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It’s a bird … it’s a plane … it’s Oscar-nominated documentary All That Breathes, now streaming on HBO Max ahead of Hollywood’s biggest night. Though we’re living through a true boom of non-fiction filmmaking right now in terms of sheer quantity, Shaunak Sen’s singular vision also reminds us that we’re not lacking in quality, either. Without needing to rely on talking heads or archival footage, this doc investigates societal tensions with artistic aplomb.
ALL THAT BREATHES: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: There’s something in the air over New Delhi — literally. A thick smog gives the Indian city a unique sense of miasma and malaise, and the consequences of that environmental phenomenon becomes tangible as the black kite birds begin suddenly falling from the sky. In recognition of their importance to the city’s ecosystem, brothers Nadeem Shehzad and Mohammad Saud begin treating and rehabilitating these birds of prey. Their work began nearly two decades ago and reaches a key junction during the period observed in All That Breathes. Their quiet and unassuming labor, which occurs in a shared garage, swims upstream against the rising tides of ecological catastrophe and nationalist unrest focused on the Muslim minority to which the brothers belong.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: It’s hard to put a finger on comparable titles for a film that insists on having its own cinematic grammar. The closest species might be the documentaries of Gianfranco Rosi, who Sen name-checks as an inspiration for his own style. Fire at Sea, Rosi’s Oscar-nominated tale of the European migrant crisis, feels like somewhat of a blueprint in the way that it uses patiently observed scenes of everyday life to obliquely capture a society in microcosm.
Performance Worth Watching: Nadeem and Mohammad both make for captivating subjects, in large part because they don’t seem to be performing much at all. But the underrated star of the movie might just be their third staffer, Salik Rehman, whose soft-spoken charms match the film’s overarching sensibility. A moment where he’s tending to one bird only to have another one swoop in and swipe the glasses directly off his face might be the single most powerful image in All That Breathes.
Memorable Dialogue: “You don’t care for things because they share the same country, religion, or politics,” intones a voiceover at the conclusion of the film. “Life itself is kinship. We’re all a community of air.” In a film that resists easy sermonizing, this thesis hits all the harder when summing up all we’ve seen.
Sex and Skin: This is a film that ruffles some feathers, but not in THAT way.
Our Take: Shaunak Sen makes the abstract nature of climate change concrete by showing the tangible impact on the creatures of the Earth. By eschewing conventions of nature and political docs alike, All That Breathes makes for a powerful rumination on forces we can feel gnawing away at the literal and figurative fabric of our world. The film gently strings together its observations that might not feel significant in isolation, but resist the urge for restlessness or boredom. These moments accumulate to something astutely observed and quietly revelatory.
Our Call: STREAM IT! All That Breathes finds a unique documentary language to explore the connective tissue that ties us all together and is fraying dangerously at the edges. It’s a potent reminder that documentary cinema can show, not just tell, when it comes to big issues affecting the world. Sen provides not just a line of sight into these themes but a way of seeing altogether.
Marshall Shaffer is a New York-based freelance film journalist. In addition to Decider, his work has also appeared on Slashfilm, Slant, Little White Lies and many other outlets. Some day soon, everyone will realize how right he is about Spring Breakers.
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Art and Culture
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Credit: Courtesy Christie's Images
André Leon Talley's possessions fetch almost $3.6 million at auction
Hundreds of items from the estate of late fashion icon André Leon Talley, including paintings, personal photographs and some of his signature capes, have sold at auction for a combined $3.55 million.
A trove of the veteran editor's possessions went under the hammer at Christie's in New York on Wednesday, fetching almost $1.4 million, before a further 350 lots were sold online by the auction house.
Talley, who was Vogue magazine's longtime creative director, died last year aged 73. He owned a vast fashion collection, with garments on sale ranging from Tom Ford kimonos to a selection of Prada crocodile coats. Among the top sellers were a Christian Dior greatcoat and a silk satin "Climate Revolution" cloak by the late Vivienne Westwood, which fetched $40,320 and for $32,760, respectively.
The items in the collection also spoke to his deep network of relationships with some of the fashion world's biggest names. Over a dozen sketches and photos by the late Karl Lagerfed, as well as a signed watercolor portrait that Gianni Versace once made of Talley. The latter item sold for $37,500.
Talley was known not only for his love of fashion, but for his interest in art and culture. Two different Andy Warhol artworks (along with a Louis Vuitton luggage set) shared the title of the auction's top seller, each fetching $94,500. Also among the big-ticket items was a Bradley Theodore portrait of former Vogue editor-in-chief Diana Vreeland that sold for just over $40,000. Several other photos of Vreeland appeared in the sale, as did an Annie Leibovitz photo of Vogue's top gun Anna Wintour.
A red coat by designer Norma Kamali sold for $25,200, well over its initial estimate of $500 to $800. The iconic piece received renewed attention earlier in the week when Rihanna stepped out in a notably similar puffer jacket, by Alaïa, for her Super Bowl performance — leading many onlookers to speculate that it might have been a tribute to Talley.
Elsewhere, a veritable miscellany of items went on sale to buyers from 47 countries, including travel clocks, amethyst geodes and a Vera Wang-designed silver cutlery set.
The auction house said that proceeds from the sale will go toward two churches that "were close to Mr. Talley's heart": the Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York and the Mt. Sinai Missionary Baptist Church in Durham, North Carolina.
In a press statement, Christie's head of private collections, Elizabeth Seigel, said the sale confirmed Talley's "rarefied status within the fashion world and beyond." The collection was, she added, "a testament to his impeccable taste."
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Art and Culture
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Is white paint racist? Norway's University of Bergen is exploring that question, asking how the aesthetic of white paint helped the nation contribute to white supremacy and helped "[make] the world whiter.""Whiteness is not only a cultural and societal condition tied to skin color, privileges, and systematic exclusion, but materialize everywhere around us," a rundown of the study read."Although Norway is not a conventional colonial power, this project will show how the country has played a globally leading role in establishing white as a superior color," it said. "Until now, however, this story has been lesser known to scholars and the public."The study on whiteness and paint, coined as NorWhite, observes the Norwegian-developed paint pigment titanium white through "historical, aesthetic, and critical" lenses to determine how the development of the color contributed to "social transformation" as well as how the innovation led to "planetary consequences."UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO'S ‘PROBLEM OF WHITENESS’ CLASS SPARKS CONTROVERSY A paint roller covered in white paint coats a green wall. (iStock)"Currently the Norwegian innovation TiO2 [titanium dioxide] is present in literally every part of modern life…The primary research question is: What are the cultural and aesthetic changes instigated by titanium white and TiO2 surfaces – and how can both the material in itself and these changes be conceptualized and made visible?" the description asks. The Research Council of Norway, a government agency, is funding the study with 12 million NOK (the Norwegian currency is the Krone) explored by University of Bergen associate professor and historian Ingrid Halland through a grant that explores the paint color's historical legacy, its origins in Norway, and features images of several of the nation's building plastered in the color. DEM'S ‘FLAGRANTLY UNCONSTITUTIONAL’ ANTI-WHITE SUPREMACY BILL WOULD ‘GUT THE FIRST AMENDMENT’: TURLEY Norwegian flag in the Sogne Harbour, southern Norway in August 22nd 2017. (James D. Morgan / Getty Images)"The overall objective of NorWhite is to critically and visually investigate the cultural and aesthetic preconditions of a complex and unexplored part of Norwegian technology and innovation history that has—as this project claims—made the world whiter," the description concluded.The study is also sponsored by two of the major companies that contributed to titanium white paint's prevalence in the country – Titania A/S who extracts ore for use in titanium-based products and Kronos Titan, who produces the titanium dioxide pigment.HHS GIVES NYU $40,000 TO STUDY WHY CHILDREN ‘FAVOR WHITENESS AND MALENESS’The study cites that titanium dioxide is currently a part of everyday life, including in food, paper, tattoos, synthetic textiles, cosmetics and more in addition to altering the country's architectural aesthetic through a brighter, more opaque color, and research aims to dissect the historical development that "revolutionized the color-industry" with an "absolute white" color.The University of Bergen study is only the latest example of higher education making "whiteness" a focus.In the United States last year, Los Angeles Public Schools enforced the idea that "merit" and "individualism" were concepts originating from "whiteness" and must be questioned.CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APPFox News Digital obtained documents from government watchdog group Judicial Watch last year indicating the United States Military Academy at West Point was also among the institutions taking hits at "whiteness" last year with its critical race theory-based curriculum.Fox News' Jessica Chasmar contributed to this report. Taylor Penley is a production assistant with Fox News.
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Archaeologists in Egypt have discovered a 3,500-year-old cemetery that contains a "Book of the Dead" papyrus.
The cemetery, at Tuna al-Gebel in central Egypt, dates back to the New Kingdom (circa 1550 to 1070 B.C.) and contains mummies, sarcophagi, amulets and numerous "shabti" (also called ushabti) figurines that were meant to serve the deceased in the afterlife, according to an Arabic statement from the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities. The "Book of the Dead" papyrus found in the cemetery is about 43 to 49 feet (13 to 15 meters) long. Archaeologists from the ministry have been excavating the site since 2017 and found the cemetery recently.
The "Book of the Dead" is a modern-day name given to a variety of texts that served a number of purposes, including helping the dead navigate the underworld. The name the ancient Egyptians gave these texts is sometimes translated as the "Book of Coming Forth by Day." Copies of "Book of the Dead" excerpts were sometimes buried with the deceased.
The statement contained little information on the newly found copy of the "Book of the Dead." It is not clear which exact texts it contains or with whom it was buried. No photographs of the "Book of the Dead" papyrus were released, and members of the team that discovered it did not respond to requests for comment.
Scholars who were not involved with the excavation said the find could be important. It is "very rare" to find a copy of the "Book of the Dead" in the grave where it was originally buried, Foy Scalf, an Egyptologist and head of research archives at The University of Chicago, told Live Science in an email. "Without photographs, it is hard to say more, and it is customary to wait for some form of official publication to form solid assessments."
Lara Weiss, CEO of the Roemer and Pelizaeus Museum in Germany, who has studied the "Book of the Dead" extensively, told Live Science in an email that "if it's that long and well-preserved [then it's] certainly a great and interesting find."
The archaeologists at the newfound cemetery unearthed a number of coffins and mummies, including the daughter of Djehuty, a high priest of the god Amun who lived more than 3,500 years ago, according to the statement. Another coffin appears to belong to a woman who was a singer in the temple of Amun, a deity associated with the sun and the ancient city of Thebes (modern-day Luxor).
The cemetery also contained many canopic jars that would have held the organs of the deceased, the statement said. Remains of stone sarcophagi, which held the wooden coffins of the deceased, were also found.
Excavations and analysis of the remains are ongoing.
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Owen Jarus is a regular contributor to Live Science who writes about archaeology and humans' past. He has also written for The Independent (UK), The Canadian Press (CP) and The Associated Press (AP), among others. Owen has a bachelor of arts degree from the University of Toronto and a journalism degree from Ryerson University.
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Art and Culture
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When Alice Robb was little, she wanted more than anything to be a ballet dancer. After two rejections from the School of American Ballet, the feeder school for the prestigious New York City Ballet, she finally won a place at the age of nine, a few days after 9/11. “The city was in mourning but it was the best day of my life,” she recalls in Don’t Think, Dear. Ballet became Robb’s obsession and her identity, though her dream of turning professional unravelled when she reached puberty. Her hips widened, she grew tall and her teachers began to ignore her in class. She started bunking off lessons and, in 2004, was finally expelled. Robb subsequently finished high school, went to college and embarked on a successful career as a science writer and journalist. But, she notes: “I couldn’t unlearn the values of ballet.”
Those values, which include discipline, stoicism, submission and near starvation, are put under the microscope in Don’t Think, Dear, which examines ballet through a feminist lens. Part memoir, part journalistic investigation, the book weaves her early experiences as a dancer with those of her contemporaries, and of famous ballerinas, among them Margot Fonteyn, Anna Pavlova, Darci Kistler and Misty Copeland. The title is a nod to the late George Balanchine, the hallowed choreographer and co-founder of the New York City Ballet, who championed the image of the ballerina as a willowy waif, and who Robb amusingly calls “my problematic fave”. A Russian émigré in America, Balanchine’s dictum was: “Don’t think, dear. Just do.” He was, by all accounts, a control freak and a bully, demanding impossible standards from his charges, and seeking to control how they looked, what they ate, who they dated and even what perfume they wore. He had sexual relationships with multiple dancers; those who rejected him often paid for it with their careers. Carol Sumner, a Balanchine protege, tells Robb: “He was very grabby. He was always wanting the girls. He’d be arrested by now.” Sumner, who is in her 80s, says this with laughter rather than disapproval. She still regards Balanchine as a hero.
Out of Robb’s childhood cohort, only one girl made it as far as the New York City Ballet. The rate of young dancers turning their passion into a profession is staggeringly low, though that doesn’t stop scores of little girls, and their parents, dreaming of a future in ballet. All this, despite the prohibitive cost of training, the punishing schedules, the bleeding feet and the fanatical calorie-counting at a time when most dancers’ bodies are still growing. Robb’s reports of young women subsisting on – and this is just one example – four tablespoons of cottage cheese and a single apple a day make for grim reading; so too the accounts of teenagers given “fat talks” by their superiors. For one, the instructions to “lengthen” and “tone up” only stopped when she developed an intestinal problem that prevented her from eating solid food.
The book arrives on the heels of 2021’s Swan Dive, in which the soloist Georgina Pazcoguin blew the whistle on the sexual harassment, disordered eating and body-shaming experienced by dancers at the New York City Ballet. Like Swan Dive, Don’t Think Dear is powered by a fundamental love of the art form while exposing the toxic culture that runs through it. Robb may look fondly back at her ballet years but she can’t deny the intrinsic weirdness of 21st-century women willingly submitting themselves to a life of physical and psychological torment, conceived of and often enforced by men, for a picture-book fantasy of femininity. While, in her final chapter, she finds green shoots of optimism in a production of Swan Lake that features gender nonconforming and Black dancers, the sense remains that, to be successful in their profession, ballet dancers must sacrifice their bodies and their agency. Most troubling of all is that, for many, it is a price worth paying.
When Alice Robb was little, she wanted more than anything to be a ballet dancer. After two rejections from the School of American Ballet, the feeder school for the prestigious New York City Ballet, she finally won a place at the age of nine, a few days after 9/11. “The city was in mourning but it was the best day of my life,” she recalls in Don’t Think, Dear. Ballet became Robb’s obsession and her identity, though her dream of turning professional unravelled when she reached puberty. Her hips widened, she grew tall and her teachers began to ignore her in class. She started bunking off lessons and, in 2004, was finally expelled. Robb subsequently finished high school, went to college and embarked on a successful career as a science writer and journalist. But, she notes: “I couldn’t unlearn the values of ballet.”
Those values, which include discipline, stoicism, submission and near-starvation, are put under the microscope in Don’t Think, Dear, which examines the ballet through a feminist lens. Part memoir, part journalistic investigation, the book weaves her early experiences as a dancer with those of her contemporaries, and of famous ballerinas, among them Margot Fonteyn, Anna Pavlova, Darci Kistler and Misty Copeland. The title is a nod to the late George Balanchine, the hallowed choreographer and co-founder of the New York City Ballet, who championed the image of the ballerina as a willowy waif, and who Robb amusingly calls “my problematic fave”. A Russian émigré in America, Balanchine’s dictum was: “Don’t think, dear. Just do.” He was, by all accounts, a control freak and a bully, demanding impossible standards from his dancers, and seeking to control how they looked, what they ate, who they dated and even what perfume they wore. He had sexual relationships with multiple dancers; those who rejected him often paid for it with their careers. Carol Sumner, a Balanchine protege, tells Robb: “He was very grabby. He was always wanting the girls. He’d be arrested by now.” Sumner, who is in her 80s, says this with laughter rather than disapproval. She still regards Balanchine as a hero.
Out of Robb’s childhood cohort, only one girl made it as far as the New York City Ballet. The rate of young dancers turning their passion into a profession is staggeringly low, though that doesn’t stop scores of little girls, and their parents, dreaming of a future in ballet. All this, despite the prohibitive cost of training, the punishing schedules, the bleeding feet and the fanatical calorie-counting at a time when most dancers’ bodies are still growing. Robb’s reports of young women subsisting on – and this is just one example – four tablespoons of cottage cheese and a single apple a day make for grim reading; so too the accounts of teenagers given “fat talks” by their superiors. For one, the instructions to “lengthen” and “tone up” only stopped when she developed an intestinal problem that prevented her from eating solid food.
The book arrives on the heels of 2021’s Swan Dive, in which the soloist Georgina Pazcoguin blew the whistle on the sexual harassment, disordered eating and body-shaming experienced by dancers at the New York City Ballet. Like Swan Dive, Don’t Think Dear is powered by a fundamental love of the art form while exposing the toxic culture that runs through it. Robb may look fondly back at her ballet years but she can’t deny the intrinsic weirdness of 21st-century women willingly submitting themselves to a life of physical and psychological torment, conceived of and often enforced by men, for a picture-book fantasy of femininity. While, in her final chapter, she finds green shoots of optimism in a production of Swan Lake that features gender nonconforming and Black dancers, the sense remains that, to be successful in their profession, ballet dancers must sacrifice their bodies and their agency. Most troubling of all is that, for many, it is a price worth paying.
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Art and Culture
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A German government official has requested the removal of an antisemitic sculpture from a church, the Jewish Chronicle (JC) reported on Monday.
The sculpture, a Judensau (Jew sow), adorns the facade of the town church in Wittenberg, also known as the Stadtkirche. It has been there for over 700 years, remaining despite multiple attempts to remove it.
Most recently, the German government commissioner for Jewish Life and the Fight against Antisemitism, Felix Klein, has made such a request.
The Stadtkirche Judensau depicts a pig with its hind leg and tail being held aloft by a rabbi so that other Jews, portrayed as small and hook-nosed, can drink milk from the pig’s teats.
Although Judensau’s have appeared elsewhere, it is primarily a German motif. They also vary from depiction to depiction, but they all feature Jews suckling on a pig’s teat.
The request to remove the statue comes while Wittenberg, among other German cities, is being considered as the possible location for a new German Israeli youth organization.
The JC reported that Klein has described the statue as making Wittenberg unwelcoming for Jews.
“A city in which hostility to Jews is so openly displayed with the Judensau on the church cannot be a place of welcome for Jewish Israelis,” he said. “For Wittenberg to become the base of the German-Israeli Youth Exchange, the antisemitic Jew-sow must be removed.”
In an effort to further advance Israeli-German relations, the governments planned the creation of the organization with the aim of preserving the memory of the Holocaust as well as focusing on topics of joint concern such as climate change and renewable energy.
The preservation of the Judensau is an enduring barrier
German courts have repeatedly dismissed cases brought up to take the statue down. The body responsible for the church, the Evangelical Academy of Saxony-Anhalt in Wittenberg, has fought hard against any such attempt.
The director of the organization, Christoph Maier, has cited that efforts to remove the statue further stagnate bilateral negotiation between the two governments which are, as is, already slow.
The Stadtkirche lies at the very heart of Protestantism itself and served as a location of the first Protestant services where Martin Luther himself would preach.
Like the church, Martin Luther has a history deeply stained by antisemitism. The church reformer wrote a text entitled “The Jews and their Lies” and repeatedly espoused ideas such as that the Jews are “the devil,” “deceivers,” and “blasphemers,” among others.
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Succession star Sarah Snook will play 26 different characters in a one-woman show opening in London next year.
The actress will star in a new adaptation of Oscar Wilde's only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray.
It will mark Snook's first appearance on the London stage since her 2016 debut opposite Ralph Fiennes in The Master Builder.
Snook told BBC News the idea of playing so many roles was "an exhilarating challenge I can't wait to get into".
The Picture of Dorian Gray will open on 23 January 2024 at the Theatre Royal Haymarket and run for nearly 12 weeks.
The new stage adaptation of Wilde's 1890 novel has already enjoyed a successful run in Snook's native Australia, although a different actress played the leading role there.
Discussing its London transfer, Snook said: "I'm so excited by the prospect of returning to the stage again, let alone a stage in the West End.
"Bringing a show to an international audience, to a theatre Oscar Wilde would no doubt have frequented, is thrilling, and demands a high calibre of theatrical experience to be worthy of the venture."
She added: "The Picture of Dorian Gray is just that, and I'm honoured to be joining the team that created it. To be asked to play these multiple roles is an exhilarating challenge I can't wait to get into."
In a five-star review of the Australian production, The Guardian said Snook's counterpart, actress Eryn Jean Norvill, had "dazzled" in the role.
"[The show] is ambitious, exuberant and whip-smart; it is an embrace of theatre's past, present and future," wrote theatre critic Cassie Tongue.
The production was adapted and directed by Sydney Theatre Company's artistic director Kip Williams, who will also direct its West End transfer.
Earlier this year, Snook starred in the hugely acclaimed fourth and final series of the Emmy-winning drama Succession, which was warmly praised by critics.
She played Shiv Roy in the series, one of four children battling for control of their father Logan Roy's international media and entertainment company.
Like its sister production in Australia, The Picture of Dorian Gray will employ a collection of on-stage cameras and video screens which help bring the characters to life.
"The powerful use of Snapchat filters and other selfie-style shots draw heavy parallels to the impossible beauty standards of social media influencers and how this curated identity can be the painted rust concealing psychological trauma beneath," Time Out said in its review of the Australian production.
Despite the presence of the cameras and screens, the production features minimal pre-recording and Snook will play the overwhelming majority of the characters live each night, with the cameras employed more as a technique to complement her performance.
Dealing with themes of morality, narcissism and excess, The Picture of Dorian Gray tells the story of a young man who sells his soul in exchange for eternal youth and beauty.
The show's titular protagonist makes a deal that his body will retain perfect youth, while a recently-painted portrait of him - representing his soul - grows older and uglier instead.
Gray begins committing a series of debauched acts, but as he does, the ever-changing portrait he has in his house becomes increasingly hideous, serving as a reminder of the effect each evil act has on his soul.
Gray's descent into sin and hedonism ultimately leads him to question the real source of beauty in life.
Discussing the London production of the play, Snook said: "This story of morality, innocence, narcissism and consequence is going to be thrilling to recreate for a new audience."
The transfer from Australia to London mirrors that of Prima Facie, which was staged in Sydney before its West End transfer scored its British star Jodie Comer an Olivier and Tony Award.
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The London Symphony Orchestra’s concert performances of Janáček’s Katya Kabanova with Simon Rattle form an effective sequel to their 2019 production, directed by Peter Sellars, of the composer’s very different Cunning Little Vixen. Admirable though that was, Katya strikes me as being in every way the greater achievement, probingly conducted by Rattle – he is at his best here – and for the most part wonderfully well sung, with a truly great performance from Amanda Majeski in the title role.Orchestrally, this was exceptional. Rattle’s interpretation blends tension with lyricism. Katya’s reminiscences, tinged with mysticism, of childhood experiences in church sounded ravishing, and a deep sensuality burned in the garden scene, in which she yields to her feelings for Boris. But the contrasting terror and emotional violence were shockingly realised as well, from the lacerating phrases and hammering monotones with which Janáček closes Act 1, to the storm, both physical and psychological, that finally pushes Katya over the edge. Nowhere was the combination of beauty and tragic intensity more overwhelming than in the brief moment of rapture in the final scene that brings the lovers back together only to confront the realisation that they must part.Majeski, meanwhile, returned to the role she very much made her own in Richard Jones’s Covent Garden production, also in 2019. She’s an artist of the highest calibre, with a glorious voice, ample, opulent in tone and wonderfully expressive over a wide dynamic range. But without Jones’s at times distracting interventions, her portrayal of Katya’s emotional collapse became even more harrowing in its veracity and immediacy. This was an outstanding achievement, though there were fine performances elsewhere, too. Simon O’Neill was the ardent, if metallic sounding Boris. Katarina Dalayman, all steely high notes and vicious declamation, made a brutal Kabanicha, pouring scorn on Andrew Staples’ Tichon and treating Pavlo Hunka’s belligerent yet servile Dikoj with thinly disguised contempt. Magdalena Kožená, in lovely voice, was luxury casting as Varvara, with Ladislav Elgr as her appealing Kudrjas – warm sounding, handsome and very much the voice of reason in the chaos around him. A tremendous evening, every second of it.
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New rooms discovered in Sahura's pyramid
An Egyptian-German mission led by Egyptologist Dr. Mohamed Ismail Khaled of the Department of Egyptology at Julius-Maximilians-Universität of Würzburg (JMU) has made a significant discovery within Sahura's pyramid.
The exploration has unearthed a number of storage rooms that had not been documented before. This discovery sheds new light on the architecture of the pyramid of Sahura, the second king of the Fifth Dynasty (2400 BC) and the first king to be buried at Abusir.
The conservation and restoration project inside Sahura's pyramid, initiated in 2019 and supported by the Antiquities Endowment Fund (AEF) of the American Research Center in Egypt (ARCE), aimed to safeguard the substructure of Sahura's pyramid. The team's efforts focused on cleaning the interior rooms, stabilizing the pyramid from inside, and preventing further collapse. In the process, the team succeeded in securing the pyramid's burial chambers, which had previously been inaccessible.
A Briton with the right hunch
During the restoration work, the team discovered the original dimensions and was able to uncover the floor plan of the antechamber, which had deteriorated over time. Consequently, the destroyed walls were replaced with new retaining walls. The eastern wall of the antechamber was badly damaged, and only the northeast corner and about 30 centimeters of the eastern wall were still visible.
Traces of a low passageway that John Perring had already noticed during an excavation in 1836 continued to be excavated. Perring had mentioned that this passage had been full of debris and rubbish and had been impassable due to decay. The British Egyptologist suspected that it might have led to storage rooms. However, during further exploration of the pyramid by Ludwig Borchardt in 1907, these assumptions were called into question—other experts joined his opinion.
All the more surprising was the find of the Egyptian-German team, which actually discovered traces of a passage. Thereby proving that the observations made during Perring's exploration were correct. The work was continued, and the passage was uncovered. Thus, eight storerooms have been discovered so far. Although the northern and southern parts of these magazines, especially the ceiling and the original floor, are badly damaged, remnants of the original walls and parts of the floor can still be seen.
Modern technology in use
Careful documentation of the floor plan and dimensions of each storage room has greatly enhanced the researchers' understanding of the pyramid's interior. During restoration, a balance between preservation and presentation was pursued to ensure the structural integrity of the rooms while making them accessible for future study and potentially the public.
Using state-of-the-art technology, including 3D laser scanning with a ZEB Horizon portable LiDAR scanner from GeoSLAM, the Egyptian-German team collaborated with the 3D Geoscan team to conduct detailed surveys inside the pyramid. This advanced technology enabled comprehensive mapping of both the extensive external areas and the narrow corridors and chambers inside. The frequent scans provide real-time updates of progress and create a permanent record of exploration efforts.
This groundbreaking project represents a significant milestone in the understanding of the Sahura pyramid and its historical significance. The discovery and restoration of the storerooms is expected to revolutionize the view of historical development of pyramid structures and challenge existing paradigms in the field.
Provided by University of Würzburg
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Art and Culture
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Abstract expressionism, that all-American boys’ club, is being disbanded. In the latest revision to the overwhelmingly white and male canon of art history, east London’s Whitechapel Gallery has put together an exhibition by some 80 female artists from around the world.
Many of the works could easily be confused with the best known masterpieces of abstract expressionism, which emerged in New York in the late 1940s and made international celebrities of figures such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko. Although never forming an official group, these artists shared a conviction in the emotionally expressive possibilities of abstraction and its fundamental elements: paint, colour and gesture.
But they were not alone. On view at the Whitechapel, there’s the Jewish-Ukrainian Janet Sobel, who emigrated to the US in 1908. It is believed that her technique of using pipettes and a vacuum cleaner to splatter and spread paint on the canvas directly inspired Pollock’s drip paintings. In the same east coast coterie is Elaine de Kooning, who signed her energetic, allusive abstractions with her initials to evade sexist comparisons with her husband.
Among those working further afield, there are representatives from Africa, Asia, Europe and across the Americas, each incorporating their own traditions and perspectives. The Taiwan-born Li Fang, for instance, who worked in France and Switzerland, painted nature-inspired oils using calligraphic brushstroke techniques.
The starting point for this show was a landmark 2016 exhibition at the Denver Museum of Art that featured female painters working on the US east and west coasts in the 1940s and 50s. The Whitechapel wanted to broaden that remit. As assistant curator Candy Stobbs explains, in the decades after the second world war, “artists all around the globe were thinking about how to represent the world after such destruction; how to begin again”. Even if they’d never seen each other’s work, many gravitated towards a “painterly language of gestural abstraction”.
To emphasise the sometimes surprising connections, the show is organised not chronologically or geographically but in five thematic clusters. One grouping surveys artists whose work explores myths, symbols and rituals, such as the Mozambique-born painter and sculptor Bertina Lopes, who abstracted African iconographic forms. Elsewhere, there are works relating to “material, process and time”; “environment, nature and perception”; “being, expression and empathy”; and “performance, gesture and rhythm”.
