Why are there almost no tears in great works of art? Italian artist Francesco Vezzoli is rectifying this – by embroidering balloon-shaped drops on to modern mashups of Giotto and Botticelli

Since tears express intense emotion, you’d think great painters would have fallen over themselves to depict people crying. Wrong, says Francesco Vezzoli. “Just Google books about tears in art,” says the Italian artist via video call. “There aren’t any. There are some tears in Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, but that’s an extreme painting. You should find tears on the face of Christ, but that happens only once.” This is in Antonello da Messina’s Ecce Homo, from 1475. “Go to the Kunsthistorischen Museum in Vienna: no tears. In European religious paintings, there should be tears on the faces of every saint because they all died for martyrdom. But tears are very rare.”

To correct this remarkable oversight, over the past 15 years Vezzoli has embroidered tears on to reproductions of paintings by great Renaissance artists from Giotto to Botticelli and Lotto. Sewing has been long part of Vezzoli’s practice: he used to frequent a needlepoint shop called Creativity while at Central St Martin’s in London in the early 1990s (when he wasn’t clubbing, that is, or writing his dissertation on homoeroticism in Brazilian soap operas).

Continue reading...

The artist, who has died aged 93, spent her life battling white male dominance, in the gallery and beyond. Her work foregrounded Black American experience with a raw and unforgettable power

When New York’s Museum of Modern Art reopened in 2019 after a radical rehang, its most headline-grabbing display placed Faith Ringgold’s American People Series #20: Die eye to eye with Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon. For years, MoMA had been criticised for its shocking gender imbalance and lack of diversity. Ringgold was among the feminists to protest about the museum in the late 1960s, but it would be decades before it paid attention. The museum’s permanent display told a story of modern art imagined as a sequential progression driven almost entirely by the work of white men. In 2019, that started to change.

Painted 60 years apart – Picasso’s was completed in 1907, Ringgold’s in 1967 – the pairing of Die and Les Demoiselles invited a different kind of storytelling, one that acknowledged the debt of influence Picasso owed African art, the influence he in turn exerted over generations that followed and the rich complexity that might emerge from acknowledging plural art histories.

Continue reading...

Founder of Black Audio Film Collective says he would have laughed if someone had said he’d someday be in the UK pavilion

Britain’s national pavilion at the Venice Biennale, the world’s largest and most prominent art event, begins with video of delicate Holbein drawings from the Tudor court being washed over by the eddies of a stream and ends with the death of a British-Nigerian man, David Oluwale, who drowned in a Yorkshire river after being beaten by local police in 1969.

Along the way, in filmmaker Sir John Akomfrah’s exhibition, comes a sumptuously told visual and auditory story of migration and colonialism, held together by the image of flowing water. It culminates in images of the arrival in Britain of the Windrush generation – those who migrated from the Caribbean to the UK in the years after the second world war, often to work in British public services.

Continue reading...

Painting by Graham Sutherland is being displayed at Blenheim Palace before being auctioned in June

An intimate study of Winston Churchill that has been in private hands for seven decades has gone on show in the room at Blenheim Palace in which Britain’s most famous prime minister was born, before being auctioned in June.

It was the work of Graham Sutherland, one of the most highly regarded artists of his time. Sutherland was commissioned to paint Churchill by the Houses of Parliament to mark the wartime leader’s 80th birthday in November 1954.

Sutherland’s portrait of Churchill will be on public view at Blenheim Palace from 16-21 April, and at Sotheby’s in London and New York before its sale.

Continue reading...

A recent Guardian news story on the Russian use of poison gas in Ukraine featured an arresting photograph that spoke to me of the anonymity of war

This photograph of a gas mask on a tree beside a track in Kreminna in Ukraine’s Luhansk oblast stopped me in my tracks.

The original caption in the Guardian reads “tree” but it looks like the remains of a tree, more like a planted post. Has the rest of it – the parts that make it a tree – been damaged by war? Whatever the explanation there is a hint, in the mottled pattern of the bark, of a giraffe’s neck, that vulnerable loneliness of the vertical amid the overwhelmingly horizontal. By a careful choice of angle the photographer has also imparted an animating slinkiness, a slightly feminine torsion, to the immobile wood. That might be why it’s reminiscent of one of Peter Mitchell’s wonderful photographs of scarecrows in Yorkshire . The one I have in mind is a rare example of what is obviously a woman plying this exposed and elemental trade, glamorously kitted out for a night – she is framed by darkness – on a nonexistent town. Lifelike and haunted, she looks like a ghost of her former self.

Continue reading...

Academics, artists and curators delve into the background behind Sargent’s glossy society portraits in this polished documentary

With impeccable timing, as the show it explores is still running at London’s Tate Britain, here is an appreciation/profile of the American painter most famous for his brilliantly rendered portraits of the late Victorian and Edwardian upper crust and nouveau riche. The art world being what it is, the film takes its cue as much from the similarly themed Sargent exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (with whom the Tate has co-produced the show); an institution that has its own significant claim to Sargent via the spectacular murals commissioned for the Boston Public Library and the Museum of Fine Arts itself.

Such is Sargent’s commitment to reproducing the shimmering wonder of the fabrics in which his subjects are often draped, it’s fair to say that “fashion” might be a valid, if clickbaity, way in. It has not proved universally popular, however, with the Guardian’s Jonathan Jones describing the Tate exhibition as “horrible … [with an] obsessive, myopic argument”.

Continue reading...

With their serene poses, beautiful curves and arms often enfolding pregnant bellies, these figurines celebrate the miracle of fertility. Sadly, I saw them during protests about violence against women

Tall, thin, small, wide, or shaped like a violin. Lying down, standing up, arms folded or looking up to the stars. Male, female, intersex or abstracted. Alone or in groups, drinking, or playing music. All these descriptions came to mind last week when I came into contact with some of the earliest known Greek figurine sculptures, known as Cycladic art.

Marble white – although originally painted – the Cycladic figures date from the Neolithic to early Bronze Age, around 5300–2300BC. They were sculpted in cultures based in the circular cluster of islands in the Aegean Sea known as the Cyclades. What began as pebble-shaped figurines grew into a great variety of shapes and sizes, sometimes with coiled hair and eyes drawn atop little wedge noses, and occasionally playing instruments.

Continue reading...

Ane Freed-Kernis used her pension to build a workshop where she could create the tactile, surprising sculptures of her dreams

In 2019, after retiring from her career as a social worker, Ane Freed-Kernis decided to build a home workshop and devote all of her free time to stone carving. “It’s really therapeutic and completely absorbing,” she says. “I might be covered head to toe in dust but I’m happy – it was something I needed more of in my life when I hit 60.”

This fascination has its roots in Freed-Kernis’ childhood. Growing up on her father’s farm in Denmark, she used to wander through the fields with her gaze fixed on the ground, looking for stones to add to her collection. “I’ve always been drawn to the shapes and textures of stones,” she says.

Continue reading...

Edinburgh Printmakers says anyone can add work or co-curate the exhibition by moving artworks around

A gallery in Edinburgh has invited the public to hang their art on its walls.

Edinburgh Printmakers, based in a former factory in Fountainbridge, was the first open-access print studio in the UK when it first opened 57 years ago.

Continue reading...