new development has....
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GUARDIAN Thu, 03 May 2012 19:00:00 GMT
The Icelandic musician shares her latest obsessions with us – from waterfronts to fado music, coconuts to surreal cinema
Plus: listen to an exclusive Death Grips remix of Björk's song Sacrifice
Last July, at the tiny Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester, Björk revealed her Biophilia project. Considering that her Vespertine tour had employed a 70-strong orchestra local to each city, while the Volta shows made use of brass and choirs in a riot of neon, lasers and what appeared to be giant silly string, it was remarkable to see that, even by her standards, she was continuing to push the performance of live music into another realm. This time, the booming voice of Sir David Attenborough introduced videos about nature to a soundtrack of bespoke instruments controlled by iPad apps, including a pendulum that plucked strings as it swung, and a giant Tesla coil that emitted a bone-rattling melody, unamplified.
Since then, Biophilia has continued to evolve as it slowly makes its...
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GUARDIAN Thu, 03 May 2012 21:05:36 GMT
Is Munch's screamer shrieking at the world, or is he (or is it she?) being screamed at by it
The strange hold of the Mona Lisa smile is said to be due to the way it disappears when eyeballed direct. The second most famous face in art is likewise marked with ambiguity – is Munch's screamer shrieking at the world, or is he (or is it she?) being screamed at by it, until the head is crushed in by the din? The little cribsheet of a poem the artist penned around the frame of the version which just sold for $120m hardly helps, as it can support either reading. But if the meaning's mixed up, then so are we all, which is why this harrowing spectre has marketed everything from M&M's to Macaulay Culkin, as well as being used in therapy. With the sale, primal anguish is twisted once again, this time into a plutocratic plaything. The painting is big enough to survive this reinvention, as it has the previous ones. Proceeds will fund a new museum and hotel in Norway. The next twist in the tale...
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