Many of the artists are no longer living and remain little known. To identify them, the curatorial team worked with a 13-strong advisory board of curators, art historians and collectors. They also combed through catalogues from related exhibitions.
In recent years, there has been a notable increase in initiatives to rediscover and reintroduce overlooked female artists. But, Stobbs says, “it was sometimes still hard to find published material. Many of the artists were very active at the time, but have slipped out of the art-historical narrative. Even if they were being noticed to an extent, it was still a male-dominated environment. They didn’t always get to develop their careers in the same way as male artists did.”
There is debate about the merit of projects that seek to simply add women to the canon, or create a separate “women-only” body of work. Is it not better to examine the conditions that have historically led to the exclusion of female artists, or to dismantle the notion of a canon altogether?
In her catalogue essay for this show, the feminist art historian Griselda Pollock acknowledges these questions but concludes that such exhibitions are “tactically necessary” – to ensure that our understanding of female artists is “as rich and as intelligible as that of their male co-creators of modern art”. Why let the guys take all the credit?
The female gaze: five artists in the show
Behjat Sadr (1924-2009)
Untitled, 1956
Born and educated in Iran, Behjat Sadr first encountered abstract expressionism on a study trip to Rome in the 1950s. “Representing reality has never been important to me,” she said. “Reality was a pretext for creating forms and colours.”
Wook-kyung Choi (1940-1985)
Untitled, 1960s (main picture)
“Wook-kyung Choi was a discovery for us,” says Stobbs. In the 1960s, the Korean artist moved to the US, where she began to develop her distinctive approach to abstraction. “I dash into the canvas and develop various situations without any conception or any plan, paying attention to almost spontaneously occurring forms,” Choi once said. Then, “I select, organise and create order”.
Lee Krasner (1908-1984)
Bald Eagle, 1955
This painting is composed of cut-up fragments of newspapers, burlap, and discarded drawings by Krasner and her husband, Jackson Pollock. Krasner achieved recognition in her lifetime, but her gender remained an obstacle. “It’s quite clear I didn’t fit in,” she said of the abstract expressionists. “With relation to the group, if you are going to call them a group, there was not room for a woman.”
Li Fang (1933-2020)
Untitled, 1969
Li Fang was the sole female founding member of the Fifth Moon Group, a collective of avant-garde artists formed in Taiwan in 1957. Two years later she travelled to Paris, eventually settling in Switzerland. “Her works are impressions of the natural world,” says Stobbs. “But she was still interested in using the calligraphic techniques she’d grown up with in Taiwan. She brought that context with her to Europe.”
Janet Sobel (1893-1968)
Illusion of Solidity, c1945
Janet Sobel is sometimes called “the grandmother of drip painting”. Her influence on abstract expressionism extends to her interest in “all-over composition”, says the show’s assistant curator Candy Stobbs. “There’s this tracery that covers the whole surface. Nothing is privileged on the canvas – it’s the whole thing.”
Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940-70 is at Whitechapel Gallery, London, to 7 May.
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- Forensic evidence from a bullet-damaged wall sheds light on the Nazi occupation of a British island.
- During World War II, thousands of prisoners were sent to labor and concentration camps in Alderney.
- The British territory was part of Hitler's "Atlantic Wall" and was dubbed "Adolf Island."
A British artist probing an almost forgotten chapter of the Nazi occupation of the small island in the English Channel hopes his work will "serve as a warning from history."
Seeing art as a historical and political tool, Piers Secunda will exhibit new artwork of a reproduction of a "little understood" Nazi execution site later this month in London.
Secunda — whose art explores the impact of destructive conflicts worldwide — first traveled to Alderney in 2019 to explore the island that Adolf Hitler once called an "impregnable fortress," he told Insider. The tiny island has been called the "island of silence" because there has been relatively little investigation into precisely what atrocities occurred during the Nazi occupation.
Hitler believed the occupation of the Channel Islands — including Jersey, Guernsey, Alderney, and Sark — might be a "stepping stone" to invade Britain, according to the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust. The Nazis occupied all four islands in the English Channel until the end of the war in 1945, after encountering no resistance from the British.
While many civilians on larger islands like Jersey and Guernsey stayed, almost all residents of the three-mile-long Alderney were forced to evacuate after France fell to the Nazis in 1940. This added to the somewhat hazy history of the brutalities in Alderney, with very few people to witness.
Thousands of prisoners were brought to Alderney — referred to by Nazis during the war as "Adolf Island" — and forced under horrifying conditions into labor camps to build the Nazis' "Atlantic Wall" of concrete fortifications. The island also contained two concentration camps run by Hitler's notorious SS units.
The prisoners in the camps were from Ukraine, Poland, Russia, and other Soviet territories and included a significant number of French Jews. The official death toll from Alderney at the time is about 300 people — but scholars contend the number of those murdered and worked to death is likely much higher, with top estimates in the tens of thousands.
While Alderney was an "extraordinarily beautiful, idyllic agricultural community — and still is — its landscape permanently scarred with these concrete structures," Secunda said.
Part of his exhibit uses cordite — a form of gunpowder — found on the island to make silkscreen prints, highlighting the area's natural beauty.
But the subject of Secunda's artwork that most starkly reveals the island's darker side is a bullet-riddled wall in a Victorian fort on the north shore. From his previous artwork on conflict and destruction by the Taliban and the Islamic State, Secunda initially suspected it was a Nazi execution site.
As he made a mold of the wall in a place that is now a construction site, one of the employees told Secunda that he had found a bullet in the concrete, which he had kept in a cup in his desk drawer.
Secunda matched the bullet to German rifle ammunition with the help of a weaponry specialist. He also sought the assistance of two ballistic specialists at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. The forensic specialists all confirmed Secunda's theory about the damaged wall.
"I've gone down a rabbit hole with this project in a way that I never have with anything previously," Secunda said. The horrors of the historical circumstance of the island are not concretely understood, and there is a "wealth of information that had never been unfolded," he said.
While Secunda said he received immediate support and enthusiasm for the project from locals and the island's government, there has historically been controversy over research into the once-occupied island's tragic past.
A recent archeological study and a subsequent documentary entitled "Adolf Island" assessed the crimes committed at labor camp Lager Sylt on the island. In 1943, Sylt became a concentration camp run by an SS group called the "Death's Head Unit."
Archaeologist and lead author of the study Caroline Sturdy Colls said she and her team faced resistance from residents. She told Megan Gannon for National Geographic the atrocities committed at Sylt have been "physically and metaphorically buried."
At the war's end, the British government attempted documentation — a leaked secret document known as the "Pantcheff Report" found that 337 people had been killed in the camps.
The report conceded that "it is impossible to say with any exactitude that the general figure of 337 could represent the full number of deaths on the island," according to Coda Story. But no prosecutions were ever made by the British government for the deaths or possible war crimes — making it difficult for some locals to reckon the island's history and marred landscape, Coda Story reported.
Several reasons account for the uncertainty of exactly what happened on Alderney between 1940 and 1945 — embarrassment and secret-keeping from the British government, disagreements between scholars and local people about the immensity of the tragedy, and Nazis demolishing the camps before they fled.
Unlike in Germany or Poland, there is a general unfamiliarity in global memory that many were tortured and killed by Nazis on British territory. A recent policy suggestion hints at this. Last year a right-wing British think tank proposed that asylum seekers headed to the UK be detained on the island.
While the proposal was rejected, Andrew Muter, former chief executive of the States of Alderney, was shocked it was even in the cards: "Pause for a moment to think about the slave labor camps which were on Alderney to fulfill Hitler's Atlantic Wall strategy," he said, urging policy-makers to remember the "thousands of Jewish, Romany, French, Spanish and Eastern European people who were sent there; the hundreds of recorded and many more deaths," according to local news.
The point of Secunda's exhibit is to honor the memory of those who endured the inhumanity of and were murdered by the Nazis. It is also a means to learn from concealed violent histories that could repeat themselves. The art serves as a warning, he said, of the "huge shift in global politics towards the right wing today."
"Alderney: The Holocaust On British Soil" opens at Cromwell Place Gallery on March 15.
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Claus Guth was pleased with initial reaction to his outer space version of Puccini’s “La Bohème” at a special pre-premiere show limited to people under age 28.
“They were extremely euphoric,” he said. “It was an amazing performance with standing ovations.”
Three nights later at the official opening of the Paris Opéra’s first new “Bohème” in 22 years, a high-profile occasion featuring conductor Gustavo Dudamel’s formal company debut, the response was far different.
“The real premiere was bizarre because some people freaked out so early that Dudamel had to stop conducting once because there was just too much booing,” Guth recalled.
That uproar on Dec. 1, 2017, weighed on the German director’s mind when he arrived at the Bastille Opéra last week to supervise the first revival of his staging, which opens Tuesday night for a run of 12 performances through June 4.
Soprano Ailyn Pérez takes over as the terminally ill seamstress Mimì, tenor Joshua Guerrero is the poet Rodolfo and Michele Mariotti will be in the pit. Posters of the moonscape set used in the final two acts have been plastered throughout the Paris Métro for months.
Puccini set the first and fourth acts in a Parisian garret, the second at the Latin Quarter’s Café Momus and the third at Paris’ Barrière d’Enfe, beginning the drama on Christmas Eve 1837 and ending it months later.
Guth envisions the action unfolding across an unspecified future, perhaps 50 years from now or possibly 1,000.
Set designer Étienne Pluss, taking inspiration from Stanley Kubrick's “2001: A Space Odyssey, ” created a doomed spaceship on a raked stage for the first two acts and a bleak planet for the final two — substituting ashes for snow in Act 3. He estimated nearly 200 LED and neon lights were used. This was his first project with Guth.
“When I thought two times about this and I listened once again to the opera, I really thought it was what Puccini could have dreamed to imagine, because he’s speaking already about this in his music,” Pluss said.
Indelible images of inconsolable isolation were created by Pluss, Eva Dessecker (costumes), Fabrice Kebour (lighting), Teresa Rotemberg (choreography) and Arian Andiel (video). Men in space suits amble in low-gravity gaits and nap in sleep pods, mixed in among a hallucinatory spectacle: a boy with large red balloon, an illuminated yellow Chinese dragon, acrobats, juggling waiters and a stiltwalker.
Mimì wears a red dress and Musetta emerges from a shiny curtain to sing her waltz while hugging a stripper pole, twirling a feather boa and peeling off a dressing gown and long gloves, as if in a Paris nightclub. A body double dancer hangs outside a window in an extravehicular repair mission.
Supertitles tell the audience they are viewing Day 126 of a mission: “Expedition in danger — off course — engines inoperative — life-support resources almost exhausted.” The landlord, Benoit, is dead before the opening note and his lines reassigned. By Day 159, the musician Schaunard and philosopher Colline have expired, too. There are doppelgängers and an invented white-faced mime Rodolfo imagines, sort of a herald of death.
These are all apparitions of Rodolfo’s distant youth. As he approaches his end, Mimì’s spirit lives.
“I think for the newcomer this will be tricky to figure out,” Pérez said. “He’s outlining the solitude, the despondency of being alone — really, really alone. It kind of allows the audience to see physically something happening beyond the music. And it leads an audience to sort of go with the story and use their own imagination.”
Stéphane Lissner, preparing to start his term as Paris Opéra director, hired Guth for the project about a decade ago.
“I told Lissner I love this piece, but I hate this stupid cliches about artists, which were probably never true and are not true now,” Guth said. “The realistic story is just an occasion Puccini uses to create this music.”
He read the 1851 book “Scènes de la vie de bohème (Scenes of Bohemian Life)” by Henri Murger, much originally published in the magazine Le Corsaire and adapted into a play, “La Vie de la bohème” by Murger and Théodore Barrière. With librettists Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa, Puccini turned the story into an opera that premiered in 1896.
“It is actually the story of two old men sitting in the countryside at the end of their lives and looking back at their crazy, wild lives in Paris a long time ago. And so this combination gave me the idea, OK, let’s go one step further: Where could this longing or this remembering better times — how to get that more extreme?” Guth said.
“And so it entered at some point in combination of this storyline and the music this idea to say maybe Paris or the Earth doesn’t exist anymore because we ruined it and now I have people somewhere out in space that on a realistic level have a problem on their ship and are close to dying. So what do you do when your time is limited? You try to think of the precious moments.”
His production, preserved in a video recording of the Dec. 12, 2017, performance, is among the boldest reconceptions since Dorris Dörrie’s 2005 staging of Verdi’s “Rigoletto” at Munich's Bavarian State Opera was set on the Planet of the Apes.
Sonya Yoncheva retains vivid memories after singing Mimì at Guth’s production premiere.
“This was such a nightmare,” she said last winter, laughing, “but many people are still talking about it.”
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Whether it’s a clutch of yellow flowers wrapped around a window in Spain or dozens of pink roses cascading down a house in Switzerland, there’s a note of familiarity that threads through Raquel Rodrigo’s street art.For much of the past decade, the Spanish artist has been bringing her singular style to cities around the world, hauling a technique that stretches back millennia out of the shadows.“It’s the embroidery that women have always done inside the home on sheets, towels and cushions,” said Rodrigo. “This is about taking that embroidery to the streets.”To that end, she meticulously reproduces the hallmarks of the craft – the colourful flowers, rigid lines and raised textures – on a huge scale, affixing the designs to everything from stairwells to storefronts.The result is a style that seeks to inhabit the hazy space between the public and the private, by thrusting something as intimate as the embroidery of a home into the limelight, said Rodrigo.The Valencian-born artist came up with the idea in 2011 after she was tasked with embellishing the facade of a Madrid store that offered sewing workshops. As she searched for a way to embody the store’s raison d’être, her mind wandered back to the cross-stitching technique she had learned from her mother as a young girl.Using a computer to map out the pattern, she designed a flurry of crimson roses tumbling down the facade. From there she printed out a pixelated pattern to follow, stitching it carefully on to a metallic mesh that was mounted on the storefront.Buildings are fitted with a metallic mesh that Rodrigo sews her designs to. Photograph: Fanny Pillonel/Mathilde MusyThe technique soon became her signature. As her project Arquicostura – a Spanish portmanteau of architecture and sewing – brought her to cities such as London, Istanbul and Philadelphia, reactions poured in from around the world.Some saw reminders of their childhood in her work, others were flooded with memories of grandmothers and mothers. The constant references to female figures laid bare the wider significance of the work. “Over time I realised that this was a way of asserting a feminine art that has long been invisible,” said the 38-year-old.The teachings passed down through her family for generations have become the backbone of her workshop in Valencia. Depending on the project, she works with teams of up to 50 people to replicate the intricacies of embroidery on a large scale.The process is time-consuming; it takes two people up to three days to embroider one sq metre. Among those who help out at times in the workshop is her mother, in a nod to the wisdom handed down decades earlier as she tried to keep her children entertained.After years spent crisscrossing the globe, Rodrigo has been consistently struck by the ability of her craft to paper over differences. “I was in a village in Russia four years ago and the locals didn’t speak any English, so we couldn’t understand each other.”Instead, the needlework, stitches and yarn did the heavy lifting, bridging across cultural and linguistic differences. “We found we could work together without having to understand each other.”When the project came to an end, she was sent off amid tears and hugs. “It was something magical to be able to transmit so much through embroidery,” she said. “It’s really an international language.”
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Backstage at the Piccadilly theatre was the place to be on 5 June 1988. In the midst of rampant homophobia in the papers, on the streets and in parliament, that night saw artful protest packed into a raucous, highly political and extraordinarily gay evening of entertainment.
Organised by lesbian theatre group 20th Century Vixen, Before the Act was a benefit gala made in protest against Section 28, the legislation that had passed the previous month prohibiting local councils from distributing any material seen to “promote homosexuality”. Featuring scenes and songs from queer creators, the event was designed to show lawmakers what they’d be missing. At the end of the night, the cast and crew of more than 300 – including Ian McKellen, Judi Dench and Simon Rattle – squashed on to the stage and threw pink roses at the crowd.
This year will be the 20th anniversary of the repeal of Section 28 – whose harmful legacy is explored in Breach Theatre’s new verbatim musical After the Act. “The story of Section 28 is often told by the generation that fought it,” says the show’s co-writer and director Billy Barrett, “but rarely by the people that grew up under it.” Inspired by Before the Act, Breach’s new musical evolves the company’s award-winning style of documentary theatre to create an entirely verbatim show with first-hand interviews set to song. Performed by an all-queer cast, Barrett hopes the show will, like its predecessor, not only entertain but “function as a political action itself”.
Voted through by Thatcher’s government in the midst of a moral panic about Aids, Section 28 was a perplexingly vague piece of legislature that created a culture of fear and self-censorship across areas ruled by local councils, including schools, theatres and libraries. “There is a sense of Section 28 stealing years,” says co-writer and performer Ellice Stevens, “and stealing the ability to have confidence and self-acceptance as a teenager.”
Section 28 incited dramatic protests that included activists abseiling into the House of Lords and invading the BBC studio live on the Six O’Clock News. But it is not these attention-grabbing events that Stevens and Barrett focus on in After the Act. Instead, they conducted interviews with teachers, students and activists who were involved with or impacted by the legislation. “Section 28 was about silencing,” Barrett reasons, “so we’re uncovering those voices and bringing them to the stage.”
The experience has been a formal challenge, they admit. “It’s such a messy story to tell,” Stevens says, “because there is no linear narrative.” Working with composer and musical director Frew, and using music as a unifier, they hope to present the complexities and spiralling impact of the restrictive ruling. The words of their gathered testimonies and archival documents clash and weave together with the musical influences of Billy Bragg, Bonnie Tyler and Meatloaf.
Barrett is 30, Stevens 31. They were both starting secondary school as Section 28 was repealed – an event that took place with little fanfare. “It just got quietly taken off the statute books,” says Barrett. “There was no sudden moment of changing the whole curriculum. That meant it cast an even longer shadow, because people were unclear about what they could teach. There was no moment when someone said: ‘This massive legislation has been removed, so today the PSE lesson is about queer empowerment’.”
While rooted in history, After the Act holds up a mirror to conversations today. “A lot of the public discourse around Section 28 feel like it’s being rerun in the hysteria around trans rights,” Barrett says. “Particularly in the language of child protection.” Stevens draws a direct parallel to the protests against Westminster’s decision to block Scotland’s gender-reform bill. “I went to a protest last week about Section 35,” she says, “and the similarities to the speeches at the 1988 march in Manchester against Section 28” – one of the key events they present in the show – “are uncanny.” By drawing clear links between these drives for equality, Barrett says, they hope the show might challenge anti-trans sentiment. “It’s about saying, does this ring any bells?” he says. “Which side do you think you’re on here?”
In After the Act, Breach attempt to unfurl the story of Section 28. Fuelled by fury and progress, with the words of those who were there, and the voices of those who lived with the consequences, the show is an act of resistance in itself. “When I think back on growing up as a queer teenager,” Stevens says, “I was very lonely. I didn’t know this part of myself.” The lack of conversation about sexuality was pervasive; Section 28 helped make it so. “Even when I was exploring it all at uni, it didn’t feel celebratory and it didn’t feel fun. But this process,” she says, before heading back into the rehearsal room, “even though it’s sometimes heavy, is both.”
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Drought in Brazil's Amazon reveals ancient engravings
An extreme drought in parts of the Amazon has led to a dramatic drop in river water levels, exposing dozens of usually submerged rock formations with carvings of human forms that may date back some 2,000 years.
Livia Ribeiro, a longtime resident of the Amazon's largest city, Manaus, said she heard about the rock engravings from friends and wanted to check them out.
"I thought it was a lie ... I had never seen this. I've lived in Manaus for 27 years," said Ribeiro, an administrator, after viewing the dazzling relics.
The rock carvings are not usually visible because they are covered by the waters of the Negro River, whose flow recorded its lowest level in 121 years last week.
The surfacing of the engravings on the riverbank have delighted scientists and the general public alike but also raised unsettling questions.
"We come, we look at (the engravings) and we think they are beautiful. But at the same time, it is worrying... I also think about whether this river will exist in 50 or 100 years," Ribeiro said.
Drought in Brazil's Amazon has drastically reduced river levels in recent weeks, affecting a region that depends on a maze of waterways for transportation and supplies.
The Brazilian government has sent emergency aid to the area, where normally bustling riverbanks are dry, littered with stranded boats.
According to experts, the dry season has worsened this year due to El Niño, an irregular climate pattern over the Pacific Ocean that disrupts normal weather, adding to the effect of climate change.
The engravings comprise an archaeological site of "great relevance," said Jaime Oliveira of the Brazilian Institute of Historical Heritage (Iphan).
They are at a site known as Praia das Lajes and were first seen in 2010, during another period of drought not as severe as the current one.
The rock carvings appear against a backdrop of dense jungle, with the low brownish waters of the Negro River flowing nearby.
Most of the engravings are of human faces, some of them rectangular and others oval, with smiles or grim expressions.
"The site expresses emotions, feelings, it is an engraved rock record, but it has something in common with current works of art," said Oliveira.
For Beatriz Carneiro, historian and member of Iphan, Praia das Lajes has an "inestimable" value in understanding the first people who inhabited the region, a field still little explored.
"Unhappily it is now reappearing with the worsening of the drought," Carneiro said. "Having our rivers back (flooded) and keeping the engravings submerged will help preserve them, even more than our work."
© 2023 AFP
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COLOGNE, Germany, May 5 (Reuters) - A German artist who is preparing to lay the 100,000th cobblestone commemorating a person who was deported and killed by the Nazis has no intention of giving up making the brass-capped blocks, saying demand is higher than ever.
By placing Stolpersteine ("stumble stones") outside the victims' last known address, 75-year-old Gunter Demnig aims to draw attention to the fate of individuals in the Holocaust.
The project started about three decades ago when Demnig laid the first stones in Berlin and Cologne.
Nearly 100,000 cobblestones later, they can be found in 30 countries across Europe, from Finland to Italy, Hungary, Russia and Ukraine.
"I never dreamed of this," Demnig said, saying he had expected a few hundred or maybe 1,000 stones.
"I was naive enough to believe that it would have to decrease at some point ... but it's the other way around: interest is getting greater and greater."
He expects to lay his 100,000th stone this year.
In his workshop, Demnig embosses the name and date of birth and circumstances of death by hand. He lays most of the stones, which can be requested by anyone, himself, with the costs paid by donations and sponsorship from private individuals as well as companies or institutions.
"People ask why I don't have it done in a factory? I say Auschwitz was a murder factory. That's why it's important to me that the writing is hammered into the plaques by hand," he said.
Inspired by the Talmud - a compendium of Jewish thought and commentary - which says a person is only forgotten when his or her name is forgotten, the stones in front of the buildings revive the memory of the people who lived there.
They commemorate all groups of the Nazis' victims, including Jews, Sinti and Roma, political opponents, gay people and "antisocial elements", or criminals.
They have become an integral part of cities across Germany, especially Berlin, where locals and tourists stop to inspect the stones, which shine on grey pavements and sometimes have flowers strewn across them.
"Here we have a mother who has been stigmatised for 'antisocial'. The child was placed in a children's home. Both were murdered," said Demnig as prepares to lay two stones outside the house in Cologne where they lived.
While determined to continue his work, Demnig is resigned to eventually delegating to colleagues. "As long as my knees are still okay, I'll keep going," he said.
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Archaeologists in Mexico City have unearthed a collection of stone figurines depicting humans — carvings that the Aztecs likely used as offerings.
The 15 objects were discovered tucked inside a stone chest buried on the former site of the Templo Mayor, which once served as the temple complex of Tenochtitlán, the capital of the Aztec Empire. Spanish forces destroyed the temple in 1521, and the site is now home to the Mexico City Metropolitan Cathedral, according to a translated statement.
Fourteen of the artifacts portray men, while the smallest of the group features a woman.
All of the figurines are in the Mezcala style related to an early Mesoamerican culture that once existed in Guerrero, a state in southern Mexico, that was known for creating objects depicting humans, according to The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Researchers think the Aztecs valued Mezcala objects and may have looted the sculptures in battle, according to the statement.
"This means that when the Mexicas (Aztecs) subdued those peoples, the figurines were already true relics, some of them more than 1,000 years old," archaeologist Leonardo López Luján, director of the Templo Mayor Project, which led the excavation, said in the statement. "Presumably they served as cult effigies, which they appropriated as booty of war."
In addition to the figurines, the chest contained two rattlesnake-shaped earrings, 186 green metamorphic stone beads, snails, shells and marine corals.
"In their homes, the Mexicas used to keep their most precious belongings in palm-frond chests, such as fine feathers, jewelry or cotton garments," López Luján said in the statement. "And if we see it from the Templo Mayor … we can imagine the priests storing in these 'stone cases' the quintessential symbols of water and fertility: sculptures of the rain gods, green stone beads, shells and snails."
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Jennifer Nalewicki is a Salt Lake City-based journalist whose work has been featured in The New York Times, Smithsonian Magazine, Scientific American, Popular Mechanics and more. She covers several science topics from planet Earth to paleontology and archaeology to health and culture. Prior to freelancing, Jennifer held an Editor role at Time Inc. Jennifer has a bachelor's degree in Journalism from The University of Texas at Austin.
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This concert, given by the intrepid forces of the BBC National Orchestra of Wales under conductor Matthew Coorey, was refreshing for offering repertoire not frequently performed and a context for a newly commissioned work.
Steve Reich’s 1995 City Life is a sonic tribute to his native New York, sampling the city’s overall clamour. Among the words and phrases integral to the fabric of the piece are those of firefighters responding to the abortive 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, now a chill pointer to what would be his WTC 9/11.
Given that George Gershwin’s car claxon in An American in Paris was one of the triggers for Reich’s use of sampled sounds, Gershwin’s Second Rhapsody – reflecting New York and originally titled Rhapsody in Rivets – was a neat pairing. Soloist Freddy Kempf was suitably flamboyant, but brought considerable delicacy to the piano’s quietly lyrical passages.
Colin Riley’s Hearing Places is a series of impressions of the Welsh landscape, using on-site recordings, and as such a counterpart to both the Reich and the Gershwin. Its seven movements represent an exhortation to listen, to relate fully with our environment before it’s too late; part of the deep conviction of Riley’s approach is as someone who creates work directly influenced by his own hearing impairment following encephalitis as a child. Beginning with the clangour of Port Talbot steelworks, it included the pitter-patter of Dylan Thomas’s “pale rain” over the Taf estuary at Laugharne, fingers tapping rhythms on the wood of the stringed instrument, and later the furious clatter of Solva’s weaving mill. While the detail of the score underlined Riley’s acute sensibilities, it seemed ironic that the visual element, projecting images from the various locations and controlled by the keyboard sampler, felt an unnecessary distraction. The different bell-like chimes heard in Percy Grainger’s arrangement of La Vallée des Cloches from Ravel’s Miroirs which opened the evening finally had their echo in Riley’s last movement with its sampling of church bells from Ruthin. Their effect was at once celebratory and mournful.
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Prehistoric standing stones in western France destroyed during construction of DIY store
Thirty nine ancient standing stones at the Neolithic site of Carnac, in north-west France, have been destroyed during the construction of a Mr Bricolage DIY store, it has been revealed.
The huge site of Carnac, in Brittany, contains thousands of ancient standing stones, spread over 27 communes - it is one of the most import prehistoric sites in Europe.
The "menhirs" - single standing stones - are part of one largest collections in the world - you may recognise them as the giant rocks carried by Obelix, in the classic "Asterix & Obelix" French comic series.
Believed to have been erected during the Neolithic period, some stones are thousands of years old, having been placed there as early as 4,000 BC.
READ ALSO 6 prehistoric sites in France to visit
But there are now fewer stones than previously, after it was revealed that 39 of them have been destroyed during the construction of a new DIY store at the edge of the heritage area.
According to regional newspaper, Ouest-France, the DIY chain Mr Bricolage had been given a building permit to build a new store in the area, issued by the local town hall in August 2022. Construction is now underway.
The stones in question are in the town of Montaubin, not at the primary tourist locations of Ménec and Kermario - located a little over 1.5km away.
Nevertheless, historical associations and nearby residents, like Christian Obeltz, a researcher who runs the a "Sites & Monuments" website, have been incredulous about how building permission could have been given to a place listed as a heritage site to be preserved.
The issue appears to be that certain stones were missed off recently updated planning maps, and the builders say they had no idea that the site was part of the heritage area.
According to Ouest France, in 2014, an archeological survey was carried out, which led to another planning permission being rejected, as work on the site could have affected "elements of archeological heritage".
But Stéphane Doriel, who will be running the building operation, told Ouest France that they had not been warned by any government body or document about the presence of the menhirs.
"I'm not an archaeologist, I don't know menhirs; low walls exist everywhere. If we'd known that, we'd obviously have done things differently", Doriel told Ouest France. Doriel claimed that the previous permit was refused due to a wetland issue, not the stones.
As seen in the image below, the area is surrounded by quite a lot of vegetation.
À Carnac (#Morbihan), pour construire un magasin, 39 menhirs - pourtant identifiés par la Drac (Direction régionale des affaires culturelles) - ont été détruits 😡 #Bretagne — Xavier Mauduit (@XavierMauduit) June 7, 2023
Un alignement d’explications est nécessaire !
👉 https://t.co/ORwAShzSmS pic.twitter.com/4UAhFRfdKK
The town's mayor, Olivier Lepick, also said he was unaware the site had been listed on the Heritage Atlas, even though he is reportedly the president of the group that applied for UNESCO status for the pre-historic sites. Lepick told Ouest France that effort had been made to comply with zoning rules and that there must have been an error with the updating of zoning plans, as the discoveries of new stones occurred in 2015.
In France, zoning plans, or PLU, are quite strict about what can be built where, but there was a change to this process in December 2020. The PLU replaced its precursor, 'Plan d'occupation des sols' (POS), which was previous the urban zoning document used across France.
According to Lepick, the stones had been properly listed with the previous document, not the new one, and this is to blame for why planning permission had been awarded.
But Obeltz has another theory - he told Ouest France that "elected officials in the area and the département are in a hurry to build up anything [around the archeological area] because once it is classified with UNESCO, it won't be possible anymore".
Obeltz is referring to the fact that in September 2023, there will be an application submitted to register the 397 megalithic sites, spread over 27 communes near Carnac, as a Unesco World Heritage site. If approved, building in the area will become more strictly regulated than it already is.
Visiting the Carnac stones
Most of the time, when tourists visit the stones they go to two sites: Ménec and Kermario, which extend around 6km.
There are many theories and legends that have permeated Breton history as to why the stones were aligned in the order that they were placed in. One local legend says that they are the remains of a Roman army that was turned into rock.
You can see a video overview of the site by Carnac's tourism office below:
You can visit the stones for free from October to March, but between April and September, you must go via paid tour guide. With several hiking trails around the site, there are plenty of paths to explore. Tours are also available in English, German and Spanish.
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The huge site of Carnac, in Brittany, contains thousands of ancient standing stones, spread over 27 communes - it is one of the most import prehistoric sites in Europe.
The "menhirs" - single standing stones - are part of one largest collections in the world - you may recognise them as the giant rocks carried by Obelix, in the classic "Asterix & Obelix" French comic series.
Believed to have been erected during the Neolithic period, some stones are thousands of years old, having been placed there as early as 4,000 BC.
READ ALSO 6 prehistoric sites in France to visit
But there are now fewer stones than previously, after it was revealed that 39 of them have been destroyed during the construction of a new DIY store at the edge of the heritage area.
According to regional newspaper, Ouest-France, the DIY chain Mr Bricolage had been given a building permit to build a new store in the area, issued by the local town hall in August 2022. Construction is now underway.
The stones in question are in the town of Montaubin, not at the primary tourist locations of Ménec and Kermario - located a little over 1.5km away.
Nevertheless, historical associations and nearby residents, like Christian Obeltz, a researcher who runs the a "Sites & Monuments" website, have been incredulous about how building permission could have been given to a place listed as a heritage site to be preserved.
The issue appears to be that certain stones were missed off recently updated planning maps, and the builders say they had no idea that the site was part of the heritage area.
According to Ouest France, in 2014, an archeological survey was carried out, which led to another planning permission being rejected, as work on the site could have affected "elements of archeological heritage".
But Stéphane Doriel, who will be running the building operation, told Ouest France that they had not been warned by any government body or document about the presence of the menhirs.
"I'm not an archaeologist, I don't know menhirs; low walls exist everywhere. If we'd known that, we'd obviously have done things differently", Doriel told Ouest France. Doriel claimed that the previous permit was refused due to a wetland issue, not the stones.
As seen in the image below, the area is surrounded by quite a lot of vegetation.
À Carnac (#Morbihan), pour construire un magasin, 39 menhirs - pourtant identifiés par la Drac (Direction régionale des affaires culturelles) - ont été détruits 😡 #Bretagne— Xavier Mauduit (@XavierMauduit) June 7, 2023
Un alignement d’explications est nécessaire !
👉 https://t.co/ORwAShzSmS pic.twitter.com/4UAhFRfdKK
The town's mayor, Olivier Lepick, also said he was unaware the site had been listed on the Heritage Atlas, even though he is reportedly the president of the group that applied for UNESCO status for the pre-historic sites. Lepick told Ouest France that effort had been made to comply with zoning rules and that there must have been an error with the updating of zoning plans, as the discoveries of new stones occurred in 2015.
In France, zoning plans, or PLU, are quite strict about what can be built where, but there was a change to this process in December 2020. The PLU replaced its precursor, 'Plan d'occupation des sols' (POS), which was previous the urban zoning document used across France.
According to Lepick, the stones had been properly listed with the previous document, not the new one, and this is to blame for why planning permission had been awarded.
But Obeltz has another theory - he told Ouest France that "elected officials in the area and the département are in a hurry to build up anything [around the archeological area] because once it is classified with UNESCO, it won't be possible anymore".
Obeltz is referring to the fact that in September 2023, there will be an application submitted to register the 397 megalithic sites, spread over 27 communes near Carnac, as a Unesco World Heritage site. If approved, building in the area will become more strictly regulated than it already is.
Visiting the Carnac stones
Most of the time, when tourists visit the stones they go to two sites: Ménec and Kermario, which extend around 6km.
There are many theories and legends that have permeated Breton history as to why the stones were aligned in the order that they were placed in. One local legend says that they are the remains of a Roman army that was turned into rock.
You can see a video overview of the site by Carnac's tourism office below:
You can visit the stones for free from October to March, but between April and September, you must go via paid tour guide. With several hiking trails around the site, there are plenty of paths to explore. Tours are also available in English, German and Spanish.
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Art and Culture
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On Tuesday night, King Charles III and Queen Camilla hosted a star-studded event at Windsor Castle to honor another milestone during a celebratory year. 2023 marks the 400th year since the publication of the First Folio, a collection of works by William Shakespeare released seven years after his death that preserved plays for future generations. Events to mark the anniversary have been taking place all year, but this week, the librarians at Windsor Castle brought out their copy of the First and Second Folios so that a collection of British icons, including Dame Judi Dench, Dame Vanessa Redgrave, Helena Bonham Carter, Joely Richardson, and David Oyelowo could take a look.
Also representing the royal family at the event were Sophie, the Duchess of Edinburgh, and Birgitte, the Duchess of Gloucester. On social media, the palace shared footage of another highlight of the reception, a set of performances by Lucy Phelps, Ray Fearon, and Mark Quartley of the Royal Shakespeare Company.
The actors have quite a bit of experience under their belts, but in the palace video, they admitted that it was a difficult performance. Fearon said that it was one of the “toughest audiences.” Phelps added, “When I saw the people who were on the guest list a creeping panic started to emerge.”
Afterward, Phelps told Hello! that the real issue was the acting royalty in the audience, not necessarily the Windsors. “I thought it was going to be a bit like Strictly [Come Dancing] with Judi Dench holding up a card with a number seven on it,” she said. “Just with all those actors in the room with us who have played those parts, that was the thing.”
In their post, the palace also pointed out the connection between the plays and the history of the royal family. “Well-known faces from @theRSC performed excerpts from some of the plays which would have been lost to us today had the folio not been published, and guests were able to view the First and Second Folios, which are preserved at Windsor,” it said. The post also explained a message left by one of the king’s ancestors, Charles I, who reigned from 1625 until he was executed in 1649. “Charles I read the Second Folio while imprisoned at Windsor Castle during the Civil War. Inside it he wrote ‘Dum Spiro Spero,’ Latin for ‘while I breathe, I hope.’”
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The UK's heroes are no longer being honoured in marble on a plinth but with spray paint on a brick wall. Stephen Smith explores what's behind this artistic revolution.
Between a jerk chicken restaurant and a nail bar, the familiar features of Spurs striker Harry Kane rise into the London sky. The England captain is the subject of a 25-feet high mural on Whitehall Street, opposite the great, gunmetal dreadnought of the Tottenham Hotspur stadium.
With his pensive 1,000-yard stare, the Kane of this portrait is North London's answer to Che Guevara - or to put it another way, this is as close as a millionaire footballer is likely to come to the figurehead of the Cuban revolution, who is immortalised on the crumbling walls of old Havana.
Kane is one of a rapidly growing number of sports personalities and other celebrities seen at epic scale on murals in the backstreets of our cities and towns. Soccer fans once collected trading cards depicting their favourites; now they can gather and swap Instagram images which depict them as big as houses.
In recent weeks, Liverpool legends John Barnes and Roberto Firmino have been celebrated in spray paint, after musician Sir Elton John and champion jockey Frankie Dettori, whose supersized likeness will greet racegoers at the Epsom Derby next month.
The unsuspecting onlooker could be forgiven for thinking that Kane's mural had gone up under the cover of darkness thanks to an army of dedicated fans, unacknowledged artists drawn from the estates around Tottenham's ground.
In fact, it's the creation of a former graphic designer pushing 50, David Nash, and a younger colleague. Surrounded by spent canisters of aerosol paint which litter the pavement, they're putting the finishing touches to their work.
Nash, better known on the streets by his nom de can Gnasher, was a graffiti artist when still at school. "But it was all illegal back in the Eighties. Now you go into Tate Modern and you find graffiti is on the timeline of modern art," he says.
Statues of famous men and women have fallen into decline in recent years - literally, in some cases - but Gnasher is one of a group of artists and taggers paying tribute to the heroes of today with gable ends and street corners as their canvas.
"When you look at a mural like the one of Mo Salah in Liverpool, the composition is not so different in intent to something by [portrait artists] Gainsborough or Reynolds," says Prof Paul Gough, principal of Arts University Bournemouth. Gough is one of the country's leading authorities on street art, so much so that some have even suggested he could be Banksy himself ("No comment!" is all he will tell me.)
Historically murals have been about the common man and woman re-owning the street, he says. "You see this with murals about the Troubles in Northern Ireland, without a doubt. They're polemic and political at the same time. Football is the vernacular game. The fans who go and support their team in all weathers are reclaiming the street with these murals."
In other words, the people's game has met the art of the streets.
Gough echoes Gnasher's point that urban art enjoys a prestige today, although there's still no Banksy in a national gallery. "There can still be a sniffiness about a certain urban, grungy language."
Even if museum status continues to elude Britain's most famous street artist, his peers now have the confidence to switch up from spraying tags to creating images on a monumental scale. Outsize representations of sports stars and other revered figures have long been a common sight in Europe and Latin America but now the UK too.
The process of painting Kane's likeness began with a coat of whitewash as a primer, says Gnasher.
"We drew numbers and squiggles all over the wall and passers-by thought that was going to be the mural. But we used those marks as points of reference, took a picture of them and overlaid our design on top so we knew where the facial features were. Then we started at the top of the wall and worked our way all the way down to the bottom. It's like painting by numbers, with spray cans."
It's not only the beautiful game that's being celebrated. Manchester United star Marcus Rashford and Liverpool's Jordan Henderson have been recognised for their activism over school meals and NHS fundraising respectively.
"I used to say that graffiti art is a bit like a contact sport: an aggressive, assertive, often very masculine environment," says Gough. "But it's sobered a bit in the last five or so years and crossed genders so it's not so masculine." A number of women footballers have been depicted in murals - Lionesses Lucy Bronze and Jill Scott feature in a group portrait in Darlington.
The old masters of the Renaissance had popes and princes to thank for their careers; the pandemic appears to have been the unlikely midwife of the British sports mural.
During lockdown, a friend of Gnasher's asked him if he would decorate his son's bedroom with a football motif: the two men looked at each other and had a eureka moment - what if the grassroots art of the spray can got together with the passion of football?
A collective of street artists was assembled and they've been to many parts of the country to immortalise heroes in paint and brick.
"Sometimes the idea starts with fans, other times it comes from us," says Marc Silver, the other man who shared that lightbulb moment, who has set up a company called MurWalls.
"For instance, a group of Liverpool fans who have a box at Anfield wanted to salute two club legends - Ian Callaghan and Phil Neal - so they got in touch. We're on good terms with the city council, they found us a property where we could paint, and we did the mural." A finished artwork costs upwards of about £5,000, says Silver.
Not all of his distinguished sitters are known for kicking a ball about. His stable of artists has produced murals of musicians including Sir Elton and the late Faithless musician Maxi Jazz. Silver is also sending a team to Los Angeles to paint the Teletubbies on a wall in Hollywood.
According to Gough, one reason for the interest in murals is their handmade, artisanal aspect.
"There's something about the craft of painting, seeing these huge, almost medieval murals being put up, that stops people in their tracks. They're more likely to talk about them and remember them and mention them to friends than they would if they were passing a billboard that's been pasted up."
Back on Whitehall Street, north London, Gnasher and his mate are standing back and squinting up at their handiwork. They're checking that their daub of Harry Kane, envisaged to occupy an entire wall, is complete.
They think he's all over. He is now.
Stephen Smith is a writer and broadcaster
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Gladiator fights were once staged in Roman-occupied Britain, new research suggests.
Tests have proven that the Colchester Vase - an ancient artefact which depicts a fight between combatants - was locally made and decorated.
With no written information, this was the "only evidence" of such duels in Britain, the head of Colchester and Ipswich Museums told The Observer.
The findings have led to "startling new conclusions", Frank Hargrave added.
The vase in question, which is nearly two millennia old, was used as a cremation vessel and discovered in a Roman grave in Colchester in the mid-1800s.
The 23cm-high (9in) vessel, made around AD 160-200, is described as "one of the most important, and perhaps famous, pots from Roman Britain" by Colchester Museums.
It depicts scenes which may have been witnessed in a Roman arena - namely animal hunts and a duel between a pair of gladiators.
Mr Hargrave told The Observer that the vase was of "such high quality that there's been a bit of snobbery, an assumption that it couldn't possibly have come from Britain."
But, he said, the fresh research had "put that to bed."
As well as confirming that the artefact was made from local clay, the analysis crucially showed the names of gladiators Memnon and Valentinus were written into the clay while the pot was being made.
It was previously believed that the inscriptions had been added after the vase had been fired - suggesting less of a link between the decoration and local events.
Analysis of the human remains inside the pot suggested the deceased person was aged over 40, and may have come from overseas.
Glynn Davis, a senior curator of Colchester and Ipswich Museums, told The Observer that the vase may have belonged to a sponsor of the gladiatorial fight depicted.
The item is due to go on display at Colchester Castle from 15 July, along with other significant Roman finds.
Colchester is one of England's most historic cities, having become the capital of Roman Britain soon after the conquest of AD 43, and known as Camulodunum.
Previous discoveries have indicated the presence of Roman-era gladiators in Britain, even if the evidence of arena combat here has been more thin.
Skeletons from an ancient "gladiator cemetery" went on display in York in 2011, although archaeologists said they could not be certain the men were fighters.
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What makes a celebrated beauty, and who sets the standards by which it is judged? In 17th-century Restoration London, the answer was clear.In the 1660s, Sir Peter Lely, court painter to Charles II, painted a series of portraits of 10 prominent society women, led by Barbara Villiers, 1st Duchess of Cleveland, the king’s principal mistress. Over time the collection came to be known as the “Windsor Beauties” and held as the archetype of feminine loveliness of the time.Now part of the royal collection they hang at Hampton Court Palace as part of an exhibition that interrogates those questions in relation to the Britain of today.A portrait of Barbara Villiers, 1st Duchess of Cleveland, by Sir Peter Lely. Photograph: Royal Collection TrustConceived by the art historian and musician David McAlmont and featuring work by the artist and portrait photographer Robert Taylor and the film-maker Mark Thomas, Permissible Beauty juxtaposes Lely’s works with portraits of six contemporary black queer sitters. Its aim, they say, is to draw parallels between the artifice and performance of the Restoration and today, and to challenge visitors, perhaps, to examine their own sense of what makes a contemporary beauty.The contrast between the historical and contemporary portraits is not as abrupt as it might first appear, says Matthew Storey, collections curator for Historic Royal Palaces. The Restoration court was an arena in which dress was highly performative, just as it often is in black queer subcultures, he says.Le Gateau Chocolat by Robert Taylor. Photograph: Robert Taylor“An important part of the culture of the court was masques, in which members of the court dressed up and people read meaning into who was taking on certain roles. The idea of dressing up and performance and that having meaning is an incredibly important part of that culture.”The exhibition also explores hints of rarely told queer stories among Lely’s original sitters, two of whom – Villers and Frances Stewart, Duchess of Richmond – were reported by Samuel Pepys to have taken part in a mock marriage ceremony as a “frolic”. Lely’s portrait of Stewart, in which she is dressed as a chaste Diana, is flanked by another painting in which she is wearing male clothes – highly unusual for the time, says Storey.Sir Peter Lely’s portrait of Frances Stewart, Duchess of Richmond. Photograph: Hampton Court Palace“So often, with queer history, it has been erased – you get examples of literal erasure where pages are cut out of diaries, for instance. And here we have just a hint, a piece of evidence of a culture which may have been lost.”The distinctive “Lely look” shared by the Restoration portrait series underlines the conformity of ideas of beauty of the time – and also has contemporary resonances, says McAlmont. “If you’re looking at them for the first time, you see several people with very similar eyebrows, very similar eyelids full mouths, the undress. It’s the Lely filter. If it was Instagram, you press the Lely button, and get that look.”Son of a Tutu Photo by Robert Taylor. Photograph: Robert TaylorThe contemporary sitters – who include Ebony Rose Dark, Son of a Tutu and Le Gateau Chocolat – were closely involved in their presentation, in a collaboration that in total took three years, says Taylor. They are shown both without artifice, in simple black and white photographs, and in an exuberant film that explores the process of makeup and costume in creating performative identities.“The Windsor Beauties represent a set of 17th-century values about beauty and value of people – I was interested that although those are 17th-century values, quite a lot of them persist to the present in a Britain that now looks very different,” says Taylor.Ebony Rose Dark photographed by Robert Taylor. Photograph: Robert Taylor“I was interested in why and how those things have survived, and what could be done, through portraiture, to bring a different sensibility in how we’re looking at and listening to people.”While his intention is to broaden notions of beauty, Taylor says, “this is not a campaign, it’s a celebration”.
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A new play chronicling “the gentle revolution” led by England men’s football manager, Gareth Southgate, is to be staged at the National Theatre, it has been reported.
James Graham, the writer of acclaimed television series Sherwood, has written Dear England, about the shift in the national team’s culture under Southgate, the BBC said.
The Hollywood actor, Joseph Fiennes, is set to play the player-turned-manager in the production this summer.
In an interview with the BBC, Graham said Dear England, which takes its name from an open letter written by Southgate to England fans in 2021, is inspired by Southgate’s journey since his infamous penalty miss for England in 1996.
“I think what has happened to the men’s England football team over the past six years has been quietly extraordinary,” the writer said.
“It’s been humming along in the background, but we’re only starting to really understand now Gareth’s gentle revolution.”
Southgate took on the role when the England team was at its “absolute lowest ebb” in 2016 amid an “existential crisis about why we’d lost our way” and against the backdrop of the Brexit vote, Graham said.
Dear England will be directed by Rupert Goold, and National Theatre artistic director, Rufus Norris, described it as “a captivating examination into the complex psychology of the much loved beautiful game”.
The show will come six months after England were knocked out of the World Cup by France in the quarter-finals, with Kane missing a late penalty. Southgate has said he will stay as England boss until after Euro 2024.
“[It’s] great to be writing a story that hasn’t finished,” Graham said. “My experience of watching England go out of this last World Cup, it was a multitude of conflicting feelings when I was sat there in the pub.
“Because obviously I was waiting for the ending of my story, so while I was sat there grieving England’s loss around my mates, I was also going: ‘What does it mean for my story? What does it say about their journey? Is this good? Is it bad?’
“None of my mates around me knew I was writing this play so I think they were wondering why I was sat silently staring into my pint trying to make sense of it all.”
Dear England will run at the National Theatre from 10 June until 11 August. Tickets go on sale on 9 March.
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BERLIN -- An independent German commission on Tuesday recommended that a painting by Wassily Kandinsky currently owned by the Bavarian state bank be returned to the heirs of a Jewish family that originally owned the piece of art.
The commission can be called on in cases of disputes over the restitution of Nazi-confiscated cultural property, especially Jewish property.
In the case of the heirs of Hedwig Lewenstein Weyermann and Irma Lewenstein Klein versus Bayerische Landesbank, the commission advised that the 1907 painting “The Colorful Life” by Russian artist Kandinsky be returned to the heirs.
The commission’s recommendations are non-binding but are mostly followed by the parties once they have agreed to call on it to resolve the conflict.
The large tempera painting shows a group of colorfully clad people on a lawn, some eating or playing music, while others seem to be dancing.
In its conclusion, the commission says that from November 1927, the painting belonged to Hedwig and Emanuel Albert Lewenstein, a Jewish couple living in Amsterdam, and was part of their extensive art collection. The painting was auctioned off on Oct. 9, 1940 — just a few months after Germany's Wehrmacht occupied the Netherlands — at an auction house in Amsterdam.
Before the auction, the piece had been on loan from the Lewenstein family to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, from where it was taken on Sept. 5, 1940 by order of the art dealer Abraham Mozes Querido, the commission said in a statement.
“Despite years of research," the commission said it was unable to trace the path of the painting.
“It cannot be proven on whose initiative the painting was sold as part of the Lewenstein estate to the auction house Frederik Muller & Co. at the auction,” the commission said.
It added that the art piece was acquired by Salomon B. Slijper, whose widow sold it to Bayerische Landesbank in 1972 for 900,000 Dutch guilders. Since then, it has been on loan to the Staedtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus and Kunstbau museum in Munich.
At the time of the 1940 auction, the children of Hedwig and Emanuel Albert Lewenstein — Robert Gotschalk Lewenstein and Wilhelmine Helene Lewenstein — had emigrated to the United States and to then-Portuguese colony of Mozambique, respectively.
Only Irma Lewenstein Klein remained in Amsterdam — she was Robert’s separated wife. She survived the Nazi occupation and World War II.
In the dispute over the painting's ownership, the Bayerische Landesbank suggested that Irma Lewenstein Klein had put up the painting for auction in connection with her divorce settlement.
The claimants, however, were of the opinion that the auction of the painting took place in connection with the Netherland's occupation by the Nazis and the systematic persecution of the Jewish population that followed.
After studying the historic evidence, the commission concluded “the painting was seized as a result of persecution. The Lewenstein family and Irma Lewenstein Klein were persecuted as Jews" from the beginning of the German occupation of the Netherlands in 1940, it said.
“There is no evidence to support the assumption that Irma Lewenstein Klein arranged for the painting to be handed over of her own free will,” the statement added.
There were no immediate reactions by the heirs or the Bavarian state bank.
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A new initial public offering (IPO) is dropping this summer, but it’s not for a tech company or retailer. A 1963 three-panel oil painting by Francis Bacon is set to become the first artwork ever taken public.
Bacon’s Three Studies for a Portrait of George Dyer, a triptych depicting one of the artist’s most prominent muses, will be offered to the public in the form of an IPO by ARTEX, a Lichtenstein-based trading company. The painting’s 385,000 B shares, offered at $100 per share, will be listed on ARTEX’s exchange, which is regulated by the Liechtenstein Financial Market Authority.
The work is currently valued at $55 million, according to ARTEX, and was last sold at auction for nearly $52 million in 2017. The company plans to begin listing similar masterpieces monthly, increasing to weekly listings by 2025.
ARTEX isn’t the first company to make a foray into the world of fractional artwork. Launched in 2017, New York-based Masterworks has offered $700 million worth of art investments, typically for paintings valued between $1 million and $20 million, since its inception. Another fractional art company, Freeport, released its inaugural offering of four Andy Warhol prints in May, with each piece split into 10,000 shares, joining an industry of similar and relatively new competitors like Particle, Yieldstreet and Rares.
Why are companies trailblazing the fractional art market?
The majority of these companies have claimed the desire to democratize high-value artwork, which is typically only available to the mega-wealthy, is behind the recent wave of fractionalized paintings. “As [Bacon] received strong public and institutional recognition during his life, the price for most of his work remained beyond the means of most people,” said Yassir Benjelloun-Touimi, ARTEX CEO and co-founder, in a statement. “ARTEX is bringing the opportunity not only to revisit his legacy but to finally make his work accessible for all.”
Of the roughly ninety iconic Bacon paintings in existence, more than half are held in private collections, according to ARTEX. In addition to its goal of providing artwork access to the public, the company claims that the market for artists like Bacon, which has seen $3.4 billion in sales revenue from 1986 to November of 2021, are continuing to strengthen. Global art sales reached $67.8 billion in 2022, the second-highest figure to date, according to a 2023 report from Art Basel and UBS.
But the changing demographics of collectors have also created an opportunity for fractional art companies to benefit. The current generation of art collectors are “slightly more focused on finances,” Evan Beard, executive vice president at Masterworks, previously told Observer. As people from industries like private equity, real estate, hedge funds and tech enter art collecting, they’re more focused on the financial gain of artwork instead of its aesthetic value, he said. “The real shift is the mentality of the collector base.”
More sophisticated data collection has also spurred fractional art offerings, according to Beard, who said “it used to be difficult to aggregate data on the performance of works of art.”
Despite the proliferation of players in the fractional art ownership space, ARTEX stands apart in several ways. For one, ARTEX is launching its artwork shares through a regulated public exchange. And its $100 shares represent a significantly lower buy-in than the $15,000 required by Masterworks. The company also plans to have works like Three Studies for a Portrait of George Dyer hang in museums, as opposed to companies like Masterworks and Freeport, which store their works in Delaware freeport facilities for at least three years before putting them up for sale.
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January 25, 2023 02:08 PM Multiple British museums are changing their language when referring to mummies, referring to them as "mummified persons," or the name of the historical figure, to pay more respect to the dead. The British Museum and the Great North Museum: Hancock in Newcastle, England, are changing the way they address ancient Egyptian human remains in order to emphasize that the remains once belonged to a real person. It also helps visitors stop thinking of mummies as a supernatural monster. WHY EGYPT KEEPS GETTING INTERNATIONAL BAILOUTS Adam Goldwater, the museum manager at the Great North Museum, explained that visitors often did not view the museum's mummified woman Irtyru as a person, according to visitor research. "[By] displaying her more sensitively, we hope our visitors will see her remains for what they really are — not an object of curiosity, but a real human who was once alive and had a very specific belief about how her body should be treated after death," Goldwater told CNN. At the British Museum, the word "mummy" has not been banned as previously suggested and is still used in signs and across the galleries. But the new exhibits reflect the new term of "mummified remains" and the person's name, if known. At the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, the word "mummy" is used as an adjective for objects, such as a "mummy mask." "Where we know the name of an individual we use that, otherwise we use 'mummified man, woman, boy, girl or person' because we are referring to people, not objects," a spokeswoman for the National Museum told the Daily Mail. "The word 'mummy' is not incorrect, but it is dehumanizing. Whereas using the term 'mummified person' encourages our visitors to think of the individual." CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER Although mummies originate in Egypt and are of Egyptian people, many mummies were transported to Great Britain during its imperial age, according to the Daily Mail. However, the British Museum's collection predates that, having acquired 150 items from a private collection in its inception in 1753, according to its website.
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‘What I see is different,” says Chris Packham as he introduces Inside Our Autistic Minds (BBC Two). The naturalist is in his natural habitat, a woodland scene, which looks lush and peaceful but is, Packham explains, a lot for him to take, because he sees not just a vista of nice trees but all the connections between them, the names of all the species, their possible animal and insect inhabitants. Sherlock-style graphics on the screen help to convey the information overload within Packham’s brain. “It becomes utterly overwhelming,” he says.
Immediately, we have learned a little more of what it can be like to experience the world with autism. This new two-parter doesn’t give us too many insights into Packham’s own thoughts, in the way that his gently revolutionary 2017 documentary Asperger’s and Me did, although his interactions during the programme with others on the spectrum are noticeably different to the more familiar sight of him working with neurotypical co-presenters. This time, he is handing the mic to others – meeting autistic people and then helping them to make a film that encapsulates their inner life. It’s a gesture with results as valuable as they are beautiful.
Packham’s first film-maker is 28-year-old Flo, whom we initially see in a packed arts venue, performing improvisational comedy. The uninitiated might assume a stage performance would be the last activity an autistic person would volunteer for, but once the applause has died down, Flo explains: improv requires its exponents to understand the rules of human interaction and then replicate them, picking up on cues and aiming to artificially contrive a satisfying conclusion. Flo can do this, because it’s how she conducts nearly all her conversations in real life.
Flo’s share of the hour becomes an indispensable guide to “masking” – the exhausting, torturous technique used by some autistic people to help them function in work and social situations. Performatively copying the behaviour and mannerisms of others means Flo is, in her words, “never speaking my native language”. She can only be herself at home, where her husband is accustomed to her sitting and rocking, or flapping her hands behind her ears (“Your head’s on fire,” says Packham, knowing exactly what is going on), or melting down when a planned trip to Tesco ends up being Sainsbury’s instead. What might be another surprise for those without direct experience of autism is that Flo’s domestic life was not always like this: masking was a dominant part of her youth. We meet her mother and can see she is the most tolerant and loving parent imaginable, yet her daughter still fought shy of letting her true self show when growing up.
So Flo’s film is a monologue, unloading her lingering anxieties (“I’m worried that you’ll think I need fixing”) and unpacking her confident stage persona. As her mum watches it and cries tears of relief and regret, it’s both a deeply moving illumination of autistic life and a story about how children of any kind can remain, even to their parents, somewhat unknown.
The second case study is Murray, 20, whose issue is starker. His autism means he does not speak, and never has. His dad, Radio 2 DJ Ken Bruce, confirms that the sharp irony of a father and son’s very different experiences of verbal communication has not been lost on the family, but what emerges is that, having spent years unhappily locked in his own thoughts, Murray has developed a felicity with words that desperately deserves an outlet. In the film, his writing spoken by an autistic voiceover artist, Murray says that “non-verbal people sense the world in a deeper way than those who talk … we become deep thinkers, people watchers. We have the same dreams as everyone else … each of us is a star, waiting to be discovered and named in the atmosphere.”
If there is a frustration with Murray’s section of the programme, it’s that there isn’t quite time to hear much of what he wants to say, beyond his pleas to be heard in the first place. But his demand for more tolerance and better awareness is pure and undeniable, and the life lesson he offers about those who speak the least often being the people who are most worth listening to has – like Flo’s mum discovering that she does not know her own child as well as she would wish – considerable universal application.
A diversion to visit a school for autistic girls brings a slew of shocking statistics about how many children and adults might be suffering silently, in a world that hasn’t recognised how their brains operate. With another programme that derives its charm and its power from how intimate and relatable it is, Chris Packham has taken a further, deeply admirable step towards making us see things differently.
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Hundreds of faint stripes, dots and wavy lines that adorn a cave wall in central France are the oldest known engravings made by Neanderthals, according to scientists who analysed the ancient markings.
The patterns, called finger flutings, appear on sections of the longest and most even wall of the cave in La Roche-Cotard in the Loire valley, and were created more than 57,000 years ago, before modern humans arrived in the region, the researchers say.
“These drawings have been applied, are structured, and were not made quickly or without prior thought,” said Jean-Claude Marquet, an archaeologist at the University of Tours. Some of the panels were so rich in markings they might be the product of collaborations, he added.
The cave was discovered in 1846 when quarrying work on the bank of the Loire revealed a hitherto buried entrance. Limited excavations in 1912 recovered animal bones and Neanderthal stone tools from the site, but it took more extensive digging in the 1970s and from 2008 onwards to reveal the full extent of the cave.
Today, the cave has four main connecting chambers that reach 33 metres deep into the riverbank. Neanderthals appear to have lived in the first chamber and in front of the cave entrance, where the tools and bones were found.
The engravings were spotted in the cave’s third chamber where a thin brown film covers much of the crumbly limestone wall. “The wall is very fragile,” said Marquet. “All you had to do was touch it to leave a mark.”
Analysis of sediments that once blocked the entrance revealed that the cave was effectively sealed from the outside at least 57,000 years ago. Along with the tools unearthed at the site, this suggests that the markings could only have been made by Neanderthals who occupied Europe long before Homo sapiens reached the area about 42,000 years ago.
Nearly all of the markings appear to have been made by sweeping fingers across the soft brown film or pressing fingers into it at a height that could be reached by adults or tall teenagers. The patterns are grouped into eight separate panels, according to the study in Plos One. On one panel there are curved lines that meet at a point. Others bear dozens of dots, parallel stripes, and a fan-like pattern.
Previous evidence for Neanderthal engravings is patchy and largely confined to marks scratched into bones dating back 40,000 to 50,000 years ago.
Paul Pettitt, professor of Palaeolithic archaeology at Durham University, who was not involved in the research, said the researchers presented “as convincing a case as can be made, from a site disturbed by early excavations, that the animal and human marks on its walls were left long before the arrival of our own species in Europe”.
“Given that the cave’s archaeology is exclusively indicative of Neanderthals, with no evidence of subsequent Upper Palaeolithic occupation, presumably because the cave was by this time inaccessible, this provides strong indirect, cumulative evidence that Neanderthals produced the finger markings,” he added.
What the markings are meant to convey may forever remain a mystery. “It’s important to know about these ancient Neanderthal tracks because they’re part of our territory’s past and part of our history,” said Marquet. “We’ll never know what they mean. We are not Neanderthals even if we have 2 to 4% of their genes.”
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Artist and activist Ai Weiwei is examining design, history, and what humans choose to value in his exhibition “Making Sense” at London’s Design Museum(Opens in a new tab).
The exhibition is a compilation of provocative and eclectic pieces both created and collected by the Chinese contemporary artist, including a particularly significant work: a re-creation of Claude Monet’s impressionist painting, Water Lilies #1(Opens in a new tab). Ai’s rendition is constructed of 650,000 Lego blocks spanning 22 colours. The artist notably added a personal detail not present in the original: a black portal, symbolising the entrance to an underground dugout in Xinjiang, China, where Ai and his father, the poet Ai Qing, were forced into exile during the 1960s until 1976.
This is Ai’s largest work in Lego, a medium the artist has previously worked with(Opens in a new tab), once leading to the company controversially refusing(Opens in a new tab) to approve the use of Lego for his politically-charged work showing at the National Gallery of Victoria in Australia.
Like much of Ai’s existing body of work, the exhibition is underpinned with political messaging, related not only to his home country China but humanity at large. Widely known as a dissident artist, Ai has long questioned the contemporary world and mused upon the links between history and modernity, freedom and fascism. His acclaimed Study of Perspective(Opens in a new tab) pieces, a blend of photography and graphic design, are telling examples: these photographs feature Ai giving the middle finger to prominent sites of power and tourism globally, like Tiananmen Square in Beijing, Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, the Eiffel Tower in Paris, the White House, and Trump Tower. With these, Ai “rejects the expectation that these institutions should be respected or revered,” the museum’s chief curator Justin McGuirk told reporters.
Other artworks presented at the Design Museum include ordinary objects such as takeout boxes, glass helmet, and toilet-paper rolls, rendered precious with valuable materials such as glass, jade, and porcelain. Playful in execution, the pieces encompass greater themes of construction, destruction, and what society chooses to deem worthy.
Ai Weiwei: Making Sense(Opens in a new tab) is showing at the Design Museum in London from April 7 to July 30.
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The eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD79 laid waste to Pompeii and nearby Herculaneum where the intense blast of hot gas carbonised hundreds of ancient scrolls in the library of an enormous luxury villa.
Now, researchers are launching a global contest to read the charred papyri after demonstrating that an artificial intelligence programme can extract letters and symbols from high-resolution X-ray images of the fragile, unrolled documents.
Scientists led by Prof Brent Seales, a computer scientist at the University of Kentucky, were able to read the ink on surface and hidden layers of scrolls by training a machine-learning algorithm to spot subtle differences in the papyrus structure captured by the X-ray images.
“We’ve shown how to read the ink of Herculaneum. That gives us the opportunity to reveal 50, 70, maybe 80% of the entire collection,” said Seales. “We’ve built the boat. Now we want everybody to get on and sail it with us.”
For the Vesuvius challenge, Seales’s team is releasing its software and thousands of 3D X-ray images of two rolled-up scrolls and three papyrus fragments. The hope is that $250,000 (£207,800) in prizes attracts global research groups who can improve the artificial intelligence and accelerate the decoding of the only intact library to survive from antiquity.
“We’re having a competition so we can scale up our ability to extract more and more of the text,” Seales said. “The competitors will be standing on our shoulders with all of our work in hand.”
Teams that enter will compete for a grand prize of $150,000, awarded to the first to read four passages of text from the inner layers of the scrolls before the end of 2023. Progress prizes include $50,000 for accurately detecting ink on the papyri from the 3D X-ray scans.
The two unopened scrolls belong to the Institut de France in Paris and are among hundreds discovered in the 1750s when excavations at the buried villa revealed a lavish library of Epicurean philosophical texts. The enormous building is thought to have belonged to a wealthy Roman statesman, possibly Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, the father-in-law of Julius Caesar.
While the black ink used to write the scrolls cannot be seen on the charred papyri, infrared images of surface fragments have revealed Greek letters and symbols. Armed with these and X-ray images of the same fragments, Seales’s team trained their algorithm to read the lettering from X-ray images alone. Once trained, the algorithm could then spot new text in hidden layers of the tightly wrapped scrolls.
“A human cannot pick this out with their eye,” Seales said. “The ink fills in the gaps that otherwise create a waffle-like pattern of the papyrus fibres. That pattern gets coated and filled in and I think that subtle change is what’s being learned.”
The majority of Herculaneum scrolls analysed so far are written in ancient Greek, but some might contain Latin texts. There could also be poems by Sappho or the treatise Mark Anthony wrote on his drunkenness. Seales hopes to find evidence of early Christian philosophy. “While others would love to see some of the lost work of the ancients, what I’d like to see is evidence of the turmoil that was happening in the first century around the development of Christianity and the Judeo-Christian tradition as it was evolving.”
Stephen Parsons, a PhD candidate on the team, said the technology was at the very limit of being able to read the ink and that improvements from competitors could lead to dramatic gains in understanding the scrolls. Fragments analysed so far have revealed letters from Philodemus’s work, On Vices and the Opposite Virtues, and others from a scroll about Hellenistic dynastic history.
“I love to wonder what’s in there and I love to imagine the human beings who made these things,” Parsons said. “It’s an incredible moment to have been the person to unveil some of this text. Even if it’s only one or two characters, that’s something a human hand wrote nearly 2,000 years ago and went unseen until I saw it on my computer screen, sitting at my desk or on my couch. For me, that’s an unforgettable moment of connection across time.”
Tobias Reinhardt, professor of the Latin language and literature at the university of Oxford, said: “To me the idea that getting more people with the right expertise to think about these problems is compelling. The competition promises to be a more effective tool for attracting attention from what is a vast and fast-evolving field than approaches to individual researchers and companies.”
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Archaeologists excavating the ancient city of Pompeii have uncovered a gorgeous still-life fresco depicting a platter covered in food and wine, including one foot item that looks suspiciously like a pizza.
Reader: It’s not a pizza. Traditional pizza has tomato and mozzarella on it, as the Pompeii Archaeological Park press office reminded us in a statement released today. Rather, the bready item on the left side of the 2,000-year-old fresco is mensa, a Roman flatbread which served as both a platter for food and food itself.
In a blog describing the find, the culinary archaeologist Farrell Monaco noted that mensa is also Latin for table, and that the poet Virgil described eating the meal in The Aeneid: “After Aeneas and his men eat their meals off the flatbread, they remark, ‘Oh, look! We are eating our tables too!’”
The food “could be a distant ancestor of the modern dish,” the Pompeii press office noted in the release. According to the statement, the flatbread is loaded with a pomegranate, a possible date, as well as spices and condiments. Dried fruits and a goblet of wine also sit on the depicted platter. A research paper describing the find was published on the Pompeii website.
The food porn fresco was discovered in the Inula 10 of Pompeii’s Regio IX, just east of the city’s bustling center. Pompeii sits about 15 miles southeast of the modern city of Naples, Italy, which is generally considered the modern birthplace of pizza. Pompeii—now an archaeological site—was erased from maps in 79, when a violent eruption of Mount Vesuvius buried the city in ash.
Rediscovered in the 18th century, the city—once a bustling and beautiful hub of Roman life—was left immaculately preserved as a result of the eruption. Plates still sitting on tables gave archaeologists a window into middle-class Roman life, while the grisly remains of the city’s residents have provided insights into their dying moments and even their genetic codes.
Indeed, ancient food (not just murals of the stuff) have previously been excavated from Pompeii; in 2021, archaeologists revealed a preserved thermopolium, or Roman snack bar, with animal remains and bean residue still sitting in the dolia that held vendors’ wares.
Like the recently discovered fresco, the thermopolia of Pompeii had beautiful painted frescoes that were preserved under the volcanic ash for nearly 2,000 years.
The flatbread fresco was found in the atrium of a house that was connected to a bakery in Pompeii. The structure was partially explored between 1888 and 1891, but is only now being excavated thoroughly, with all the technological innovations of modern archaeology.
About 22 hectares (54 acres, or about one third of the town) remains totally buried under Vesuvius’ outlay. A daunting task, some might say, but for archaeologists, it’s a fantastic opportunity to see life frozen in time.
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A wooden object found at a Roman fort on Hadrian's Wall initially thought to be a sewing tool may have been a 2nd Century sex toy.
Experts say the object, found in a ditch at Vindolanda, may be the earliest example of a wooden phallus found anywhere in the ex-Roman empire.
However, they said they had not ruled out it could have been a good luck symbol or a tool to grind ingredients.
It was first thought to be a darning tool and found with dozens of shoes.
Accessories and other small tools - along with leather off-cuts - were also found with it at the site, near Hexham in Northumberland.
'Smooth at both ends'
However, experts from Newcastle University and University College Dublin say they now believe the object, which measures about 6.2in (16cm), might have had a more intimate use.
When they analysed it they found both ends were noticeably smoother, indicating repeated use over time.
Dr Rob Collins, a senior lecturer in archaeology at Newcastle University, said: "We know that the ancient Romans and Greeks used sexual implements - this object from Vindolanda could be an example of one."
Phalli were commonplace in the Roman Empire as they were believed to offer protection against bad luck.
Many are depicted in art, carved into pottery or small versions - made of bone or metal - were often worn as jewellery pendants.
The archaeologists say another possibility was the object was used as a pestle to grind ingredients for cosmetics or medicines, and its shape could have been thought to add perceived magical properties.
Or it could have been slotted into a statue and then rubbed for good luck, they wrote in the journal Antiquity.
Barbara Birley, curator at the Vindolanda Trust, where the object is now on display, said: "The wooden phallus may well be currently unique in its survival from this time, but it is unlikely to have been the only one of its kind used at the site, along the frontier, or indeed in Roman Britain."
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Karen K. Ho reports via ARTnews: British Museum has announced plans to digitize its entire collection in order to increase security and public access, as well as ward off calls for the repatriation of items. The project will require 2.4 million records to upload or upgrade and is estimated to take five years to complete. The museum's announcement on October 18 came after the news 2,000 items had been stolen from the institution by a former staff member, identified in news reports as former curator Peter Higgs. About 350 have been recovered so far, and last month the museum launched a public appeal for assistance. [...]
On the same day the British Museum announced its digitization initiative, Jones and board chairman George Osborne gave oral evidence to the UK Parliament's Culture, Media and Sport Committee. Their comments included an explanation of how the thefts occurred, policy changes made as a result, and how the museum will handle whistleblower complaints going forward. They also gave more details about the British Museum's strategy for digitizing its collection, estimated at a cost of $12.1 million. "We are not asking the taxpayer or the Government for the money; we hope to raise it privately," Osborne said.
The increased digital access to the collection would also be part of the museum's response to requests for items to be returned or repatriated. "Part of our response can be: "They are available to you. Even if you cannot visit the museum, you are able to access them digitally." That is already available -- we have a pretty good website -- but we can use this as a moment to make that a lot better and a lot more accessible," Osborne said.
On the same day the British Museum announced its digitization initiative, Jones and board chairman George Osborne gave oral evidence to the UK Parliament's Culture, Media and Sport Committee. Their comments included an explanation of how the thefts occurred, policy changes made as a result, and how the museum will handle whistleblower complaints going forward. They also gave more details about the British Museum's strategy for digitizing its collection, estimated at a cost of $12.1 million. "We are not asking the taxpayer or the Government for the money; we hope to raise it privately," Osborne said.
The increased digital access to the collection would also be part of the museum's response to requests for items to be returned or repatriated. "Part of our response can be: "They are available to you. Even if you cannot visit the museum, you are able to access them digitally." That is already available -- we have a pretty good website -- but we can use this as a moment to make that a lot better and a lot more accessible," Osborne said.
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The streaming giant has cornered the market on the classic genre, including both original features and some old hits getting new attention. (Clockwise from bottom left): “Scott Pilgrim vs. The World,” “Kuch Kuch Hota Hai,” “The Half of It,” “The Lovebirds,” and “Leap Year”Courtesy Everett Collection With wintery meet-cutes in the air and Valentine’s Day just around the corner, the romantic comedy is once again in full bloom.
The streaming behemoth that is Netflix may offer a home to everything from black-and-white foreign-language Oscar winners to middling ’80s-era throwbacks about preteens battling monsters, but the rom-com is one area in which the platform has consistently excelled. After a few years out of fashion, the romantic comedy has enjoyed new life at Netflix. You could even make the case that the streamer played a critical role in saving the genre over the past few years — or at least reminding viewers just how much fun it can be to watch two nice people fall in love against a backdrop of misadventures and hijinks.
Even as rom-coms struggle at the box office, they’re thriving among subscribers. The 2018 megahit “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before” comes to mind as an instant triumph for Netflix, supported by two sequels (released in 2020 and 2021) and countless other original rom-coms seemingly crafted in the trilogy’s image. From the workplace shenanigans of “Set It Up” to the tortured friend zone of “Always Be My Maybe,” Netflix continues to invest in flirty tales about finding the one.
In January 2022, the best romantic comedies on Netflix also include the criminally underrated Ben Stiller and Jennifer Aniston odd coupling “Along Came Polly.” Plus, there’s Alia Shawkat and Laia Costa in the melancholy “Duck Butter”; Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts in the all-time great “Notting Hill”; Amy Adams and Matthew Goode in the reasonably sweet “Leap Year”; and more
From modern classics like “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World” to new originals like “Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga,” Netflix is filled with prime examples of all the loving, funny offerings the genre still has to offer. Here are 14 romantic comedies you can watch right now on Netflix. Selections are listed in ascending order of quality and genre relevance. Sign Up: Stay on top of the latest breaking film and TV news! Sign up for our Email Newsletters here.
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Weird Tales—which delivers exactly the kind of freaky, spooky stories you’d expect—marks its 100th anniversary this year, and is celebrating with the release of illustrated anthology Weird Tales: 100 Years of Weird. It’ll include entries from authors like Ray Bradbury and H.P. Lovecraft, as well as contemporary writers.
Here’s more from the press release:
“Celebrating the 100th anniversary of the first issues of Weird Tales Magazine, 100 Years of Weird is a masterful compendium of new and classic stories, flash fiction, essays, and poems from the giants of speculative fiction, including R. L. Stine, Laurell K. Hamilton, Ray Bradbury, H. P. Lovecraft, Tennessee Williams, and Isaac Asimov.
Marking a century of uniquely peculiar storytelling, each part of this anthology features a different genre from Cosmic Horror, Sword and Sorcery, Space Opera, to the Truly Weird—things too strange to publish elsewhere, and the magazine’s raison d’etre. Landmark stories such as ‘The Call of Cthulhu’, ‘Worms of the Earth’, and ‘Legal Rites’ stand beside original stories and insightful essays from today’s masters of speculative fiction.
This visually stunning hardcover edition is a collector’s dream, illustrated throughout with classic full color and black and white art from past issues of Weird Tales Magazine.”
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A portrait of Theresa May, Britain's second female prime minister, has been unveiled in Parliament.
Saied Dai painted the picture which will hang in Portcullis House, Parliament's office complex where many MPs work.
The £28,000 painting was commissioned by the Speaker's advisory committee on works of art.
Mrs May said the portrait was a "huge honour".
The former prime minister, who left Downing Street in May 2019, is portrayed holding a lily of the valley - a plant which usually flowers in the month of May.
Mr Dai said: "In this portrait, the aim was to produce not just a convincing physical likeness, but also a psychological characterisation, both individual and yet archetypal - imbued with symbolism and atmosphere.
"A good painting needs to be a revelation and also paradoxically, an enigma. It should possess an indefinable quality - in short, a mystery."
Mrs May, who is the MP for Maidenhead, has been described as a "well devoted Parliamentarian and a dedicated public servant" by fellow Conservative MP Dean Russell.
Mr Russell, who serves as chairman of the Speaker's advisory committee on works of art, said: "The Parliamentary art collection records those who have made an important contribution to politics and public service here in the UK.
"Few embody this more than Theresa May - our second female Prime Minister."
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A Ukrainian artist who paints family portraits for refugees to give to UK hosts is "immortalising" Britons' generosity, she says.
Olha Son, who went to Cornwall when she arrived in the UK, was asked for paintings to thank people's hosts.
The 35-year-old's art shows Britons sheltering Ukrainian refugees with a Union flag-decorated umbrella.
She also said she felt she was "doing something important", partly showing the impact of the war in Ukraine.
Ms Son said she started painting five years ago when she was diagnosed with depression and initially painted still-life images, before receiving a message from a fellow Ukrainian refugee asking for a gift for their host family.
She brainstormed ideas for the painting, which was "easy" because she "was in an identical situation as my customer and I knew what it feels like to feel what they feel".
'Opened doors to strangers'
Since then, she has had commissions from other refugees who wanted to thank their hosts.
She said: "It's like immortalising this phenomena of a British family who made a decision to open their doors to strangers from a different country, a different culture, in order to help in such a devastating situation as the war."
One couple who received a painting from the Ukrainian family living with them for some months was Kevin Kennedy Ryan, 33, and Jessica Ryan Smith 32, from Sheffield.
The couple gave them a painting showing their two families, painted by Ms Son, which Mr Kennedy Ryan said left them "speechless" and "drove home some of the reality of the situation".
The British couple offered their home to refugees before Russia invaded Ukraine and said: "It's not necessarily about refugees from Ukraine or any one particular area.
"We all have this humanity that we share together."
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In Iraq, archaeologists have unearthed the remains of a nearly 4,500-year-old Sumerian palace and a temple dedicated to the god Ninurta.
The discovery was made by a team of British and Iraqi archaeologists in the ancient Sumerian city of Girsu, about 300 km southeast of the Iraqi capital, Baghdad.
Girsu, one of the oldest Sumerian cities, was first excavated in 1877 under the leadership of the French archaeologist Ernest de Sarzec. However, with a few exceptions, no archaeological excavations were carried out on the site for a long time. Meanwhile, Girsu was damaged by illegal excavations and looting.
Archaeological finds, which were moved to different museums around the world without detailed documentation, are another factor that makes it difficult to examine the history of Girsu as a whole.
The Girsu Project was created by the British Museum in order to prevent such problems, to re-examine the old archaeological finds and to continue the excavations with modern methods. The project, led by Sébastien Rey, Curator of Ancient Mesopotamia of the British Museum, is funded by the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.
During the modern excavations carried out in Girsu within the scope of the project, the remains of a 4500-year-old palace and many cuneiform tablets were unearthed. This is interpreted as an important discovery to illuminate Sumerian history and to learn more about the Sumerians.
Some of the mudbrick walls of the palace are preserved in a museum in Baghdad today.
Not long ago, a 5000-year-old Sumerian pub was unearthed in another ancient city near Girsu:
Along with the palace and cuneiform tablets, archaeologists also found the remains of a temple dedicated to the god Ninurta during excavations.
Ninurta
He is a Sumerian god, also known as Ninĝirsu, and is considered to be the son of the chief god Enlil. He has been associated with agriculture, farming, healing, hunting, and later warfare. Ninurta’s warlike nature also influenced the Assyrians. Therefore, he is also included in the Assyrian pantheon.1
Archaeologists say the cuneiform tablets found at Girsu may change some of the things we know about the Sumerians.
Girsu: An Ancient Sumerian City
It is not clear when Girsu, one of the first Sumerian cities, was permanently occupied by humans, but it is known that there were some settlements in the city in the 6th millennium BC. However, it is thought that the main activity in the city began during the Early Dynastic period in the 3rd millennium BC. The presence of a large number of archaeological artifacts from this period supports this estimate.
Although it lost its political characteristics after the reign of King Gudea, Girsu maintained its importance as a religious center for many years.2
External Links
- The Girsu Project, The British Museum
- Lost Royal Sumerian Palace and Temple discovered in Iraq’s ancient city of Girsu (The British Museum – Press Release)
- “The God Ninurta: In the Mythology and Royal Ideology of Ancient Mesopotamia”, Amar ANUNS, Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project, 2002, ISBN: 9789514590573
- “Gudea and his dynasty”, Dietz Otto EDZARD, University of Toronto Press, 1997, ISBN: 9781442675551
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Nigeria's outgoing president has issued a declaration on the Benin Bronzes that could have significant consequences in the campaign for the return of these great cultural treasures, as Barnaby Phillips has been finding out.
In the dying weeks of his administration, Nigeria's President Muhammadu Buhari made a decision which has caused a mixture of delight, concern and confusion.
His declaration of 23 March, made public last month, unequivocally recognises the Oba, or king, of Benin, Ewuare II, as the owner of the famous Benin Bronzes.
These are thousands of metal castings and ivory carvings which were looted by a British military expedition in 1897 from the Benin kingdom in what is today southern Nigeria, and are now mainly in museums in Europe and the United States.
In recent years several of these museums, responding to demands from Nigeria but also from within their own societies, have started to return the Bronzes.
The Nigerian president's declaration says any repatriated Bronzes must be "handed over to the Oba", who is "responsible for the management of all places" where they will be kept.
This could include the Oba's palace, or anywhere else he and Nigeria's government consider secure.
No Benin Bronze can be moved without the Oba's written authority, and he must inspect and authenticate each one upon its subsequent return.
In other words, Ewuare II has been given sweeping powers.
These appear to come at the expense of the Nigerian government's National Commission for Museums and Monuments, (NCMM), which has handled many of the negotiations over the return of colonial-looted artefacts.
When the Oba played host to the Dutch ambassador in his palace in Benin City last month, he spoke confidently.
The president, said the Oba, had "spelt it out clearly. The ownership, custody, and management are vested in the Oba as an institution. That is the law."
Many of the Benin people, known as the Edo, welcome the president's declaration.
The Benin Bronzes came to be seen as works of art during the decades they have been in Western museums, but they have a spiritual significance which predates this.
They were made by royal guilds, to venerate the Oba's ancestors, and were kept in the palace.
Ewuare II is the great-great grandson of the Oba toppled by the British, and his palace was built upon the ruins of the one destroyed in the invasion.
But for the NCMM, supposedly in charge of the country's heritage and yet not even mentioned in the president's declaration, this has come as an unwelcome surprise.
"We were blindsided⦠this is not practical nor compatible with existing Nigerian law [and] it was written by someone who doesn't understand how museums work," one official said.
I am told the NCMM has been invited by Nigeria's ministry of justice to offer amendments to the president's declaration.
But President Buhari may feel this is a problem best left to his successor, President-elect Bola Tinubu, due to be sworn in on 29 May.
Nigeria's contradictions and fragilities - its many ethnic groups were carelessly thrown together by the British in 1914 - are never far from the surface.
One of the NCMM's concerns is that President Buhari has, inadvertently, undermined the rationale for any national collection.
If the Oba's ownership of the Bronzes moves beyond the theoretical to the practical, does this not mean that every Nigerian traditional ruler or community be in charge of the treasures made by their ancestors?
The NCMM aims to build a Museum of National Unity in the capital, Abuja, which would, presumably, contain objects such as the Benin Bronzes. That ambition could be harder to achieve now.
Oba Ewuare II and his advisers are more focused on local politics.
They welcome the president's declaration as a victory over the governor of Edo State, Godwin Obaseki, with whom they have a chilly relationship.
Governor Obaseki supports a museum project in Benin City known as the Edo Museum of West African Art, or EMOWAA, which has attracted international funding and engaged the Anglo-Ghanaian architect Sir David Adjaye.
EMOWAA says it will complete its first building in 2024.
Although it has abandoned its original ambition to be "home to the world's most comprehensive collection of Benin Bronzes", it is still viewed with suspicion by palace officials.
The Oba says that returned Benin Bronzes will eventually go on display in a much discussed Benin Royal Museum, to be located near his palace and constructed with the support of the Nigerian government.
"All hands are on deck" for this museum, according to the Oba.
European museums, perhaps understandably, are confused.
The German government, which has taken the lead on the return of Benin Bronzes, says these are internal matters for Nigeria. But some diplomats are worried.
"We negotiated with the Nigerian government to return Bronzes to the NCMM, and signed contracts with the NCMM," says a key German official, "so who are we giving them to?"
In November 2022 Germany's Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock flew to Abuja and, amid fanfare, delivered some 20 Bronzes to Nigeria's minister of culture. They remain in NCMM custody.
"Things would be done differently next time," one of the Oba's officials said.
A close relative of the Oba told me the NCMM had "bungled" returns by "surreptitiously" signing agreements.
But he and NCMM officials also told me they were determined to resolve simmering tensions and work together.
"We shouldn't take the presidential declaration too literally," he said, "but as an acknowledgement that the Oba must be at the heart of the process."
In Britain, museums also try to navigate their way through Nigerian politics.
Cambridge University's Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology was due to hand over 116 Benin Bronzes to a Nigerian delegation on 16 May.
It would have been a highly symbolic moment.
Cambridge has the second biggest collection of Benin Bronzes in Britain after the British Museum itself, which is increasingly isolated on the issue of restitution.
But Cambridge's event has been quietly postponed.
"There being a bit of confusion, it seemed better to pause," explained one official, diplomatically. October is mooted as a new date.
"I have no doubt," emphasised the museum's director, Nicholas Thomas, "that the transfer of ownership will go ahead."
Barnaby Phillips is a former BBC Nigeria Correspondent and the author of Loot, Britain and the Benin Bronzes.
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BERLIN -- Hadad, the ancient weather god at Berlin's Pergamon Museum, growls deeply as he casts his neon-blue gaze on visitors, his body bathed in pulsating orange light.
What seems like a scene from a horror movie is in fact the product of a light and sound installation by British contemporary artist Liam Gillick, part of the show Filtered Time that opened Tuesday at one of the German capital's most popular museums.
The exhibition at the Museum of the Ancient Near East in the south wing of the Pergamon Museum uses unexpected layers of sound, light and color to breathe new life into iconic sculptures and artifacts that are thousands of years old.
It comes as the Pergamon Museum, which is based on the city's famous Museum Island, prepares to close its gates for several years on October 23 for renovation. The show Filtered Light will end a week before the museum's closure.
While the north wing of the Pergamon Museum is expected to open again in 2027, the south wing will only be open to the public again in 2037.
The weather god from Sam'al in what is today Turkey's Gaziantep Province, is 3.4 meters (11 feet) tall and was created from black basalt in the 8th century BC. It is the first object to capture visitors with its unusual colors and sounds as they enter the museum's galleries.
Gillick, who was present at the opening of his show, said he wanted to bring "an emotional quality to life in this object and gently bring warmth back,” as originally the weather god would have been standing outside in the sun.
“But it’s slowed down. It’s made unclear. It’s sort of rendered into this soundscape, which becomes more emotional, suggestive of movement of machinery, of construction,” Gillick explained.
"But it could also be the sounds of an ancient God moaning and murmuring,” he added.
Gillick also attached a shining blue light above the museum's renowned Ishtar Gate from the ancient city of Babylon with its characteristic blue-glazed bricks and depictions of lions, bulls and dragons. The light rises and fades while faint thunderclaps can be heard — sounds that in fact are a slowed-down recording of clay being knocked out of brick molds, the artist explained.
Gillick's show was curated by the Museum of the Ancient Near East in cooperation with the city's museum for contemporary art, the Hamburger Bahnhof.
Sam Bardaouil, the director of the Hamburger Bahnhof, explained how the sound installations help bring back energy to some of the antique objects.
“Many times when we come to these museums, the objects, unfortunately, become relics," though they once existed in cities as living space, on avenues where people used them in different ways, walked through them or sat on them, Bardaouil said.
"So the sound, in a sense, is a way of bringing back some of the commotion, some of the energy, some of the life in which these objects existed,” he added.
The curators of the exhibition said they also wanted to make a point of showing that the artifacts Gillick engaged with come from places such as Syria and Iraq to which civilization owes much — even if today they've become associated with conflict and grief.
Visitors planning to catch a glimpse of Gillick’s show and the Pergamon's treasures before it closes for renovation should book online tickets as waiting times can last up to two hours, according to the museum.
Built between 1910 and 1930, the museum and four others nearby were designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1999.
Even before the Pergamon Museum's temporary closure was announced, it attracted more than a million visitors each year. During the renovation period, the museum is planning to show some of the objects in other exhibition spaces and will also offer virtual tours.
However, the Ishtar Gate, which was built in 575 BC, will be wrapped up and closed to the public until 2037.
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A stretch of a street in Oakland will be renamed in honor of slain rapper Tupac Shakur.
The city council voted unanimously to add “Tupac Shakur Way” signs on part of MacArthur Boulevard by Lake Merritt in the center of the city where the rap icon used to live in the early 1990s.
The Tupac Shakur Foundation will pay for the signs and commemorative plaques.
The “Dear Mama” rapper was born in Harlem and lived elsewhere before residing in Oakland and launching his career in music and movies.
Shakur said Oakland was the place “where I got the game at.”
Shakur was killed in a drive-by shooting in Las Vegas in 1996 when he was 25 years old.
According to the city council’s resolution, public streets can be renamed “as a tribute to an individual, or as a result of a significant event or activity if one of the following conditions is met: The individual has positively impacted the lives of a nation or the world.”
“MacArthur Boulevard between Grand Avenue and Van Buren Avenue where [Shakur] once lived serves to remind us of his contributions to Oakland and our communities through the celebration of art and culture as an awakening tool towards changes in society.”
The city council has previously voted to rename streets after baseball player Joe Morgan, Black Panthers co-founder Huey P. Newton — who Shakur references in “Changes” — and rapper Too Short, among others.
“Tupac Shakur’s legacy will continue through his contributions in art and social outreach, through his family and fans, touching countless lives of children and elders over the years while alive and after his death, taken too young by gun violence,” the resolution concludes.
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A short- video series has gone viral in China, amplifying calls for the British Museum to return Chinese artefacts.
It tells the story of a jade teapot, played by a woman, looking for its way back to China.
The world-renowned museum has been under pressure after 2,000 treasures were reported to be "missing, stolen or damaged" last month.
The scandal has prompted demands from China and other countries for treasures to be returned.
Titled Escape from the British Museum, the three-part series was filmed and directed by two Chinese social media influencers. It tells the story of a jade teapot coming alive and taking a human form as she tries to escape from the museum.
Her wish? To return home to China, with the help of a Chinese journalist she meets on the streets of London.
The teapot is a real artefact - and relatively recent addition to the British Museum. It was made in 2011 by a Chinese artist who specialises in intricate jade carvings.
Though not exactly a cultural relic, the delicate technique used in the making of the pot is a craft unique to China and that has resonated with the Chinese public.
First released on China's version of TikTok, Douyin, the series has been played 270 million times on the platform. It has also seen its creators, who claim to be independent content makers, gaining more than five million followers on Chinese social media apps within one week.
The series has also been strongly endorsed by state media. State broadcaster CCTV gave it a pat on the back this week, saying: "We are very pleased to see Chinese young people are passionate about history and tradition⦠We are also looking forward to the early return of Chinese artefacts that have been displaced overseas".
The smash hit has also inspired other influencers to dress up as characters from ancient Chinese paintings and sculptures.
While traditional media has scrambled to decode the secret of the series' success, social media users credit it to the relatable message of "homecoming".
"Maybe the Chinese cultural relics in the British Museum are also missing home right now. But they can only be squeezed into the crowded booths. Will they be thinking 'Bring me home' when they see Chinese faces there?" read one top-liked comment on Douyin.
"Eventually, there will be a day when [the items] come home in a dignified way," another user commented on Weibo.
Cultural heritage and ownership has become a more sensitive topic for the Chinese public in recent years amid rising nationalist sentiment. President Xi Jinping continues to push for a strong Chinese identity against growing tensions with the West.
Last year, luxury brand Dior was accused of "culturally appropriating" a Chinese traditional design for one of its skirts, triggering backlash online and protests in front of their stores.
And earlier this year around the Lunar New Year, a video of a Chinese influencer visiting the museum went viral on Douyin, in which the user said the treasures must be homesick. A comment suggesting the escape of the treasures be turned into an animation inspired the series.
The series' release has come as the British Museum faces intense pressure over the thefts. Last week, Chinese nationalist newspaper The Global Times issued an editorial asking the museum give back its entire Chinese collection.
"We formally request the British Museum to return all Chinese cultural relics acquired through improper channels to China free of charge," said the newspaper, which is known to be a Beijing mouthpiece.
It's not the first time China has made such demands - which also echo the calls of other countries including Sudan, Nigeria, and Greece who have all asked the British Museum to give back stolen artefacts.
Egypt has been asking for the return of the Rosetta Stone, forcibly taken by the British empire in 1801. Greece has also been campaigning for its Parthenon sculptures, also known as the Elgin Marbles, to be returned.
The British Museum has long argued that it's in the best position to protect such treasures, but critics say the latest thefts show this argument no longer applies.
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Francoise Gilot, who emerged from the shadow of her lover Pablo Picasso to become acclaimed as an artist in her own right, has died at the age of 101.
An accomplished painter, Gilot also wrote a best-selling 1964 memoir detailing her tumultuous relationship with the Spanish giant of modern art.
She described the "hell" of being Picasso's mistress and artistic muse.
France's culture minister Rima Abdul Malak called Gilot "one of the most striking artists of her generation".
Her "disappearance plunges the world of art into great sadness as her personality was bright and inspiring", Malak said.
Huffington Post founder and Picasso biographer Arianna Huffington thanked Gilot for "the insights, love and wisdom you brought into my life".
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Born near Paris to a prosperous family of engineers and merchants in 1921, Gilot set up her first studio in her grandmother's apartment.
She studied English, philosophy and law at the insistence of her father, who was reluctant to see her become an artist. But privately she kept painting.
While living in occupied Paris during World War Two, she was briefly arrested for her part in an anti-Nazi demonstration under the Arc de Triomphe.
Aged 21, she met Picasso, 40 years her senior, at a restaurant and the pair went on to strike up a personal and professional relationship.
After the best part of a decade together, which brought them two children, she left him.
"Pablo was the greatest love of my life, but you had to take steps to protect yourself," Gilot said in Janet Hawley's 2021 book Artists in Conversation. "I did. I left before I was destroyed."
The Spaniard was unsuccessful in his attempts to block her candid memoir, Life with Picasso, and cut off contact with Gilot and their two children, Claude and Paloma.
The book inspired the 1996 film of the same name, starring Anthony Hopkins as Picasso and Natascha McElhone as Gilot.
Although Picasso reportedly pressured galleries not to show her works, Gilot continued to exhibit them, and they are now in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, as well as the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
A 1965 portrait of her daughter, Paloma à la Guitare, sold for $1.3m (£1m) at auction in 2021.
She ultimately moved to the US, marrying twice and giving birth to another child, as well as becoming chairwoman of the fine arts department at the University of Southern California.
A keen travel artist, in 2018, Gilot - then 96 - published a book of sketches made during trips to India, Senegal and Venice.
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Hugh Morris writes via the New York Times: When the musician and artist Paul Purgas was invited in 2017 by the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, India, to play some of the music he'd found in its archives that year, he was initially very keen. These were tapes that had been hidden from the public for decades; they proved the existence of a fertile avenue for electronic music in 1960s and '70s India, and he was determined for people to hear them. But as he went to use the institute's aging reel-to-reel machine, he got a nasty surprise: an electric shock. "I think that sobered me up," he said in an interview. The project, he realized, was about to become "a bit of a lifetime journey."
Purgas, 43, is a London-based sound artist and curator, and half of the electronic music duo Emptyset. Initially, he had been on the trail of the lost Moog synthesizer that the American experimentalist David Tudor used while in India, which led him to the library of the NID. In "a victory for good record keeping," Purgas found details of some unknown Tudor recordings noted in a handwritten logbook by a diligent archivist in the 1960s. He requested them from the archives, and was presented with box after box of carefully annotated tapes, all taken from a neglected cupboard. Purgas returned to England to undertake training in tape restoration to properly conserve what he'd found: music from a group of Indian composers who, aided initially by Tudor, had used the Moog and some accompanying homemade modular devices between 1969 and 1972 to create some of India's earliest electronic music.
Following a 2020 BBC radio documentary, "Electronic India," in which Purgas situated the music in its cultural context, a new compilation -- "The NID Tapes: Electronic Music from India 1969-1972," out Friday -- presents the restored pieces in their full variety. There are manipulated field recordings, pieces linked to birds and nature, compositions inspired by Indian classical music, imagined voyages to outer space, and tracks reminiscent of bleep techno or Aphex Twin. What the recordings demonstrate, Purgas said, is "electronic sound and music existing free from any baggage," away from "any vestiges of what could be conceived as a kind of Western continuum."
Purgas, 43, is a London-based sound artist and curator, and half of the electronic music duo Emptyset. Initially, he had been on the trail of the lost Moog synthesizer that the American experimentalist David Tudor used while in India, which led him to the library of the NID. In "a victory for good record keeping," Purgas found details of some unknown Tudor recordings noted in a handwritten logbook by a diligent archivist in the 1960s. He requested them from the archives, and was presented with box after box of carefully annotated tapes, all taken from a neglected cupboard. Purgas returned to England to undertake training in tape restoration to properly conserve what he'd found: music from a group of Indian composers who, aided initially by Tudor, had used the Moog and some accompanying homemade modular devices between 1969 and 1972 to create some of India's earliest electronic music.
Following a 2020 BBC radio documentary, "Electronic India," in which Purgas situated the music in its cultural context, a new compilation -- "The NID Tapes: Electronic Music from India 1969-1972," out Friday -- presents the restored pieces in their full variety. There are manipulated field recordings, pieces linked to birds and nature, compositions inspired by Indian classical music, imagined voyages to outer space, and tracks reminiscent of bleep techno or Aphex Twin. What the recordings demonstrate, Purgas said, is "electronic sound and music existing free from any baggage," away from "any vestiges of what could be conceived as a kind of Western continuum."
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Kaija Saariaho, who wrote acclaimed works that made her the among the most prominent composers of the 21st century, died Friday. She was 70.
Saariaho died at her apartment in Paris, her family said in a statement posted on her Facebook page. She had been diagnosed in February 2021 with glioblastoma, an aggressive and incurable brain tumor.
“The multiplying tumors did not affect her cognitive facilities until the terminal phase of her illness,” the statement said. Her family said Saariaho had undergone experimental treatment at Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris.
“Kaija's appearance in a wheelchair or walking with a can have prompted many questions, to which she answered elusively,” the family said. "Following her physician's advice, she kept her illness a private matter, in order to maintain a positive mindset and keep the focus of her work.”
Her “L’Amour de Loin (Love from Afar)” premiered at the Salzburg Festival in 2000 and made its U.S. debut at the Santa Fe Opera two years later. In 2016, it became the first staged work by female composer at Metropolitan Opera since Ethel M. Smyth’s “Der Wald” in 1903.
Saariaho did not like to be thought of as a female composer, rather a woman who was a composer.
“I would not even like to speak about it,” she said during an interview with The Associated Press after a piano rehearsal at the Met. “It should be a shame.”
Born in Helsinki on Oct. 14, 1952, Saariaho studied at the Sibelius Academy and the Hochschule für Musik Freiburg. She helped found a Finnish group "Korvat auki (Ears Open) in the 1970s.
“The problem in Finland in the 1970s and ’80s was that it was very closed,” she told NPR last year. “My generation felt that there was no place for us and no interest in our music — and more generally, modern music was heard much less.”
Saariaho started work in 1982 at Paris' Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics/Music (IRCAM), a center of contemporary music founded in the 1970s by Pierre Boulez. She incorporated electronics in her composition.
“I am interested in spatialization, but under the condition that it’s not applied gratuitously,” she said in a 2014 conversation posted on her website. "It has to be necessary — in the same way that material and form must be linked together organically.
Inspired by viewing Messiaen’s ″St. Francois d’Assise" at the 1992 Salzburg Festival, she wrote “L’Amour de Loin." She went on to compose “Adriana Mater,” which premiered at the Opéra Bastille in 2006 and “Émilie,” which debuted at the Lyon Opéra in 2010.
Her latest opera, “Innocence,” was first seen at the 2021 Aix-en-Provence Festival. Putting a spotlight on gun violence, the work was staged in London this spring and is scheduled for the Met's 2025-26 season.
“This is undoubtedly the work of a mature master, in such full command of her resources that she can focus simply on telling a story and illuminating characters,” Anthony Tommasini wrote in The New York Times.
Saariaho received the University of Louisville's Grawemeyer Award in 2003, was selected Musical America's Musician of the Year in 2008. Kent Nagano's recording of “L’Amour de Loin" won a 2011 Grammy Award.
Saariaho's final work, a trumpet concerto titled “HUSH,” is to premiere in Helsinki in Aug. 24 with Susanna Mälkki leading the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra.
The announcement of Saariaho's death was posted by her husband, composer Jean-Baptiste Barrière; son Aleksi Barrière, a writer; and daughter Aliisa Neige Barrière, a conductor and violinist.
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How to make a mummy: Ancient Egyptian workshop has new clues
For thousands of years, ancient Egyptians mummified their dead in the search for eternal life. Now, researchers have used chemistry and an unusual collection of jars to figure out how they did it.
Their study, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, is based on a rare archaeological find: An embalming workshop with a trove of pottery around 2,500 years old. Many jars from the site were still inscribed with instructions like "to wash" or "to put on his head."
By matching the writing on the outside of the vessels with the chemical traces inside, researchers uncovered new details about the "recipes" that helped preserve bodies for thousands of years.
"It's like a time machine, really," said Joann Fletcher, an archaeologist at University of York who was not involved with the study. "It's allowed us to not quite see over the shoulders of the ancient embalmers, but probably as close as we'll ever get."
Those recipes showed that embalmers had deep knowledge about what substances would help preserve their dead, said Fletcher, whose partner was a co-author on the study. And they included materials from far-flung parts of the world—meaning Egyptians went to great lengths to make their mummies "as perfect as they could possibly be."
The workshop—uncovered in 2016 by study author Ramadan Hussein, who passed away last year—is located in the famous burial grounds of Saqqara. Parts of it sit above the surface, but a shaft stretches down to an embalming room and burial chamber underground, where the jars were discovered.
It was in rooms like these where the last phase of the process took place, said Salima Ikram, an Egyptologist at The American University in Cairo who was not involved with the study. After drying out the the body with salts, which probably took place above ground, embalmers would then take the bodies below.
"This was the last phase of your transformation where the secret rites, the religious rites, were being performed," Ikram said. "People would be chanting spells and hymns while you were being wrapped and resin was being anointed all over your body."
Experts already had some clues about what substances were used in those final steps, mainly from testing individual mummies and looking at written texts. But a lot of gaps remained, said senior author Philipp Stockhammer, an archaeologist at Ludwig Maximilian University in Germany.
The new finds helped crack the case.
Take the word "antiu," which shows up in a lot of Egyptian texts but didn't have a direct translation, Stockhammer said. In the new study, scientists found that several jars labeled as "antiu" contained a mixture of different substances—including animal fat, cedar oil and juniper resin.
These substances, along with others found in the jars, have key properties that would help preserve the mummies, said lead author Maxime Rageot, an archaeologist at Germany's University of Tubingen.
Plant oils—which were used to protect the liver and treat the bandages—could ward off bacteria and fungi, while also improving the smell. Hard materials like beeswax, used on the stomach and skin, could help keep out water and seal the pores.
Some of the substances came from very far away—like dammar and elemi, types of resin that come from the tropical rainforests of Southeast Asia. These results show that ancient Egyptians would trade far and wide to get the most effective materials, the authors said.
"It's interesting to see the complexity," Stockhammer said. "Having this global network on the one hand, having all this chemical knowledge on the other side."
Ikram said an important next step for the research will be to test different parts of actual mummies to see if the same substances show up. And these recipes probably weren't universal—they changed over time and varied between workshops.
Still, the study gives a basis for understanding the past, and can bring us closer to people who lived long ago, she said.
"The ancient Egyptians have been separated from us through time and space, yet we still have this connection," Ikram said. "Human beings all throughout history have been scared of death."
More information: Maxime Rageot, Biomolecular analyses enable new insights into ancient Egyptian embalming, Nature (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-05663-4. www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05663-4
Salima Ikram, Recipes and ingredients for ancient Egyptian mummification, Nature (2023). DOI: 10.1038/d41586-023-00094-1
© 2023 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
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While exploring a canal off the Mediterranean coast of Egypt, underwater archaeologists discovered a sunken temple and a sanctuary brimming with ancient treasures linked to the god Amun and the goddess Aphrodite, respectively.
The temple, which partially collapsed "during a cataclysmic event" during the mid-second century B.C., was originally built for the god Amun; it was so important, pharaohs went to the temple "to receive from the supreme god of the ancient Egyptian pantheon the titles of their power as universal kings," according to a statement from the European Institute for Underwater Archaeology (IEASM).
The now-derelict building was once part of the ancient port city of Thonis-Heracleion in the Bay of Aboukir (also called Abū Qīr Bay). The former city, now underwater and about 4.3 miles (7 kilometers) from Egypt's modern-day coast, was destroyed when a major earthquake and tidal waves caused the land to liquefy and sink into the Nile delta.
While exploring the temple, archaeologists unearthed a number of "treasures and secrets," including silver-made ritual instruments, gold jewelry and alabaster containers once used to hold perfumes or greasy ointments known as unguents.
Also at the site divers found underground structures supported by "well-preserved wooden posts and beams" that dated to the fifth century B.C., they wrote in the statement.
"It is extremely moving to discover such delicate objects, which survived intact despite the violence and magnitude of the cataclysm," Franck Goddio, president of IEASM and a French underwater archaeologist who led the excavations, said in the statement.
East of the temple, archaeologists found a Greek sanctuary dedicated to Aphrodite, the goddess of love. It, too, contained numerous artifacts, including imported bronze and ceramic objects.
"This illustrates that Greeks who were allowed to trade and settle in the city during the time of the Pharaohs of the Saïte dynasty [between 688 B.C. and 525 B.C.]
had their sanctuaries to their own gods," the archaeologists wrote in the statement.
The sanctuary also held a cache of Greek weapons, which could indicate that Greek mercenaries were in the region at one time "defending the access to the Kingdom" at the mouth of the Nile's westernmost, or Canopic, branch, the researchers said in the statement.
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Jennifer Nalewicki is a Salt Lake City-based journalist whose work has been featured in The New York Times, Smithsonian Magazine, Scientific American, Popular Mechanics and more. She covers several science topics from planet Earth to paleontology and archaeology to health and culture. Prior to freelancing, Jennifer held an Editor role at Time Inc. Jennifer has a bachelor's degree in Journalism from The University of Texas at Austin.
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A few years ago, the art world was abuzz with news that a painting by the 13th-century master Cimabue was discovered and was going up for auction.
At the time, it was found in the house of a 90-year-old French woman hanging above her hot plate. Christ Mocked also known as The Derison of Christ, was identified only because one of the elder’s children decided to bring an appraiser into the house whilst they were preparing to help her move.
The elder had originally planned to find a new home for the painting in the nearest wastebasket, assuming the 10 x 8 painting to be a simple Greek icon.
Going up at auction in 2019, it sold for over $25 million, four times its predicted amount. Smithsonian reports that Fabrizio Moretti, the buyer who was working on behalf of two other collectors, believed it to be of inestimable value.
“It’s one of the most important old master discoveries in the last 15 years,” he told the New York Times after the sale. “Cimabue is the beginning of everything. He started modern art. When I held the picture in my hands, I almost cried.”
Cimabue is believed to be the pseudonym of Fiorentino painter Cenni di Pepo, who was born in 1240 and may have been the teacher of the celebrated Italian master, Giotto.
“The Derision of Christ of Cimabue is a crucial milestone in art history, marking the fascinating transition from [iconograpy] to painting,” the French Ministry of Culture stated after it, in collaboration with the Louvre, managed to buy the painting for its collection.
“Cimabue lays the foundations for a new way of painting and addresses questions that will be central to the Renaissance: the illusionist representation of space, the body, light, and human feelings.”
The painting is part of a diptych that included 8 different altar paintings; only two of which are known today.
Merely fifteen works of Cimabue are known, and these are mainly frescoes. Christ Mocked will join the monumental Maestà, another masterpiece of Cimabue whose restoration is currently ongoing for an exhibition event in spring 2025 at the Louvre.
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It's one of the world's most iconic historic sites and a British cultural icon, but it seems the debate over how and why Stonehenge was built around 5,000 years ago is far from over.
A new paper claims to 'debunk' the theory proposed last year that the Wilshire monument served as a solar calendar, helping people track the days of the year.
The Italian and Spanish experts argue that this assertion is 'totally unsubstantiated' and based on 'forced interpretations, numerology and unsupported analogies'.
The British researcher behind the theory thinks Stonehenge's great sandstone slabs, called sarsens, each represented a single day in a month, making the entire site a huge time-keeping device.
He has hit back at the new criticism of his theory, calling it 'a classic piece of ranting without a conclusion' that's 'ill-informed' and 'picks away at the corners'.
The new paper was authored by Dr Giulio Magli of Politecnico di Milano and Professor Juan Antonio Belmonte of Universidad de La Laguna in Tenerife.
'Stonehenge is an astonishingly complex monument, which can be understood only by taking into account its landscape and the chronology of its different phases along the centuries,' they say.
'In a recent paper, the author has proposed that the project of the “sarsen” phase of Stonehenge was conceived in order to represent a calendar year of 365.25 days.
'The aim of the present letter is to show that this idea is unsubstantiated, being based as it is on a series of forced interpretations, numerology, and unsupported analogies with other cultures.'
The calendar theory was proposed last year by Professor Timothy Darvill, who thinks Stonehenge would have let ancient locals track a solar year of 365.25 days calibrated by the alignment of the solstices, taking inspiration from ancient Egypt.
Professor Darvill called the newly-published assessment 'a classic piece of ranting without a conclusion'.
'Their main beef is not actually with my ideas but rather the consensus of Egyptologists who I cite in my original paper,' the British researcher told MailOnline.
'It's easy to assert that someone is wrong, but what is their evidence? And how exactly do they interpret the arrangement of stones at Stonehenge?'
For his study published in Antiquity a year ago, Professor Darvill analysed the numbers and positioning of Stonehenge's great sandstone slabs, called sarsens.
Sarsens form all 15 stones of Stonehenge's central horseshoe, the uprights and lintels of the outer circle, as well as outlying stones such as the Heel Stone, the Slaughter Stone and the Station Stones.
Stonehenge, Professor Darvill said, was a 'simple and elegant' perpetual calendar based on a tropical solar year of 365.25 days.
The entire site was the physical representation of one month (lasting 30 days) – and that the 30 stones in the sarsen circle each represented one day within the month.
People at Stonehenge likely marked the days of the month each represented by a stone, perhaps using a small stone or a wooden peg, he told MailOnline at the time.
But the Italian and Spanish duo – who are both astronomers – wholeheartedly reject this concept by calling it 'numerology' (the pseudo-scientific study of hidden relationships between numbers and concepts).
They also point out that almost half of the stones of the circle have been lost and it is 'possible that they could have been small as well, thus breaking the magic of the hypothesis'.
It's already well known that the whole layout of Stonehenge is positioned in relation to the solstices, or the extreme limits of the sun’s movement.
English Heritage explains: 'At Stonehenge on the summer solstice, the sun rises behind the Heel Stone in the north-east part of the horizon and its first rays shine into the heart of Stonehenge.
'Observers at Stonehenge at the winter solstice, standing in the enclosure entrance and facing the centre of the stones, can watch the sun set in the south-west part of the horizon.'
Professor Darvill thinks dwellers at the famous henge not only used to track times of the year, but days of the month too.
'What they did I think was simply to mark the days represented by the stone,' he told MailOnline.
'We have some later prehistoric calendars where they list the days and have a hole next to each so they could mark them with a peg.
'I think something similar would have happened at Stonehenge, perhaps using a small stone or a wooden peg.'
Professor Darvill also thinks the calendar could mark the 12 monthly cycles of 30 days each – adding up to a year.
But the astronomers counter this calling the device 'unknown' and saying that the 12 months are not represented by the monument.
Professor Darvill ultimately thinks the new paper 'picks away at the corners with a series of assertions supported only by the content of their own previous publications'.
'They also fall into the trap that has caught many archaeo-astronomers – the idea that prehistoric people worked at a high level of precision,' he told MailOnline.
'They didn’t, they used observations, posts, and pieces of string – the theodolite and compass had yet to be invented.'
Although no one can be certain why Stonehenge was built, a school of thought that it served as an ancient calendar has long existed, but the British expert pinpointed how it likely functioned.
temple, a place where ancestors were worshipped or even a graveyard.
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Art and Culture
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PHNOM PENH, Cambodia -- A spectacular collection of centuries-old Cambodian jewelry has been returned to the Southeast Asian country, the latest treasures to be retrieved from the estate of well-known antiquities collector and dealer Douglas Latchford, who was accused of buying and selling looted artifacts.
Cambodia’s Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts announced Monday that 77 pieces of Cambodian jewelry from the Latchford family collection arrived back in their homeland on Friday. It said the collection included items "such as gold and other precious metal pieces from the Pre-Angkorian and Angkorian period including crowns, necklaces, bracelets, belts, earrings and amulets.” Angkor in the 9th to the 15th centuries was a powerful kingdom in the area of present-day Cambodia, and tourists can see its legacy at the famous Angkor Wat temple complex in the country’s northwest.
The ministry said the handover of the items involved Hun Many, a lawmaker who is the youngest son of Prime Minister Hun Sen; Cambodia’s ambassador to Britain; representatives of Britain’s Foreign Office; the Art & Antiques Unit of London’s Metropolitan Police; and the Arts Council England.
The return of the items followed a September 2020 agreement with Latchford’s family under which all Cambodian artifacts in their possession would be returned to Cambodia. Other stone and bronze artifacts were returned in September 2021.
Latchford, known as both an expert and a dealer in Cambodian and Indian antiquities, died in August 2020 at age 88 in Bangkok, Thailand, where he lived for decades.
In November 2018, U.S federal prosecutors indicted him on charges of wire fraud conspiracy and other crimes related to alleged trafficking in stolen and looted Cambodian antiquities. It accused him of creating “false provenances” — documents about how and where the items were obtained — and “falsified invoices and shipping documents” to conceal their origins. Experts believe many or most of the items he handled were looted from Cambodia during periods of war and instability, including in the 1970s when the country was under the brutal rule of the communist Khmer Rouge.
Latchford in earlier interviews denied any involvement in smuggling or other wrongdoing. He died before he could be extradited to the United States to face charges, so the indictment against him was eventually dismissed.
After his death, at least 30 sandstone and bronze sculptures and artifacts were sent back to Cambodia from the U.S. by their owners either voluntarily or after court action. They included items held by the Denver Art Museum in Colorado.
The statement from Cambodia’s Culture Ministry quoted its minister, Dr. Phoeurng Sackona, as saying that “the repatriation of these national treasures opens a new era of understanding and scholarship about the Angkorian empire and its significance to the world.”
She encouraged “private individuals, museums as well as other institutions around the world that are in possession of Cambodian artifacts to cooperate with the Royal Government of Cambodia through the Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts or through Cambodian embassies to return Cambodian cultural heritage objects."
“We consider such returns as a noble act, which not only demonstrates important contributions to a nation’s culture, but also contributes to the reconciliation and healing of Cambodians who went through decades of civil war and suffered tremendously from the tragedy of the Khmer Rouge genocide,” it quoted her as saying.
Cambodia's western neighbor, Thailand, has in recent decades also successfully retrieved archaeological treasures that were illegally smuggled abroad, as awareness of the theft of cultural artifacts has heightened.
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Art and Culture
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The final painting by artist Gustav Klimt is expected to fetch up to £65m when it is auctioned in London later this month.
The estimated value of the portrait makes it the most valuable painting ever offered at auction in Europe.
The Dame mit Fächer (Lady with a Fan) is a portrait of an unnamed woman and was painted in 1918.
It was Klimt's very last and was found on an easel in his studio when he died unexpectedly.
The painting has strong Asian influences and is part of the Japonisme trend, which refers to the influence of Japanese art and design among Western European artists.
It also features several Chinese motifs including the phoenix, a symbol of immortality and rebirth, and lotus blossoms that signify love.
Who was Gustav Klimt?
The Austrian symbolist painter Gustav Klimt was born on 14 July 1862.
He was considered an artist ahead of his time and achieved his greatest success during his "golden phase", in which his paintings often included gold leaf.
Klimt celebrated the female body in his work, which was often considered controversial due to its erotic nature.
Other notable works include The Kiss, painted in 1909 and the Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II (1912) that was sold for $87.9m (£69.55m at current rates) in New York in November 2006.
He was a great influence on later artists, including Egon Schiele.
Unlike many of Klimt's other portraits, the Lady with a Fan was not a commissioned piece and was painted entirely in the pursuit of his own interests.
Thomas Boyd Bowman, head of impressionist and modern art sales at Sotheby's, said: "The beauty and sensuality of the portrait lies in the detail: the flecks of blue and pink which enliven the sitter's skin, the feathery lines of her eyelashes and the pursed lips that give her face character.
"Klimt here gave himself full freedom to capture on canvas a devastatingly beautiful woman."
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Art and Culture
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Philip Larkin thought of himself as an outsider, one of a small literary clique with its own jokes, insults and hinterland, whose other members included Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest. In his poetry he often cast himself as an observer: curious about people but also amused (or indeed bemused) by them, as if they were inhabitants of a world that he could only ever view remotely.
A prime example of this is The Whitsun Weddings, published in 1964, in which the poet, on a train journey – a premise Larkin returned to in his writings – spots several wedding parties, causing him to reflect not just on marriage but on the relations that make society. It is a society of which he feels he has at best only associate membership.
Scholars dispute the actual occasion that inspired the poem. The legend is that Larkin travelled from Hull (where he was the university librarian) to London on the Whitsun weekend – which falls this Sunday – of 1955. Some have pointed out there was a train strike that weekend, and so other journeys have been suggested, with the poem possibly being a combination of two or more trips. The precise moment that provoked it is largely irrelevant to the poem’s significance. What is relevant is how The Whitsun Weddings evokes the slight seediness of the 1950s, of an England still down at heel after the war, and its people cheerfully doing their best to muddle through (lacking the mordant pessimism of the poet).
It is one of Larkin’s longer poems, at eight stanzas of 10 lines, the second of each stanza being just four syllables long and presenting, therefore, an arresting rhythm. The scene is set tersely, and allows the poet to slip into his desired detachment, soothed by the heat and the quiet of a near-deserted train: “Not till about/ One-twenty on the sunlit Saturday/ Did my three-quarters-empty train pull out,/ All windows down, all cushions hot, all sense/Of being in a hurry gone.” He smells the fish from the docks and sees the Humber broaden: “Where sky and Lincolnshire and water meet.”
As the train executes “a slow and stopping curve”, Larkin notes the contrast between the old England and the industrialisation that has been disfiguring it: he passes “Wide farms” with “short-shadowed cattle”, and then “Canals with floatings of industrial froth”. Sometimes “a smell of grass/Displaced the reek of buttoned carriage-cloth”, evoking the dusty, coarse upholstery of old British Rail carriages. Then another town appears out of the window: “new and nondescript,/ Approached with acres of dismantled cars.”
There is another distraction: “At first, I didn’t notice what a noise/The weddings made/ Each station that we stopped at”. He continues: “down the long cool platforms whoops and skirls/ I took for porters larking with the mails,/And went on reading.” But he then notices out of the window “grinning and pomaded, girls/ In parodies of fashion, heels and veils”. He characterises these people “As if out on the end of an event/ Waving goodbye/ To something that survived it.” At the next station he sees a similar party: “The fathers with broad belts under their suits/ And seamy foreheads; mothers loud and fat;/An uncle shouting smut”. This is Larkin’s England and its people; and “All down the line/ Fresh couples climbed aboard: the rest stood round;/ The last confetti and advice were thrown”.
Larkin notes that “A dozen marriages got under way./ They watched the landscape, sitting side by side”. And that English landscape is one where “An Odeon went past, a cooling tower,/ And someone running up to bowl”. For the newlyweds, “none/ Thought of the others they would never meet/ Or how their lives would all contain this hour.” Then the train slows as “the tightened brakes took hold”, and “there swelled/ A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower/ Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.”
That is a typical Larkin touch: the sun goes in, the heat cools, arrows fly high and drop to the ground. Such he feels is marriage, an institution he scrupulously avoided. In Larkin’s estimation of life – and at the heart of The Whitsun Weddings, surely one of the finest English poems of modern times – moments of vivid elation are precisely that: moments.
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Art and Culture
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Manny Jefferson for NPR
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Artist Dafe Oboro (right), winner of the Nigerian Prize Award of the Access ART X Prize 2022/23, chats with an attendee at this year's Art X fair in Lagos.
Manny Jefferson for NPR
"I wanted to create a moment for Lagos on the global art calendar," says Tokini Peterside-Schwebig, the founder of Art X, sitting in a chic private booth within the fair. "A moment that brought the rest of Africa together here and enabled us on home soil to encounter those around the world and ourselves."
From the hot blaze of a November day in Nigeria's most populous city, thousands of people pour into the cool shade of Art X, the eighth edition of the largest art fair in West Africa: Visitors from around the world and the local art scene, a runway of celebrities and the effortlessly glamorous Lagos middle-class, all make their way through a maze-like sprawl of paintings, prints, sculptures and moving image installations.
This is one of the most prominent events in Lagos' "art month," as it's unofficially and widely known – a packed calendar of exhibitions, art, photography and cultural events between the end of October and the end of November, mainly dotted around the affluent parts of the city. Its prominence is at the heart of Lagos' gradual re-emergence as an international center for art from Nigeria and the continent, a status that waned in the decades of military rule and economic turmoil after the iconic pan-African cultural festival, Festac, in 1977.
Manny Jefferson for NPR
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Tokini Peterside-Schwebig launched Art X in 2016. "I wanted to create a moment for Lagos on the global art calendar," she says. "A moment that brought the rest of Africa together here and enabled us on home soil to encounter those around the world and ourselves."
Manny Jefferson for NPR
Peterside-Schwebig launched Art X in 2016, wading against the tide as Nigeria's economy slid into a recession. "And honestly, it took off like a rocket," Peterside-Schwebig said.
Amid a prolonged period of economic decline in Nigeria, rising insecurity and growing disillusionment with the political class, the emergence of the art industry has been a success story. Solo exhibitions by Nigerian and African artists are now a more regular fixture in Western galleries.
Art X, held this year at an event center in Lagos' Victoria Island district, right on the edge of the Atlantic, is one snapshot of how Nigeria's art industry, largely led by women, has flourished in adverse conditions. But staging this has not been without challenges, especially now.
Ten galleries exhibited at Art X this year, compared to 30 in 2022. Even so, the fair has evolved, offering a greater proportion of local galleries on show.
Courtesy Art X
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Art X, held this year at an event center in Lagos' Victoria Island district, right on the edge of the Atlantic, is one snapshot of how Nigeria's art industry, largely led by women, has flourished in adverse conditions.
Courtesy Art X
Art X, held this year at an event center in Lagos' Victoria Island district, right on the edge of the Atlantic, is one snapshot of how Nigeria's art industry, largely led by women, has flourished in adverse conditions.
Courtesy Art X
An amphitheater now sits at the center of Art X as a space for panel discussions and talks. "This is the scene for dialogue where talks will happen over the course of the fair, pulling in our audiences to say, look, these are trying times," Peterside-Schwebig said, pointing to the economic headwinds faced by the industry and the myriad challenges facing the country. "As citizens of this country and continent, what do we want for the future?"
The last decade has seen rapid success for several artists and galleries in Nigeria. One key driver has been growing demand from Western galleries for Black and African art, particularly the genre of "Black portraiture," depicting Black figures. The genre has grown in response to the historic under-representation of Black figures in Western art.
Manny Jefferson for NPR
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An attendee views one of rising artist Adulphina Imuede's dreamlike illustrations at ART X.
Manny Jefferson for NPR
An attendee views one of rising artist Adulphina Imuede's dreamlike illustrations at ART X.
Manny Jefferson for NPR
Dozens of visitors pore over the wide bright eyes and mythical, dreamlike illustrations from rising Nigerian artist, Adulphina Imuede, exhibited by Wunika Mukan. Mukan founded her self-named gallery in Lagos three years ago and has quickly gained wide regard within the industry, showing a variety of artistry.
She said a reckoning within the art world after the killing of George Floyd drove efforts to exhibit a greater diversity of artists and a greater representation of Black art.
Manny Jefferson for NPR
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Wunika Mukan at Art X. She founded her self-named gallery in Lagos three years ago and has quickly gained wide regard within the industry. She said a reckoning within the art world after the killing of George Floyd drove efforts to exhibit a greater diversity of artists and a greater representation of Black art.
Manny Jefferson for NPR
"Nigerian artists have always been in the room, from [the late painter and sculptor] Ben Onwonwu to, you know, [painter] Nengi Omoku [and] [printmaker, painter and sculptor] Bruce Onagwapia but in the past three or four years, there was this like insatiable appetite for West African Black portraits and a lot of young artists started to emerge."
Demand for this type of black portraiture from the continent has slowed over the last year in part due to economic downturns around the world, reducing the appetite from foreign buyers. The slowdown is also due to a saturation of the genre as it has grown more lucrative. "I think the Black portraiture phase brought in a lot of attention, which is good. They're still here. So it's now time for us to also show more and, and yeah, be more flexible," says Mukan.
Courtesy Art X
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A scene from this year's Art X fair.
Courtesy Art X
A scene from this year's Art X fair.
Courtesy Art X
The slowdown is also due to reduced appetite for the genre. Wunika says. "I think the Black portraiture phase brought in a lot of attention, which is good. They're still here. So it's now time for us to also show more and, and yeah, be more flexible."
Beyond ART X is a wide range of exhibitions during "Art Month" held in alternative and immersive spaces. Farida Folawiyo's "Image Impressions" exhibition hosts intimate family and individual portraits and a range of collage and animated illustrations exploring migration – and is held at the private residence of Remi Vaugn-Richards, built by her father Alan Vaugn-Richards, a late British tropical-modernist architect. The venue serves to create a "synergy between the art and the space it inhabited," Folawiyo said.
Manny Jefferson for NPR
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Farida Folawiyo (right) hosts the "Image Impressions" exhibition, with family portraits and collage and animated illustrations exploring migration. The venue is the private residence of Remi Vaugn-Richards (left), built by her father Alan Vaugn-Richards, a late British tropical-modernist architect. They're posing for a photograph in the Vaughan-Richards Garden.
Manny Jefferson for NPR
The home is a blend of Yoruba indigenous aesthetics, reflected in the various mythical figurines and carvings, along with tropical modernist ideals, with the entryways and windows and structure seamlessly interacting with the partly forested nature around it.
"This sweet young woman kept harassing me from London," Vaughn-Richards laughs, explaining how Folawiyo convinced her to open her home for the exhibition. "Stalking me and harassing me nicely. And at the end of the day I thought, 'you know what, let me just try it.'" A stream of guests enter the compound and are guided into a smaller building near the gate, before exploring the grounds.
While local collectors have grown, with art works increasingly visible in businesses across Lagos, foreign collectors have largely driven the boom in Nigeria's art industry. A common discussion point during art month has been how to build local and sustainable growth, and not be beholden to foreign shifts. It's a challenge many are reflecting on, and meeting head on.
"For us, Africa is not a trend," Peterside-Schwebig says. "Africa is an important and pivotal voice in the mainstream. And so for us, this is about a sustainable future and longevity."
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Art and Culture
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It’s now consensus that Neanderthals were complex, social cousins of Homo sapiens that disappeared from the Earth around 40,000 years ago. But our lost relatives just became more complex, with the discovery of ancient cave engravings in France that appear to be their handiwork.
The engravings sit in La Roche-Cotard, a cave about 12 miles (20 kilometers) west of Tours. The figures—which are comprised of parallel lines made by fingers dragged across the cave wall in a number of patterns—predate Homo sapiens’ arrival in the region, leading a team of researchers to believe they were created by Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis). The team’s research was published this week in PLoS One.
“These panels are made with highly applied, structured lines,” said Jean-Claude Marquet, an archaeologist at the University of Tours, in an email to Gizmodo. “The cave was closed 57,000 years ago, and sapiens had not yet arrived in Western Europe, so these engravings can only be attributed to Neanderthals.”
Neanderthals were our stocky, barrel-chested, big-browed cousins. Once imagined as backwards and stupid, increasing piles of evidence indicate that they were every bit as complicated and innovative as modern humans. They worked together in communities, sharing food, hunting in groups, and even practiced healthcare. They started and used fires, just like our ancestors.
In any case, Neanderthals disappeared around 40,000 years ago, leaving behind remains for researchers to find—genetic quirks and perks in modern humans that scientists can now trace back to our lost cousins, and—as evidenced in the new work—very ancient cave engravings.
La Roche-Cotard was sealed by infilling around 57,000 years ago, well before Homo sapiens arrived in the area, based on optically-stimulated luminescence dating of the cave’s sediments.
Since Neanderthals were the only known hominins in the area at that time, it goes to provide that the finger markings are theirs. That makes the La Roche-Cotard markings the oldest known artwork made by the species. The ceiling for the markings’ age is about 75,000 years old, the researchers said.
“To me it was only a matter of time before evidence for Neanderthal cave art would be found in France. We have strong evidence for Neanderthal use of pigments, and non-figurative cave paintings at multiple sites in Spain, so it is likely they were engaged in similar behavior across the whole of their range,” said Alistair Pike, an archaeologist at the University of Southampton, in an email to Gizmodo. “The ‘finger flutings’, a kind of engraving made by pressing and dragging the fingers onto soft surfaces (e.g. clay or soft carbonate deposits), are convincing examples of art.”
“For complex caves this can be controversial as there may yet be undiscovered entrances that were blocked at different times,” Pike added, noting that the relatively small La Roche-Cotard was sealed shut. “So I’m pretty convinced this art was the work of Neanderthals.”
What does it mean for this to be found? Ancient art by Neanderthals and Homo sapiens has been found before, even in the same cave. Last year, over 1,000 artworks spanning 50,000 years were found in Spain’s Cueva de Ardales.
But the works in La Roche-Cotard show Neanderthals were definitely making figures on their own time, without interacting with Homo sapiens. Even if they were eventually absorbed into our species, they were creative in their own right at the time.
Marquet told Gizmodo in an email that there’s more analysis that needs to be done in the cave, saying “different panels, one large, another drawn with a tool and other simpler panels are also to be studied.”
Thanks to developments in genetics and imaging, scientists are making new insights into our ancient past: who made up the genus Homo, how those individuals interacted, and when and how they developed their own technologies.
More study of caves around the world, from France to Indonesia, will not only clarify our genus’ geography through time, but also its inventions.
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Art and Culture
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Next Met Gala theme unveiled: the 'sleeping beauties' of fashion
It may be time to get out those fairytale ballgowns
NEW YORK -- It may be time to get out those fairytale ballgowns. The theme of the next Met Gala has been unveiled: “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion.”
The Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art revealed the theme of its spring 2024 exhibit, which is launched by the huge party known as the Met Gala, on Wednesday. Yet to be announced: the celebrity hosts of the May 6 affair.
The “sleeping beauties” referred to in the title of the show are actually treasured garments in the museum’s collection that are so fragile, they need to be housed in special glass “coffins,” curators said. Garments will be displayed in a series of galleries organized by themes of nature.
“Using the natural world as a uniting visual metaphor for the transience of fashion, the show will explore cyclical themes of rebirth and renewal, breathing new life into these storied objects through creative and immersive activations designed to convey the scents, sounds, textures, and motions of garments that can no longer directly interact with the body,” the museum said in a statement.
Curator Andrew Bolton, who masterminds all the Met Gala exhibits, explained that the show includes both rare historical garments and corresponding contemporary fashions.
“When an item of clothing enters our collection, its status is changed irrevocably,” Bolton said in the statement. “What was once a vital part of a person’s lived experience is now a motionless ‘artwork’ that can no longer be worn or heard, touched, or smelled. The exhibition endeavors to reanimate these artworks by re-awakening their sensory capacities."
About 250 garments and accessories spanning four centuries will be on view. The exhibit will unfold in a series of rooms, each displaying a theme inspired by the natural world, “in an immersive environment intended to engage a visitor’s sense of sight, smell, touch, and hearing.”
Examples will include a space decorated with the “insectoid embroidery” of an Elizabethan bodice, or a ceiling projecting “a Hitchcockian swarm of black birds” surrounding a black tulle evening dress from before the outbreak of World War II.
The exhibit will run May 10-Sept. 2, 2024.
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Art and Culture
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The Tuscan-town of Laterina is thrilled to see news that an Italian historian has determined a ruined Etruscan-Roman era bridge in their area was the backdrop of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.
Using drone photographs and historical records of da Vinci’s whereabouts, including those owned by the De Medici family, historian Silvano Vinceti says he feels very sure that the bridge over Mona Lisa’s left-shoulder is the Romito di Laterina bridge.
The most telling clue was the number of arches. Three candidates for the bridge depicted in the Mona Lisa all have different numbers of arches. The Ponte Buriano near Laterina has 6 arches, while the Ponte Gobbo, in the town of Bobbio near Piacenza, has more than 6.
The bridge in the Mona Lisa, however, has 4. Using drone photographs and by measuing the distance between the two banks of the river in Laterina, as well as the size of the single arch that remains from the historic bridge, Vinceti came to a mathematical conclusion that the Romito di Laterina surely had 4 arches.
MORE HISTORIC DISCOVERIES: Renovation Unearths Paintings Behind Kitchen Walls Nearly 400-Years-old
Laterina, in the province of Arezzo, sits on a river called the Arno in a valley where Da Vinci worked at the pleasure of the cardinal Cesare Borgia, and then for Piero Soderini, a statesman of the Republic of Florence—both of whom lived near the river. It was at this time that he painted the Mona Lisa in Florence in the early 16th century.
The Romito di Laterina bridge across the Arno was a shortcut to a town called Fiesole, where Da Vinci also stayed, and then on to Florence, cutting travel times by 3 hours compared to other routes.
Tuscany is no stranger to rivalries; the rivalry between Florence and Siena went back and forth for hundreds of years. The Mayoress of Laterina Simona Neri joked with the Guardian that the nearby town of Buriano, who boast about their bridge being used in the Mona Lisa, and who have posters and signposts up, will undoubtedly be unhappy to hear the news.
“There’ll be some rivalry; we’ll need to put a poster up, too,” she said, adding that “We need to try to protect what’s left of the bridge, which will require funding.”
SHARE This Cool Discovery In The Famous Painting With Your Friends…
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Building Amsterdam’s North-South metro line was big trouble – a budget-blowing 15-year operation that involved carefully burrowing beneath the foundations of centuries-old architecture.
For archaeologists tasked with sifting through soft mud to preserve any history disturbed by the massive engineering project, it was no easy feat either. Their potentially hazardous work took place inside concrete boxes pressurized to keep out deluges from the Dutch capital’s ubiquitous waterways.
Today, the fruits of their subterranean labors can be seen at Rokin station, one of eight stops on the route and one that doubles up as an impressive underground archaeological museum, with nearly 10,000 artifacts on display.
The station, well worth visiting in its own right, is a testament not only to the rich heritage on which Amsterdam is built, but also to the engineers and archeologists who worked so hard to preserve it.
The fruits of their labor are displayed in two glass cases positioned between the escalators, one case at either end of the station. On any given day, it’s not unusual to find a commuter going up and down the escalators, just to get a better look.
A significant number of these artifacts were found in and around Rokin, a neighborhood that lies along the city’s main Amstel river that was at the heart of Amsterdam as it developed from the 13th century onwards.
Waterways tend to become dumping grounds, accumulating objects over the centuries. The Amstel riverbed around Rokin was no different.
“The sheer mass of material we unearthed during the construction of the North-South line was extraordinary,” says Peter Kranendonk, one of two senior archaeologists leading the excavations during the metro project.
“The construction gave us a unique opportunity to excavate under the city up to a depth of 30 meters,” he adds. The oldest items found were mollusc shells dating to over 115,000 years ago.
The artifact displays at Rokin station are organized into various themes. In the north display, the focus is on objects related to food, science and technology, arms and armor, communication, games and recreation, personal artifacts and clothing; while the south display includes items from buildings and structures, interiors and accessories, transport, as well as craft and industry. All of these artifacts provide insights into Amsterdam’s glorious, and sometimes unknown past.
“Some objects, like the 500-year-old coins, have a direct story behind them,” says Kranendonk. “On the basis of the finds, we can also say something about the use of an area,” he adds.
Under pressure
In one spot at Rokin, unearthing a concentration of chopped animal bones pointed to the existence of a butchery nearby in the 17th and 18th century. At another spot, an abundance of furniture fittings confirmed the presence of a furniture maker’s shop in the 19th century.
“Prior to the excavation of these artifacts, the city had an archaeological archive of only about 70,000 artifacts,” says Hoite Detmar, who served as the director of the North-South metro project from 2016 till its completion. “We found 10 times as many during the construction of the North-South line.”
Kranendonk elaborates on the rather unconventional excavation process behind these finds.
“This was not a normal dig,” he says. “Usually, excavation is done before building. But in this case, the construction plans were already finalized. So we had to become part of the existing process. The civil engineering team were building and we were excavating.”
For the archaeology team, working in the caissons was a novel experience. A caisson is a large watertight concrete chamber, open at the bottom, from which water is kept out by air pressure and in which construction work is carried out underground or underwater.
“It was an interesting experience but also a bit frightening,” says Kranendonk. “The deeper you go, the more compressed the air gets. It’s like deep sea diving,” To acclimatize to the caissons, teams had to spend time in a pressure chamber before entering and after exiting, otherwise they’d face risk of “the bends,” when gas bubbles form in the body, potentially leading to paralysis.
To enable people to engage with the Rokin displays at leisure, an online database of nearly 20,000 objects, Below the Surface, was created, providing information about every single item in the glass cases. “It’s a process of discovery in its own way,” says Kranendonk.
A documentary about the excavation called “Amstel, Spiegel van de Stad” (Amstel, Mirror of the City) and a beautiful coffee-table book, “Amsterdam Stuff” were also created.
“We knew we would be working in the city for a very long time and would inconvenience citizens a lot,” says Hoite Detmar. “This was one of the many ways we gave back to the city.”
In addition to the two archaeological displays, the walls of Rokin station adjacent to the tracks are covered with stone mosaics by artists Daniel Dewar and Grégory Gicquel depicting 33 of the artifacts unearthed – a keyboard, a pike, a teapot, dice, a butterfly, among others.
There is even a mosaic of a crocodile which represents a crocodile jaw that was unearthed, a rather unusual find for this part of the world.
An engineering feat
Hailed as one of the most challenging infrastructure projects in the Netherlands, the North-South line was inaugurated in July 2018, with a lot of fanfare. The route is six miles long – of which 4.5 miles are underground – and runs under the historic city center, the Central train station, and the IJ, a water channel which separates the city’s north from its center.
The line linked neighborhoods like the northern suburbs (previously unconnected by rail) to the city center, eliminating the need to take a ferry across the IJ or to drive through the IJ tunnel. It also halved the 30-minute travel time required to traverse the city from north to south. Right after the opening of the line, an estimated 120,000 commuters used it every day.
However, the initial plans for the North-South line were not met with enthusiasm. Public resistance to this project was prompted by the traumatic experiences during construction of Amsterdam’s first metro, the East Line, in the 1970s. A large part of the Nieuwmarktbuurt neighborhood was demolished to make way for the project, leading to anger and riots in 1975.
The construction of the North-South line began in 2003, one of its key objectives being to preserve the existing built environment.
With this in mind, a specific route was chosen and several new construction techniques were used, including the deployment of a customized tunnel boring machine, which made it possible to dig deep in Amsterdam’s soft soil, without impacting structures above.
However, public concerns about homes collapsing loomed over the project. In June 2008, work came to a grinding halt when four 17th-century buildings near Vijzelgracht station sank by about 25 centimeters (10 inches), rendering them uninhabitable.
“Thankfully, no one was injured,” says Detmar. An independent assessment was conducted and work resumed in the summer of 2009. The heritage houses were also restored.
The project was beset with many engineering challenges that led to the doubling of the construction budget from 1.4 to 3.1 billion euros. The initial launch date of 2011 was also pushed back to 2018.
Despite these challenges, the North-South line has functioned smoothly since launch.
Detmar says he’s pleased with the appreciation the project has received to date, especially for the art at each of the eight stations on the new line.
Rokin is the highlight.
“When I travel to Rokin station, I see people really studying the archaeological exhibits,” he says. “I hope more people will take the metro to see this underground museum.”
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The Kunsthaus Zurich museum says it is strengthening its provenance research and giving itself more resources to deal with the problem of ill-gotten cultural property.
“In future, the Kunsthaus Zürich will adopt a more proactive approach to works that, following in-depth research, may constitute cultural property confiscated as a result of Nazi persecution,” the museum said in a press releaseExternal link on Tuesday.
The new strategy includes “improved transparency” and an independent, international commission of experts to support provenance research. The museum says it is working for “just and fair solutions” where there are substantiated indications that works are held unlawfully.
It is giving priority on provenance research to its own collection and to new acquisitions. The Bührle Collection, which is on display in the Kunsthaus, is being analysed separately. Zurich historian Raphael Gross was recently appointed to evaluate the provenance research carried out to date by the Bührle Foundation, which owns the works. The results of this assessment are expected in spring 2024.
“The strategy we are presenting today establishes a clear framework for the challenges that lie ahead,’ said Philipp Hildebrand, chair of the Zurich art society that runs the museum.
The move comes after heated debate about the origin of 203 works of art on display at the Kunsthaus Zurich. The controversy is about the collector of the paintings: Emil G. Bührle, who died in 1956, funded his collection with arms sales – to Nazi Germany in particular. An independent panel of historians have called the situation at the Kunsthaus Zurich an “affront” to victims of Nazi looting.
In compliance with the JTI standards
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For interdisciplinary artist Nyugen E Smith, the origins of his new show go back to around 2009, when a chance encounter in a high school history class ignited his imagination over the Democratic Republic of the Congo. “I was substituting for a history teacher, when I saw all these VHS tapes and was attracted to one that read ‘Lumumba’. I took it to see what it was about and popped it in the VCR in a free period. I had never heard of Patrice Lumumba before, and everything was so fascinating to me.”
So began Smith’s interest with the history, culture and global impacts of the DRC that has resulted in Ancient Future Memory, showing at Cultural DC thorough 12 March. Exploring what Smith has gleaned from his years-long interest in the DRC, the show offers sculptures and mixed media pieces on watercolor paper and is notable for Smith’s use of reclaimed materials. It incorporates bits of things, like fabric, tarp, rubber hoses and old bottle caps, that he found while in Kinshasa.
Although the use of found materials is now central of Smith’s artistry, it originated out of necessity, when he was emerging as an artist with insufficient resources to pursue his art. “I was a budding artist and didn’t have much money for art supplies,” he said. “In Jersey City we had all of these buildings, and we would salvage for found objects and materials to work with.” It also goes back to the years he spent in Trinidad as a child living with his grandparents, where utilizing found materials in novel way is enmeshed in the way of life. “So much in the built environment in Trinidad is built with reclaimed materials, so that way of making things was already in my visual vocabulary.”
For Ancient Future Memory, Smith was particularly inspired by ritual objects made by the Luba people, who have inhabited lands in the Congo for centuries. He first discovered these objects during a visit to the Congo’s national art museum in Kinshasa. “I was just really struck by their beauty and their difference from art objects in other parts of Africa. I was struck by the elegance in the simplicity.”
Smith found himself especially drawn to Luba lukasas, or memory boards, which are used to map the historical, political, and territorial memories of the Luba people. He found these objects extraordinarily sophisticated and beautiful, and he felt especially attached to how lukasas act as maps. “I liked the idea that they’re a way of mapping, because in my work I deal a lot with maps.”
Conceptually, lukasas worked their way into Ancient Future Memory through the tension between between protecting a culture’s memory, but also allowing outside forces to infiltrate. Smith was struck by how one must be initiated in order to read a lukasa and interpret the memories it holds. He found this akin to what he was attempting to do in creating his art. “These things are what I’m thinking of when I’m trying to represent a place but also keep these sorts of things secret.”
This can be seen in a piece like Bundlehouse: Migrant Magic, which depicts a person carrying a map, while at the same time being a container for a map. In the figure’s arched posture and the heavy yet delicate load he bears, Migrant Magic conjures a sense of both precarity and determination. It also impinges notions of migration, while indicating how our histories can be integral to where we are headed. “I liked this idea of giving homage to the past while going to the future, this is exactly what I’m thinking about.”
Ancient Future Memory is a part of Smith’s larger Bundlehouse series, which originated in 2005, when he happened to see photographer Chenoa Maxwell’s shots of a refugee camp in Uganda during a trip to London. He was struck by how the refugees had used reclaimed materials to build their camps, almost as though they were sculptures. The photos also inspired Smith to raise awareness of the global impacts of the wars of extraction in the region that had contributed to internal displacement and violence. “I couldn’t get those photos out of my head, and I started making drawings on the barf bag in the back of the seat of the airplane on my way back home from the exhibition in London.”
Although Bundlehouse is based in the African diaspora, for Smith the project has a global scope, tracing the web of interconnections as the effects of the diaspora has been felt worldwide. “I started to find through lines and connections to the African diaspora, the Caribbean being one of them. When we think about the Caribbean as ground zero for climate change, all of these different types of circumstances perpetuate a living that I would describe as Bundlehouse.”
But even though the series is strongly rooted in particular forms of historical wrongdoing, for Smith it ultimately transcends particular identities and events to implicate a basic part of the human experience. “Bundlehouse is not just about the structures made of these found materials, it’s a wider concept – thinking about what it means to rebuild your life by picking up the pieces again after a traumatic event. Building these structures within the context of a traumatic event or crisis.”
Ultimately, Smith’s art is all about deconstruction and reconstruction, integration and layers. The intricacy of his work in Ancient Future Memory is reflective of how he builds his artistic practice through various different forms of artistic expression. Smith is always drawn toward the linkages, attempting to elaborate the web of interconnections that reveal the complexity of the world we live in. “When I’m in the studio, I’m constantly cutting away from one piece to add to another piece. Nothing is really safe or sacred in the studio until it’s completely finished. There are all of these layers – if one is to look closely, you can tell that there is a history there.”
Nyugen E Smith’s Bundlehouse: Ancient Future Memory is on show at CulturalDC until 12 March
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THE HAGUE, Netherlands -- Erwin Olaf, an acclaimed Dutch photographer whose work documented topics ranging from gay nightlife in Amsterdam to portraits of the Dutch royal family, has died. He was 64.
Olaf’s highly stylized photos, with lighting often influenced by Dutch master painters Rembrandt van Rijn and Johannes Vermeer, were exhibited at galleries around the world during a career spanning decades.
His website carried a statement saying that Olaf recently underwent a lung transplant.
“The recovery seemed to be going very well. He suddenly became unwell on Wednesday morning and CPR was to no avail. We're going to miss him terribly,” it added.
Taco Dibbits, director of the Rijksmuseum, paid tribute in a statement on the Amsterdam museum's website.
“Erwin Olaf saw beauty in every person. He is of historical importance because of his activism and role in the LHBTIQ+ community,” Dibbits said.
He called Olaf “an artist with enormous drive and with a very great eye for detail. The Rijksmuseum received its core collection in 2018 and considered Erwin Olaf a sincere friend. We’ll miss him.”
Olaf was made a Knight of the Order of the Lion of the Netherlands after 500 of his works were added to the Rijksmuseum collection.
He worked in advertising — once portraying nuns in jeans for a clothing company — as well as in the world of high art and portraiture.
Over the years, he shot portraits of King Willem-Alexander and his family and in 2013 he designed the Dutch side of a new euro coin bearing an image of the king when Willem-Alexander acceded to the throne.
In March, Willem-Alexander awarded Olaf with the Dutch Royal House’s Medal of Honor for Art and Science. It honored him for “using a daring approach to portraiture to address themes such as ethnicity, sexual diversity and economic inequality.”
In a reaction to his death, Willem-Alexander and Maxima said the Netherlands “has lost a unique, exceptionally talented photographer and a great artist.”
“We will miss his friendship,” they added in a statement posted on social media. “His work lives on and continues to be intriguing and moving.”
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The Benin Bronzes — some roughly 3,000 stunning bronze artworks sculpted by African metalsmiths between the 16th and 19th centuries — were crafted from metal mined from Germany's Rhineland region, a new study finds.
Researchers had long suspected that the stunning sculptures — created by the Edo people of the Kingdom of Benin, now part of modern-day Nigeria — were made from melted-down brass rings used as a currency during the trans-Atlantic slave trade, but confirmation proved elusive.
Now, scientists have used these metal rings, called manillas, recovered from five centuries-old Atlantic shipwrecks to trace the artworks' provenance, confirming that their metal came from repurposed bracelets that had been originally used to purchase enslaved people. By tracing the manillas' metal, the researchers found the majority had been mined from western Germany. They published their findings April 5 in the journal PLOS One (opens in new tab).
"The Benin Bronzes are the most famous ancient works of art in all West Africa," study first author Tobias Skowronek (opens in new tab), a researcher of engineering and materials science at Technical University Georg Agricola in Germany, said in a statement (opens in new tab). "Finally, we can prove the totally unexpected: the brass used for the Benin masterpieces, long thought to come from Britain or Flanders [Belgium], was mined in western Germany. The Rhineland manillas were then shipped more than 6,300 kilometers [3,900 miles] to Benin. This is the first time a scientific link has been made."
Manillas, which get their name from the Spanish word for handcuffs or hand rings, served as a currency for European enslavers — namely the British, Portuguese, Spanish, Danish, Dutch and French — who sailed to Africa to trade millions of these rings for gold, ivory and slaves.
The manillas — highly valued in Africa, with different types traded among different peoples — were later made into the sculptures. Then, in 1897, British forces invaded Benin as part of a punitive military expedition, turning Benin's royal court to rubble. The British seized the Benin Bronzes before selling them to museums across Europe and the U.S.
To trace the rings' murky origins, the researchers conducted chemical analyses on 67 manillas found across five Atlantic wrecks stretching from the English Channel to Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and in land-based dig sites in Ghana, Sierra Leone and Sweden.
By comparing the elements found inside the manillas, along with their ratios of lead isotopes (variants of lead with different numbers of neutrons in their nuclei), to those inside the Benin Bronzes, the scientists found that both were similar to ores located in Germany's Rhineland region.
The scientists noted that their findings match closely with the evidence from historical sources. For instance, a 1548 contract between a German merchant family and the Portuguese king details the specific requirements for the production of two types of manillas — each for a different region in Africa where one specific manilla type was more highly valued — carefully stipulating their weight, quality levels and shapes.
The discovery adds an extra dimension to Germany's involvement with the Benin Bronzes, and to the broader story of the country's part in Europe's colonization of Africa. Prior to this finding, historians focused mostly on Germany's forestalled colonization efforts following the 1884-1885 Berlin Conference, where European powers met to agree on the carving up of Africa into distinct spheres of influence.
Nigeria and the Edo State Government have long been petitioning for the return of the artworks, the largest collection of which is in the British Museum in London. The Horniman Museum, another U.K. museum, as well as Cambridge University, have given back their collection of Benin Bronzes, along with museums in Germany and the U.S.
Ben Turner is a U.K. based staff writer at Live Science. He covers physics and astronomy, among other topics like tech and climate change. He graduated from University College London with a degree in particle physics before training as a journalist. When he's not writing, Ben enjoys reading literature, playing the guitar and embarrassing himself with chess.
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There are those in America who would have you believe there is no place in country western culture for LGBTQ+ folk. These people might put forth that the cowboy is the ultimate sign of traditional masculinity. They might suggest that life on a ranch is so hard, it's definitively heteronormative. They might sneer there's no room for drag at a rodeo. Those people will hate National Anthem.
For his feature debut, co-writer/director Luke Gilford found inspiration in his experiences as a queer kid coming up in a rodeo family and his professional photography capturing queer rodeo. National Anthem is a tale not of culture clash but of culture combining. Through the story of a lonely young man, this drama explores a side of Americana that is rural and rhinestones, true grit and truly gay. There, he will not only find his first love, but also himself.
What's National Anthem about?
Charlie Plummer stars as Dylan, an introverted 21-year-old cowboy who works long days in construction to provide for his oft-drunk single mom (Robyn Lively) and his jolly little brother. His life is one of sacrifice. He gives his time, money, and patience to their needs while ignoring his own. That is, until he meets the burly Pepe (Rene Rosado) and the breezy Sky (Bros' Eve Lindley).
Deep down a dirt road in New Mexico, this polyamorous couple owns a ranch called House of Splendor. There, they live with their found family, which includes gay and trans members as well as a nonbinary drag queen with a fairy godmother vibe (The Sandman's Mason Alexander Park). From day one, Dylan can't help but stop and stare in awe of these free spirits, who ride horseback in shimmering gowns, dance about in their underwear unashamed, and laugh loud and proud like no one in his home has ever. But it's radiant Sky who steals his heart.
As the group welcomes him into their fold — and to the queer rodeo where they compete for shiny belt buckles — Dylan begins to come out of his shell. A bit of blue eye makeup there, a no-judgment conversation there, and soon he's happier than his mom has ever seen him. This raises her suspicions, especially as he begins to take his little brother out on day trips with his new friends.
National Anthem is a hazy dream of young love.
The screenplay by Kevin Best, Luke Gilford, and David Largman Murray is light on plot, focusing half-heartedly on Dylan's infatuation with Sky — and to a lesser extent, Pepe. They will flirt, fuck, and share their feelings — with cinematographer Katelin Arizmendi capturing passion and fervent fondling in yearning close-ups. The chemistry between this threesome is heady and hot, reminiscent of European movies of the '60s and '70s, with a glossy polish of perfectly gorgeous leads and a warm color palette that relishes flushed flesh. However, this movie is bigger than their romance — and is not concerned with labeling its characters within the LGBTQ spectrum.
The film gives voice to its reticent protagonist, the kind of cowboy too often overlooked in country western culture. Dylan's longing isn't hidden among the subtext of gunplay, like in Howard Hawks' Red River. His desire has neither twisted him into a vengeful parody of hetero-machismo, like in The Power of the Dog, nor bent him into a muttering, miserable figure of tragedy, as in Brokeback Mountain. And it hasn't instantly transformed him into a glittering gay cowboy icon, like Lil Nas X in "Old Town Road." His journey involves drug store makeup, cheap wigs, and a clumsy yet powerful lip-synch performance. Surrounding Dylan at the rodeo, there is only love — in a dizzying montage of crop tops and cowboy hats, burly bears making out as their belt buckles bump, while a resplendent Black drag queen in a sequined gown and crisp ten-gallon hat sings the national anthem. Rather than offering up a tidy narrative, Gilford gives his audience a safe space that's majestic in its natural beauty of sprawling terrain and the unapologetic glamor and sensuality of its queer rodeo folk.
Therein lies National Anthem's greatest virtue. While many, many narratives of queerness in America — especially those set in traditionally conservative spaces — center on tragedy, National Anthem is about queer joy. There are moments in which this found family shares the heartbreak and ostracism they've suffered from homophobic parents. But these characters are shown as far more than queer and tragic. They are joyous. They are creative. They are resilient. Whether strutting on a stage or communing with a persnickety stallion, they are at home in this place. And we are invited in to experience the bliss of House of Splendor.
Grounded by vulnerable yet effervescent performances, National Anthem is a celebration of rural queerness. It's not a rallying cry, but instead a firm declaration of existence and the pursuit of happiness. Wrapped in the sunny hues of the New Mexican desert and floating on the charisma of a sexy and vulnerable ensemble, this drama charts its own path with clear eyes and queer hearts.
National Anthem was reviewed out of the Toronto International Film Festival.
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Credit: Steve Wakeham/Cambodian Ministry of Culture & Fine Arts
Disgraced art dealer's family returns rare royal jewels to Cambodia
While most monarchies' crown jewels are heavily protected or given pride of place in a museum, dozens of Cambodia's were, until recently, stashed away in four boxes near London.
The pieces have now been safely returned to Cambodia, the country's Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts announced in a press release Monday.
The crown jewels were among 77 pieces of centuries-old gold jewelry handed over by the family of Douglas Latchford, a British antiquities dealer and leading scholar on Khmer art who in 2019 was accused by US authorities of trafficking artifacts looted from Cambodia.
After Latchford died in 2020, with the charges still pending, his daughter agreed to return all the Khmer antiquities she had inherited from her father, including at least 100 statues and carvings. Latchford's collection is considered of such cultural significance that Cambodia's national museum in Phnom Penh is being expanded to accommodate it.
Lawyer Bradley Gordon, who advises the country's culture ministry and is leading Cambodia's efforts to repatriate stolen artifacts, first saw the jewels last summer when a representative for Latchford's family took him to a parking lot in the English countryside outside London. There, in the back of a car, sat four boxes containing a collection of Cambodia's crown jewels.
The trove includes several crowns, necklaces, bracelets, belts, earrings, arm bands and amulets, according to the culture ministry. One of the more unusual pieces, Gordon said, is a gold bowl that likely would have been used by kings to eat rice. However, because the artifacts are believed to have been looted, their exact provenance and usage is unknown.
"There's not an encyclopedia of Khmer gold to turn to, other than what was written by Douglas Latchford," Gordon said in a phone interview.
The items are thought to hail either from the Angkorian period, which began in the 9th century, or earlier. But other details, like who owned the jewelry, will be determined only after additional study, Gordon added.
The 77 pieces are expected to go on display at Cambodia's national museum in the spring. Many of the artifacts have never been seen by the public, though photos of some of them were published in a book that Latchford co-authored entitled "Khmer Gold: Gifts of the Gods," the ministry said in its press release.
"It is an astonishing collection," Gordon said, adding that the recently recovered items of jewelry were Latchford's "prized possessions, from what I understand."
According to Gordon, many of the pieces were likely used to adorn statues in temples, while others, like the crowns and necklaces, may have been worn by the Angkorian royal family. US prosecutors say that, like much of Cambodia's missing cultural heritage, items handled by Latchford were illegally removed from the country during the turbulent years of Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge regime and the subsequent civil war.
The artifacts' return comes as the Cambodian government increases its efforts to repatriate relics taken from temples and archeological sites — and as Western museums face growing calls to give back treasures taken illicitly or by force.
Speaking to CNN via email in 2021, Latchford's daughter said that "many" Khmer items in her family's collection had "impeccable provenance," although she pledged to return them all, regardless of whether she believed they had been looted. Gordon meanwhile said that Cambodia considers all items recovered from Latchford's collection, and any he sold to others, to be stolen.
"Cambodia never gave export license for any of this, so in our view it's stolen and it needs to come home," he said.
In a statement about the latest repatriations, Cambodia's Minister of Culture and Fine Arts, Phoeurng Sackona, said: "We consider such returns as a noble act, which not only demonstrates important contributions to a nation's culture, but also contributes to the reconciliation and healing of Cambodians who went through decades of civil war and suffered tremendously from the tragedy of the Khmer Rouge genocide."
Since Latchford's family agreed to return the items in 2020, several batches of Khmer antiquities have been handed back, both from the dealer's personal collection and as part of ongoing criminal investigations. In August 2022, New York officials returned 30 cultural artifacts to Cambodia, including a 10th-century Khmer sculptural "masterpiece," that had been plundered and illegally sold to private collectors and a US museum.
Gordon said Cambodia expects even more items to be returned soon, representing hundreds of repatriated antiquities in total. More than 100 objects from Latchford's personal collection have already been returned, the lawyer said, adding that the late dealer's daughter "has another 50 bronzes and ... more stone statues that she's agreed to give back."
If Cambodia finds and repatriates items Latchford sold to dealers, collectors and museums around the world, the number of recovered artifacts could double. "At the end of the day, we might have brought home maybe 300 objects," Gordon said.
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A seven metre sculpture of Mars has gone on display alongside a model of the Beagle 2 lander from the 2003 Mars mission.
They are part of the Journey to Mars exhibition at Aerospace Bristol, marking the 20th anniversary of Europe's first mission to the planet.
The mission was led by Bristol born Colin Pillinger, who died in 2014.
The Mars sculpture is a touring artwork by Bristol artist Luke Jerram. The exhibition runs until 5 June.
The artist has also created other space-themed installations, including Museum of the Moon, Gaia and Floating Earth.
Visitors to the exhibition will have the chance to see the sculpture while learning about the European Space Agency's Mars Express mission to the red planet that took place 20 years ago in June.
The sculpture features detailed NASA imagery and at an approximate scale of 1:1 million, each centimetre of the internally lit spherical sculpture represents 10km of the surface of Mars.People will be able to view Mars from the air, as though they are a satellite, mapping and studying the surface in perfect detail, with every valley, crater, volcano and mountain laid bare to inspect.
Alongside the sculpture, the exhibition will feature a model of the Mars Express Orbiter and a full-scale model of Beagle 2, the UK-built, Mars lander, that was deployed from Mars Express in 2003.
Led by Mr Pillinger, the Beagle 2 was intended to carry out an astrobiology mission that would have looked for evidence of life on Mars. Head of collections, learning and interpretation at Aerospace Bristol, Amy Seadon, said: "Aerospace Bristol can't wait to mark the 20th anniversary of Mars Express and highlight Bristol's important contribution to the European Space Agency's first ever planetary mission."
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A new 3D tour of ancient Rome allows you to explore the imperial city as it appeared in the 4th century CE. The tour, produced by the education technology company Flyover Zone, is the fourth iteration of the 3D model.
The tour’s full name is “Rome Reborn: Flight over Ancient Rome,” and it’s hosted on Yorescape alongside 13 other virtual tours of sites from ancient civilizations. The first version of the virtual flyover was published in 2007, the second the following year, and the third in 2018. Version 4.0 has better graphics than the previous iterations, giving the scale model a more realistic look.
Rome Reborn was first dreamt up in 1974 by Bernard Frischer, an archaeologist and digital humanist at Indiana University. The digital humanities have come a long way in the intervening decades, to the extent that archaeologists can now digitally “unwrap” and read scrolls, like those burnt and buried in the destruction of Roman towns Pompeii and Herculaneum in 79 CE.
“Teachers can use this and other tours on Yorescape to take their students on virtual field trips to the cultures they are studying,” Frischer said in a press release. “Armchair travelers can explore great heritage sites without having to leave home. Yorescape can help travelers to prepare for a trip to Rome, get more out of a trip by using it once they have arrived, and keep their memories alive once they return home.”
According to the Yorescape website, the Rome flyover tour is just under two hours, and features 61 stops highlighting the city’s geography, marketplaces, temples, and other cultural landmarks.
Rome Reborn 4.0 also benefits from new archaeological discoveries and updated recreations of known monuments and structures, including the Baths of Caracalla, the Stadium of Domitian (where Piazza Navona now is), and three theaters. It shows the city as it looked in 320 CE, before the capital of the empire was moved to Constantinople under the emperor…yes, Constantine the Great.
“Our goal is not to replace real-world tourism but to enhance it,” Frischer added.
Indeed, the model also includes locations (named “Time Warps”) where users can see how ancient sites appear in Rome today. The model contains approximately 7,000 buildings that would’ve stood in the 4th-century city.
We may not be able to time travel, but exploring ancient Rome in high-definition is a not-too-distant second choice.
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Prince Edward praises Reading theatre for helping young people from all backgrounds into performing arts as he is announced as its new patronThe Earl of Wessex has been named royal patron for Reading Repertory TheatrePrince Edward, 58, has been an active force in the UK's performing arts scene He says that he looks forward to supporting the theatre's inspiring work Published: 17:01 EDT, 31 October 2022 | Updated: 17:05 EDT, 31 October 2022 The Earl of Wessex has been granted a new role after being announced patron of Reading Repertory theatre. Prince Edward, 58, who has a keen interest in the arts, marked his new role on Monday by visiting the Berkshire theatre, which celebrates its 10th anniversary this year.It is also one year since the opening of the theatre's 163-seat theatre and cultural hub. Speaking about his new patronage the Earl, who is thirteenth in line to the throne, said: 'Reading Rep is rapidly becoming an essential part of the arts scene in Reading for three really good reasons.' The Earl of Wessex has been named royal patron for Reading Repertory Theatre. Prince Edward, 58, has been an active force in the UK's performing arts scene since the 1990sReferring to its work with young people, Prince Edward added: 'It is creating pathways to the performing arts for young people, regardless of background; it is introducing new audiences to the performing arts through its outreach and access activities; and it is a space providing an alternative venue for creative and production talents to hone their skills. 'I look forward to helping with reinforcing this theatre's inspiring work in the local community and to supporting its future endeavours.'During his visit, Edward attended Reading Rep's corporate partnership scheme launch. The event provided opportunity for business across Reading and the Thames Valley to connect and network. The Earl is patron of a range of organisations working in the performing arts sector including the National Youth Theatre of Great Britain, Northern Ballet and The Orpheus Centre Trust. Reading Rep: 10, the theatre's 10th anniversary season, features a mixture of bold new work, reimagined classics and family favourites. This is an important year for Reading Repertory Theatre, as it celebrates its 10th anniversary and the first anniversary of its 163-seat theatre and cultural hubPaul Stacey, founding artistic director of Reading Rep, said about their new royal patron: 'His Royal Highness has shown incredible support for arts and culture and his recognition and support of Reading Rep and the work we do both on stage and in the community is humbling. 'We are excited to work with HRH in forwarding our shared goals and aspirations for art and culture in Reading.' The Earl of Wessex was previously a production assistant at Andrew Lloyd Webber's Really Useful Theatre Company, working behind the scenes, handling paperwork on musicals such as Cats and Starlight Express. He also organised a televised royal version of It's A Knockout in 1987 and persuaded the Princess Royal and Duke and Duchess of York to dress up in medieval costumes and perform slapstick feats for the TV game show. The Earl of Wessex said that he is looking forward to supporting the theatre with its work in the local community as it works to inspire young people in performing arts Prince Edward also set up a production firm, The Theatre Division, staging plays before its collapse in 1991. The Prince two years later created the film company Ardent Productions; putting his own money into the project. He eventually stepped down from commercial work in 2002 following controversy over the Wessexes' dual roles, and Ardent was voluntarily dissolved in 2009 with assets of just £40. Earlier this month Prince Edward announced that he had promised his late father, Prince Philip that he would support young people across the world. In a video shared on the Royal Family's official Instagram page, Prince Edward, 58, was seen speaking during a visit to Romania for The Duke of Edinburgh's International Award Forum. The Earl of Wessex was previously a production assistant at Andrew Lloyd Webber's Really Useful Theatre Company, working behind the scenes, handling paperwork on musicals such as Cats and Starlight ExpressHe said: 'Our promise to Prince Philip should be that where there are young people with difficulties to face growing up in this modern and complicated world, then The Duke of Edinburgh's International Award will always be there for them.'Prince Edward has long had an affinity with the scheme and many years ago it was announced that his mother and Prince Philip wanted him to take on the Duke of Edinburgh title.The dukedom was expected to be passed to Edward after Buckingham Palace announced in 1999 that he would succeed his father 'in due course' with both his parents' blessing.His patronage with Reading Rep, is just another example of the Prince's commitment to offering creative and supportive outlets to young people. Advertisement
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The Supreme Court has ruled that Andy Warhol has infringed on the copyright of Lynn Goldsmith, the photographer who took the image that he used for his famous silkscreen of the musician Prince. Goldsmith won the justices over 7-2, disagreeing with Warhol's camp that his work was transformative enough to prevent any copyright claims. In the majority opinion written by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, she noted that "Goldsmith's original works, like those of other photographers, are entitled to copyright protection, even against famous artists."
Goldsmith's story goes as far back as 1984, when Vanity Fair licensed her Prince photo for use as an artist reference. The photographer received $400 for a one-time use of her photograph, which Warhol then used as the basis for a silkscreen that the magazine published. Warhol then created 15 additional works based on her photo, one of which was sold to Condé Nast for another magazine story about Prince. The Andy Warhol Foundation (AWF) — the artist had passed away by then — got $10,000 it, while Goldsmith didn't get anything.
Typically, the use of copyrighted material for a limited and "transformative" purpose without the copyright holder's permission falls under "fair use." But what passes as "transformative" use can be vague, and that vagueness has led to numerous lawsuits. In this particular case, the court has decided that adding "some new expression, meaning or message" to the photograph does not constitute "transformative use." Sotomayor said Goldsmith's photo and Warhol's silkscreen serve "substantially the same purpose."
Indeed, the decision could have far ranging implications for fair use and could influence future cases on what constitutes as transformative work. Especially now that we're living in the era of content creators who could be taking inspiration from existing music and art. As CNN reports, Justice Elena Kagan strongly disagreed with her fellow justices, arguing that the decision would stifle creativity. She said the justices mostly just cared about the commercial purpose of the work and did not consider that the photograph and the silkscreen have different "aesthetic characteristics" and did not "convey the same meaning."
"Both Congress and the courts have long recognized that an overly stringent copyright regime actually stifles creativity by preventing artists from building on the works of others. [The decision will] impede new art and music and literature, [and it will] thwart the expression of new ideas and the attainment of new knowledge. It will make our world poorer," she wrote.
The justices who wrote the majority opinion, however, believe that it "will not impoverish our world to require AWF to pay Goldsmith a fraction of the proceeds from its reuse of her copyrighted work. Recall, payments like these are incentives for artists to create original works in the first place."
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Archaeologists in southern Iraq have uncovered the remains of a tavern dating back nearly 5,000 years they hope will illuminate the lives of ordinary people in the world's first cities.
The US-Italian team made the find in the ruins of ancient Lagash, northeast of the modern city of Nasiriyah, which was already known to have been one of the first urban centres of the Sumerian civilisation of ancient Iraq.
The joint team from the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Pisa discovered the remains of a primitive refrigeration system, a large oven, benches for diners and around 150 serving bowls.
Fish and animal bones were found in the bowls, alongside evidence of beer drinking, which was widespread among the Sumerians.
"So we've got the refrigerator, we've got the hundreds of vessels ready to be served, benches where people would sit... and behind the refrigerator is an oven that would have been used... for cooking food," project director Holly Pittman told AFP.
"What we understand this thing to be is a place where people -- regular people -- could come to eat and that is not domestic," she said.
"We call it a tavern because beer is by far the most common drink, even more than water, for the Sumerians", she said, noting that in one of the temples excavated in the area "there was a beer recipe that was found on a cuneiform tablet".
- 'Regular people' -
The world's first cities developed in what is now southern Iraq, after agricultural surpluses from the domestication of the first crops allowed the emergence of new social classes not engaged directly in food production.
The Lagash area, close to the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, was dubbed the "garden of the gods" by the ancients for its fertility and gave rise to a string of Sumerian cities dating back to the early dynastic period.
"Lagash was one of the important cities of southern Iraq," Iraqi archaeologist Baker Azab Wali told AFP, after working with the US-Italian team on the site.
"Its inhabitants depended on agriculture, livestock, fishing, but also on the exchange of goods," he said.
Pittman said the team was eager to learn more about the occupations of the people who used the tavern in its heyday in around 2700 BC to throw new light on the social structure of the first cities.
Detailed analysis would need to be carried out on the samples taken during the excavations the team completed in November.
"There is so much that we do not know about this early period of the emergence of cities and that is what we are investigating," she said.
"We hope to be able to characterise the neighbourhoods and the kinds of occupation... of the people that lived in this big city who were not the elite," she added.
"Most of the work done at the other sites focuses on kings and priests. And that is all very important but the regular people are also important."
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It’s the 300th birthday of Sir Joshua Reynolds on Sunday (July 16) and at Kenwood House, they’re celebrating by bringing together the 17 pictures of his that the museum owns. A dozen are in one room; five in another, set alongside his rivals and contemporaries, Gainsborough and Romney.
It’s a splendid opportunity to see the span of the work of the man who dominated the artistic life of England in his age. He was revered by contemporaries: John Constable wrote that his paintings conveyed “certainly the finest feeling of art that ever existed”. Only the contrarian William Blake took the opposite view, followed by the Pre-Raphaelites, who called him Sloshua. Rude.
At Kenwood we get Reynolds as selected by its owner, Lord Iveigh, a discerning collector who knew what he liked, and what he liked were beautiful women and children. So, what you don’t get are Reynolds’ male portraits – except for a copy of his portrait of Lord Mansfield, first owner of Kenwood.
What you do get, unexpectedly, is one of his so-called ’fancy pictures’, which sends up portraiture. The Infant Academy depicts adorably winsome toddlers practising the art for which Reynolds is best known. The baby girl model is wearing a huge fancy hat; opposite a boy infant artist, against a classical backdrop, paints her likeness. Rolled ignominiously on the ground underneath the boy is a classical bust. It mocks the portrait painters of the Royal Academy, and sends up Reynolds himself.
The ladies are mostly aristocratic, sometimes dignified with classical or literary references, Reynolds’ favourite device. So, there’s a charming picture of Mrs Musters as Hebe, feeding Jupiter the eagle, all windswept, with short dry brushstrokes conveying movement and lightness in her fluttering drapery.
Nearby is another classical reference: the celebrated courtesan Kitty Fisher (who reputedly ate a hundred pound note off a slice of bread and butter) is here as Cleopatra, dropping a pearl into a goblet to dissolve it in vinegar. This paper’s Brian Sewell called Reynolds a monstrous toady, but this shows his humorous side. Reynolds is the despair of conservators for his rash experimental approach to pigment; here he used carmine or red lake for her cheeks, which hasn’t worn well.
Not all the sitters are mythologised. The portrait of Catherine Moore is a straight depiction of a young woman in a blue hat, but the way it overshadows her face gives her an enigmatic aspect.
The child portraits are lovely; take Master Philip Yorke, a three-year-old with a head of red curls holding himself still so as not to disturb the robin on his arm. It could be toe-curling, but it would take a curmudgeon not to be charmed. The irregular dark surface in the corner is another casualty of Reynolds’ disastrous experimentation, this time with pine resin varnish. What we see now isn’t what people saw then.
The man in the room is Reynolds himself, old and bespectacled. But there’s something of Rembrandt about the honesty of it. There’s no higher praise.
Kenwood House, to November 19; english-heritage.org.uk
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A 16th-century drawing of a nude man, seen from behind, has been identified as a study by Michelangelo for his monumental masterpiece, the ceiling fresco of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican.
The red chalk drawing has been linked to one of the figures battling serpents on the Worship of the Brazen Serpent painting. It is thought to date from 1512, shortly before Michelangelo painted that final section of one of the world’s most famous works of art, which he had started in 1508.
The attribution has been supported by Paul Joannides, emeritus professor of art history at Cambridge university and one of the world’s leading authorities on Michelangelo, who will publish it in the scholarly Burlington Magazine.
He told the Observer: “For an artist of Michelangelo’s greatness, and greatness as a draughtsman, any new discovery has some level of excitement. But this is a drawing by Michelangelo for one of the greatest masterpieces of western art.”
It is one of relatively few developed drawings for the Sistine ceiling to have survived. Giorgio Vasari, the Italian renaissance master best known for his 1550 book The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, wrote of Michelangelo: “Just before his death, he burned a large number of his own drawings, sketches and cartoons to prevent anyone from seeing the labours he endured or the ways he tested his genius, for fear that he might seem less than perfect.”
The male figure in the newly discovered drawing is shown from another angle in the final painted version. “Looking at the drawing, one would assume that the figure was intended to be seen horizontally. It isn’t. It’s intended to be seen with the drawing rotated 90 degrees clockwise. Put the two images side by side and there it is. Once examined, it was obvious that the drawing is preparatory for this figure.” Joannides said.
In the Burlington, he writes: “Michelangelo reminded himself of the figure’s final orientation by a sequence of short lines at the right edge, which mark the vertical when the page is rotated.”
Michelangelo’s masterpieces include the marble sculpture of David, and the new drawing shows he was adopting an increasingly sculptural style in the later stages of the Sistine fresco. Joannides said: “He developed enormously as he progressed along the ceiling. His figures became larger, more energetic. The sculptural element of his forms plays an increasing part as he comes to the end of his work.”
The drawing – which measures 15.7 by 19.3cm – came to light after its owner, an anonymous European collector, sent Joannides a photograph through an intermediary. It had been purchased privately in 2014, when it had a tentative attribution to Rosso Fiorentino, a 16th-century follower of Michelangelo.
Although the drawing had never been reproduced, Joannides immediately remembered seeing a poor black-and-white photograph of it many years ago in the Witt Library at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. He writes: “I had filed it mentally as being ‘of interest’. It was therefore intriguing to be able to study the drawing in the flesh and satisfying to conclude that it was indeed by Michelangelo.”
The drawing bears 19th-century collectors’ marks and inscriptions. Its lower left shows the handwritten initials ‘JCR’, relating to Sir John Charles Robinson, a leading connoisseur of Michelangelo drawings, and its backing sheet has the stamp of Chambers Hall, a collector who donated many drawings to the nation. Joannides paid tribute to the drawing’s owner for having first realised that it related to a figure within the “turbulence of struggling men” in the Brazen Serpent fresco.
In the Burlington, he acknowledges that, despite Michelangelo’s supreme knowledge of male anatomy, there are weaknesses in this drawing, including a near-impossible pose, a left thigh that is too long and a “block-like” depiction of vertebrae.
Noting that Michelangelo represents the bones of the back in a similar way elsewhere, he adds: “This assessment by the surgeon Francis Wells substantiates Michelangelo’s lack of concern for skeletal and muscular accuracy… As Vasari remarked in a famous passage: ‘he used to make his figures with nine, 10, or 12 heads, seeking only to create, by placing them all together, a certain harmonious grace in the whole which Nature does not produce, declaring that it was necessary to have a good eye for measurement rather than a steady hand’. Michelangelo’s concern was dynamic expression, not anatomical fidelity.”
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At this point “a John Carney movie” is its own subgenre.
Since charming the pants off audiences with 2007’s shoestring-budgeted Irish indie Once, a definitive Little Movie That Could (in its case win an Oscar for Best Original Song and spawn a hit Broadway musical), the Dublin-born writer-director has delivered a trio of spiritual sequels that play in the same sandbox: funny, emotional dramas in which characters connect and grow through music.
There was 2014’s Begin Again (Mark Ruffalo discovers Keira Knightley’s New York singer-songwriter) and 2016’s Sing Street (a group of Irish lads start a band to get girls). And this week comes Flora and Son, a more biting, hard-edged yet just as charming riff on The Carney Movie about a divorced mother who bonds with her ne’er-do-well teenager when they start writing tunes together.
“I think it’s probably a happy accident,” Carney tells us from last week's Toronto International Film Festival when asked how intentional he is in crafting similarly themed, similarly vibed stories. “It’s lovely because I was always obsessed with music, but it didn't work out for me to be in a band or to be a singer-songwriter. I'm not going to be that person. I'm not that talented, but I still love it and [then when I got into movies], it was a beautiful thing when they kind of came in together like a Venn diagram to cross over. That was probably Once when they overlapped. And you're like, ‘OK, there's a thing I can work with now that sort of satisfies the hobbyist musician in me and the professional filmmaker who really wants to make a mark. Maybe this is the way.’ But the point is I'm really comfortable and it never feels like, ‘Oh, this is a slog. I have to do another musical again.’
“So it’s a comfortable place for me, and I will keep doing it,” adds Carney, who reveals he’s passed up on opportunities to direct big-budget musicals for major studios.
Carney was a musician at one point. He was a bassist for the Irish rock band The Frames between 1991 and 1993. And contrary to popular misconception, Once — which paired the Frames’s frontman with Glen Hansard with Czech singer-songwriter Markéta Irglová as Dublin street musicians who fall slowly in love — wasn’t his first film. That was 1996’s November Afternoon, followed by 1999’s Park and 2001’s On the Edge (starring Cillian Murphy). None were musicals. He even made a film between Once and Begin Again, 2009’s space-themed comedy Zonad.
Carney’s also made a splash on TV with his star-studded anthology rom-com series Modern Love. But as films go, there’s no doubt he’s found his bread and butter with the musical drama.
Premiering to critical acclaim at the Sundance Film Festival before landing in Toronto last week (the film debuts on Apple+ Friday), Flora and Son makes Carney 4 for 4 in his self-styled subgenre.
It also keeps him collaborating with some of the best talent in the game. There was Ruffalo and Knightley in Begin Again, Jack Reynor and Lucy Boynton in Sing Street, and now Eve Hewson, Reynor and Joseph Gordon-Levitt (as the failed L.A. musician-turned-teacher who gives Flora virtual lessons) in Flora and Son.
Flora is drawing particular attention for the breakout performance of Hewson, 31, best known up until this point for the television series’ The Knick, Behind Her Eyes and Bad Sisters — and for being the daughter of rock royalty, U2 superstar Bono. (Hewson, you might recall, had one of the most memorable and amusing responses to the New Yorker’s late-2022 exposé on “nepo babies.”) Reads one headline from Rolling Stone: "Eve Hewson Will Blow You Away in 'Flora and Son.'"
Though U2 nearly contributed music to Sing Street, Carney’s semi-autobiographical look at a teen band in 1980s Dublin (Bono did end up giving the film a ringing endorsement), Hewson didn’t come to the project via her famous father. Her agent pitched her to the director.
“I thought surely she's too poised and too kind of beautiful. I saw her in some Victorian thing, very high collar, and she looked very elegant, and Flora is a little bit more street and tough,” Carney says. “And then we had a Zoom and she started to talk about the character from this very funny place, this darkly comic [place]. She thought I’d written a comedy, and she was like, ‘I’m going to play it really funny.’ And I thought it was brilliant… Within 30 minutes into Zoom I thought, ‘There’s no one else who can play this role.’”
Still, Hewson is an actor, not a musician like her father, and though she’d be singing in the role, she had some cautionary words for Carney.
“From the very beginning she was like, ‘I'm not going to be singing like my dad, you know that, don't you?’ And I was like, ‘Perfect,'" the filmmaker says. "Because she's not supposed to be. I never wanted this to be about, ‘Oh, little Flora from the flats sings and [suddenly] she's Aretha Franklin. I don't want to do that story. We've seen that story a million times… [This] is about what she's writing and the journey she's going through and how she hears her son. So she has a songwriter facility maybe in time, but I wanted to ground the character, make it feel very real and not have her suddenly clutching a bunch of awards saying, ‘Oh, thank you.’
“So I think Eve sensed that this part needed that humor and that reality, and she told me from the word go, ‘I don't really play the guitar. I don't sing like my dad, and is that OK?’ Of course people are going to be watching it going, ‘Oh, let's see. It's Bono's daughter. Let's see.’ But she distracted you from it. She was like, ‘Don't look at that. Look over here. Look at me acting.’ And I think that's brilliant the way she does that. You never go, ‘Oh, she's not really singing very well.' You go, ‘This is great.’”
Flora and Son premieres on Friday, Sept. 22 on Apple TV+.
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Three very English but three very different composers – Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Michael Tippett and Edward Elgar – made up the London Philharmonic’s latest programme under Edward Gardner. The centrepiece was unquestionable: a rare but thoroughly persuasive outing for Tippett’s fluent yet entangled piano concerto of 1953-55.It was condemned as unplayable by the soloist Julius Katchen, who walked out shortly before he was due to give the premiere. These days, especially in the hands of Steven Osborne, a champion of the work, that seems an extraordinary misjudgment about a concerto that has proved its staying power. In Osborne’s hands, the concerto was not merely playable but eloquently played. It would be hard to imagine a more convincing account than the one that, playing from the score, he conjured here.The work’s animating spirits are Beethoven’s fourth concerto, whose lyricism and structure it echoes at several points, and Tippett’s distinctive sense of fun and fantasy. These take wing in the concerto’s lapidary scoring, in which the soloist is never confrontational or dominating. Instead, it is the concertante interplay of the soloist with groups of instruments, most strikingly with the flute, violin and celesta, that holds the attention. Osborne’s encore, an improvisation on a Keith Jarrett tune, was every bit as magical.Coleridge-Taylor’s Solemn Prelude for orchestra, which preceded the Tippett, was a different kind of curiosity. First performed at the Three Choirs festival in 1899, the score then disappeared, so this was its London premiere, 124 years on. It is a stately piece, with the composer’s customary clarity of scoring and professionalism, but it has nothing of the orchestral daring that permeates Elgar’s first symphony, which took up the second half of the programme.Here Gardner was in his element, in a crisply directed performance that emphasised the exploratory rather than the traditional qualities of Elgar’s symphonic writing. This symphony may have its feet in the 19th century but, even at the close, it is constantly looking forward not back. Gardner understands this duality, and the LPO responded with the commitment that is starting to characterise their partnership.
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Sundance: D. Smith directs, edits, and shoots a luminous portrait of four Black trans women in all of their joy, pain, and beauty. D. Smith knows how to make a person stand up and pay attention. From the rollicking opening scene of “Kokomo City” — her luminous documentary portrait of four Black trans sex workers which she shot, edited, and directed — it’s clear the terms are being set by a visionary artist who just happened to funnel her interdisciplinary talents into filmmaking for this particular project. How lucky we are that she found this medium.
“Kokomo City” may be her filmmaking debut, but this songwriter innately understands the rhythms and beats that make compelling cinematic storytelling. You can see it in the staccato contrast of light and dark in her elegant black-and-white photography. You can hear it in the unexpected needle drops and deep-cut tracks, and you can feel it in her lyrical cuts that find small moments of beauty in everyday compositions. Make no mistake, Smith announces wordlessly from behind the camera: I have arrived to change the game. It would be hard to conjure a better song for a film about sex workers than Randy Crawford’s “Street Life,” which heralds the beginning of “Kokomo City” as the title credits pop in bubbly yellow graphics. But Smith, a two-time Grammy-nominated songwriter and producer, draws on a deep well of musical knowledge to score her film with as much artistry as she gives its cinematography. Many of the tracks are Smith originals, often with her collaborator and producer Stacy Barthe, like the timeless-sounding “Sugar Daddy,” but she makes equal use of lesser-known blues and funk cuts, like the film’s incredible namesake song “Sissy Man Blues” by Kokomo Arnold. Smith’s music and photography instincts carry the film cinematically, but the real stars of “Kokomo City” are its honest and dynamic subjects. In intimate interviews, Smith often places herself on the ground so the speakers hover above the camera like queens. They speak to her like friends (and maybe they are), but the familiarity of shared identity and experience creates a riveting shorthand that forces the viewer to keep up — if they want to get the jokes.
“Kokomo City”Magnolia Pictures/D. Smith
Take, for instance, the film’s wild opening anecdote from a young woman named Liyah, who lives and works in Decatur, Georgia. In a story with so many turns it could serve as inspiration for another “Zola,” Liyah explains how she once grabbed a client’s gun and tried to shoot him only to find it wasn’t loaded, tumbled down the stairs in a knockdown struggle, and then rescheduled for the next night after a friendly explanation. Smith scores the scene like a farce, then a drama, then a thriller, before coming back around to farce and punctuating it with the celebratory thrum of “Street Life.” All in a day’s work. The women wax poetic on the issues most pressing to them; the pros and cons of passing or living stealth, guys who see them on the down low, and the way they are treated and viewed by cis Black women. Unhindered by the pressure to perform a specific image of Black trans women, they are able to fully be seen and heard as themselves. The film shows Black trans sex workers engaging in the kinds of conversations that usually only occur behind closed doors — certainly not in a mainstream media that requires respectability with visibility.
There are other vital voices in the film, as well, like the men who call themselves “trans-attracted.” Smith interviews one energetic duo in their car, who loudly encourage other men: “If you like them, go hard for them…don’t live a double life.” She cuts this passionate sermon with lilting footage of a male ballet dancer, both powerful and graceful in his beauty. The dance of masculinity bouncing around the empty space. Another interview shows a happy couple, a man secure enough in his sexuality to be filmed with the woman he loves. Light catches the gentle curls of smoke passing between their lips.
Smith’s subjects are also free from the pressure to paint everything in rosy hues. “I’m supposed to tell people this shit is cool? This shit is safe? This is survival work. This is risky shit,” says a young woman named Daniella. Her powerful diatribe feels like a wake-up call to the many ways these women have been isolated from their communities. Smith films her in the bath, her expressive face growing more defiant against the glistening white tub. There she sits, alone in the bath, with no one to witness her unjust pain and righteous brilliance. No one except the camera and, perhaps now, a more empathetic world.
Grade: A-
“Kokomo City” premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in the NEXT section. It was acquired by Magnolia Pictures. Sign Up: Stay on top of the latest breaking film and TV news! Sign up for our Email Newsletters here.
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Art and Culture
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When it emerged from the earth it was dull, corroded and battered, the centuries it had spent lying beneath a Somerset field having taken their toll.
Now restored and gleaming, the Cheddar brooch, a rare early medieval piece regarded as one of the most important finds of its kind, is going on display at a museum close to where it was found by a metal detectorist.
Dating from about AD800 to 900, the large silver and copper alloy disc brooch hails from a time when the survival of Saxon Wessex was in doubt and Athelney on the Somerset Levels provided a refuge for King Alfred the Great.
Interlaced animal and plant designs in bright silver and black niello – usually a mixture, of sulphur, copper, silver and lead – are set against a gilded back panel. The animals represented include wyverns – dragon-like creatures with two legs, wings and long tails that would later become a symbol of Wessex.
Amal Khreisheh, the curator of archaeology at the South West Heritage Trust, said: “Conservation has transformed this fascinating brooch and revealed the intricacies. The details uncovered include fine scratches on the reverse, which may have helped the maker to map out the design.
“A tiny contemporary mend on the beaded border suggests the brooch was cherished by its owner and worn for an extended period of time before it was lost.”
Khreisheh said it was likely that it belonged to an important and wealthy person who had access to a goldsmith of exceptional ability.
Tom Mayberry, the chief executive of the South West Heritage Trust, said: “In 878 Alfred the Great rallied his forces in Somerset and defeated the invading Danish army. Wessex was secure and the foundations had been laid for the creation of a unified English kingdom. The Cheddar brooch comes from a time that was a turning point in English history.”
The brooch was found by Iain Sansome while metal-detecting on farmland near Cheddar, Somerset, in 2020. He reported it through the portable antiquities scheme and the item was acquired by the Museum of Somerset, Taunton, under the Treasure Act 1996.
It is believed to be the first object of its kind found in the south-west of England. A follow-up investigation took place at the site but no further significant discoveries were made, which may suggest the brooch was lost or discarded into water, rather than being deliberately buried.
The Cheddar brooch will be on display at the museum’s Making Somerset gallery from Friday 20 October. Entry is free. A programme of talks and family activities is taking place relating to the brooch.
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When Leeds was denied its chance to become European capital of culture in 2023 due to Brexit, it should have been the killing blow to what it had been hoped would be a massive year-long cultural celebration.But, refusing to be beaten, cultural leaders ploughed ahead regardless, and now almost a decade of planning and ideating will culminate on Saturday in the launch of Leeds 2023, the city-wide cultural festival.About 10,000 people will be packed into Headingley Stadium, normally the home of Leeds Rhinos rugby league club, for the Awakening, the opening ceremony.Hosted by the television presenter and Leeds 2023 chair, Gabby Logan, and BBC radio’s Sanchez Payne, the show will feature the singer Corinne Bailey Rae and poet Simon Armitage, alongside Opera North, the percussionist Inder Goldfinger and the emerging rap artist Graft.The choreographer and dancer Lucy Hind performs on Cabbage Hill, Leeds, as part of the launch of Leeds 2023. Photograph: Lorne Campbell/GuzelianLogan said her home city had always been quieter about its talents than the neighbouring northern cultural powerhouses of Manchester and Liverpool, but she was looking forward to Leeds demonstrating what it had to offer.“If you look at our noisy neighbours across the Pennines … Leeds has always been in the shadow of that and there’s a sense that there’s only so much room at the top table,” she said. “So that was probably a factor that kept Leeds a bit quiet.“And now I meet people all the time that are like: ‘Oh my God, I didn’t realise it was so amazing until I got there,’ and you hear that all the time from southerners who don’t travel up north very often. I think Leeds surprises them.”The opening ceremony at Headingley Stadium on Saturday will be hosted by the TV presenter and Leeds 2023 chair, Gabby Logan. Photograph: Javier García/BPI/Rex/ShutterstockThe Awakening is directed by Alan Lane, the artistic director of the Royal Television Society award-winning theatre company Slung Low, and choreographed by Sharon Watson, the principal of the Northern School of Contemporary Dance.They are keeping tight-lipped about the evening’s full programme, billed as a “collision” of music, poetry, performance, comedy, dance and film, but some were given a clue on Thursday evening after spotting an eerie face made up of lights in the sky over Leeds, which was confirmed to be part of drone rehearsals for the event.Unusually, local people were invited to apply for tickets in exchange for submitting pictures of their own works of art – whether a painting, a quilt, a TikTok dance routine or some baked biscuits – and the response was so great the organisers ended up with a waiting list.The creative director of Leeds 2023, Kully Thiarai, said it was about telling an “epic story about the city in one night” and was just the first in a year-long series of events celebrating the city’s cultural history and future. “I’m excited for what that will do and what confidence that will generate and what it will act as a catalyst for other people to carry on doing, once the year is over.”
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Using rock images to study cult of the gods in pre-Egyptian society
The desert in southern Egypt is filled with hundreds of petroglyphs and inscriptions dating from the Neolithic to the Arab period. The oldest date from the fifth millennium B.C., and few have been studied. Egyptologists at the University of Bonn and Aswan University now want to systematically record the rock paintings and document them in a database. Among them, a rock painting more than 5,000 years old depicting a boat being pulled by 25 men on a rope stands out in particular.
"This cultural treasure in the northeast of Aswan has been largely undocumented, let alone published," says Egyptologist Prof. Dr. Ludwig Morenz of the University of Bonn. The petroglyphs are found in numerous and often remote locations in dried-up river valleys, called "wadis" in Arabic.
At the same time, the petroglyphs, which are sometimes inconspicuous at first glance, are under severe threat, especially from current quarrying activities in the desert. "Especially in recent years, there has already been serious destruction of this cultural asset," says Morenz, who is also a member of the Cluster of Excellence Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies (BCDSS) and the Transdisciplinary Research Area "Present Pasts" at the University of Bonn. "Such losses can hardly be prevented completely, given the vastness of the area, but all the more important is at least good documentation."
Great treasure for science
Together with the Aswan Inspectorate of the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities, the University of Bonn's Egyptology Department has already documented isolated inscriptions on rocks. "These rock images are a great treasure for science, which will be systematically developed in the coming years in cooperation between the University of Bonn, the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities and especially the Aswan Inspectorate," says Mohamed Abdel Hay Abu Baker, who is specifically responsible for researching rock images at the Aswan Inspectorate.
In the course of his doctoral studies at Aswan University in Aswan, Abu Baker will now work together with the University of Bonn to create a comprehensive database with an image archive on the rock images. For this purpose, the University of Excellence Bonn supports the inspector of the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities for one year with a scholarship from excellence funds of the federal and state governments. Prof. Morenz is second supervisor of the dissertation.
Testimony from the time before the pharaohs
The project will now systematically record the hundreds of rock art images in southern Egypt. "The first newly discovered sources shed new light on the pre-Pharaonic period of the Fourth Millennium and the importance of the socio-cultural periphery," Morenz says.
Among the images that Abu Baker captured during his explorations in the field, one in particular stood out to the Egyptologist from the University of Bonn. From this period of high cultural dynamism in the Assuan region of the later Fourth Millennium comes a hitherto unique scene that offers insight into religion and cult practice. It is depicted over the bumps and edges of the rock, how a boat is pulled by 25 men with raised arms on a rope.
A ritual is obviously impressively shown here—namely the great procession of an image of the gods, according to Morenz. This is clear from image details, he said, the boat with shrine and standard and, in particular, the cattle horns, which are typical of sacred imagery. "This rock image gives us insights into the sacred design of an apparently remote landscape, the Wadi al Agebab, which is still largely unknown in research," says the Egyptologist.
The entire later Pharaonic culture is based on these beginnings of the pictorial staging of religion. Morenz: "Here, the high importance of religion and especially the cult of the gods in the still pre-Egyptian society of the second half of the Fourth Millennium is revealed as a culture-creating factor."
Provided by University of Bonn
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Dancers in a pre-Incan civilization of Peru built specially designed dance floors to honor a nearby god of mountains and lightning, a new study shows.
The floor could accommodate 26 dancers, and was hollow underneath with layers of resonant material on the underside of the cavity that would’ve aided in creating a booming noise like thunder.
It was discovered at a pre-Incan site of Viejo Sangayaico, about 120 miles south of Lima, after archaeologists walked over an open space and realized it was hollow underneath, which is exactly like something out of an Indiana Jones movie when you think about it.
It was quite near at hand to a temple dedicated to the Incan god of lightning, even though the construction of the dance floor took place around 1,000 CE, before the heyday of the Incas.
This, archaeologists believe, suggests that like their own footsteps tripping over it in our time, Incan people would have found it, realized the floor made a sound like thunder, and incorporated it into their rituals by building a temple nearby.
“We know that in pre-Hispanic Andean rituals dance was a big part of the proceedings. I believe that this specially constructed platform was built to enhance the natural sounds associated with dance,” Kevin Lane, an archaeologist with the Instituto de las Culturas (IDECU) of the Universidad de Buenos Aires who helped carry out the fieldwork, told Art News.
“I believe that these open platforms would have been used during the pre-Hispanic period as a stage on which to venerate the nearby mountain gods, in this case those of Huinchocruz,” Lane says. “This would likely have been accompanied by drums and possibly Andean wind instruments.”
The platform was made by carving out a cavity under the rock and layering it with the dung of an animal, possibly a guanaco, and silty clay. These materials gave resonance to the noise created within the hollow as the dancers above performed their rituals.
MORE SOUTH AMERICA STUDY: Incredible Discovery Beneath the Southern Amazon Reveals Urban-Agrarian Society Never Seen Before
The study authors raise the question of whether this was a common feature of Incan and pre-Incan settlements, and perhaps that completed excavations should be reexamined for such thunder dancefloors.
SHARE This Completely-Different Archaeological Discovery On Social Media…
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ATHENS, Greece -- Museums in Austria and Greece are discussing the potential return to Athens of two ancient Greek sculptures, a move which could have a knock-on effect for the world's thorniest cultural heritage dispute: the fate of the British Museum's Parthenon Sculptures.
The talks announced by Austria's foreign minister on Tuesday concern two small pieces of the 2,500-year-old marble works from the Acropolis. The sculptures are now held in Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum.
If a deal for their return is struck, it would be Greece's third in a few months with the handful of European museums that own little bits of the Parthenon Sculptures.
That could increase pressure on the British Museum to return its own, much larger collection, among the global debate on cultural restitution.
Austrian Foreign Minister Alexander Schallenberg discussed the issue with his visiting Greek counterpart, Nikos Dendias, in Vienna, the foreign ministry said.
Schallenberg said that “technical talks are currently under way” between the Kunsthistorisches Museum and the Acropolis Museum in Athens “about the possibility of a loan,” according to Austrian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Antonia Praun.
Sounding optimistic, Dendias voiced “deep satisfaction” at the development, but didn't provide any details on the terms being discussed. The two museums didn't immediately respond to requests for comment.
“This will add to a series of highly symbolic gestures that may create a positive momentum” for the return of the sculptures from the British Museum, Dendias said after meeting with Schallenberg.
In January, the Vatican Museums — in a “donation” from Pope Francis — returned their three small parts of the sculptures, shortly after a museum in Palermo, Sicily, sent back its one piece.
“So, (Vienna's) will be the third one,” Dendias said. “And this, for us, is of huge importance.”
In February, the chair of the British Museum said the U.K. and Greece were working on a deal that would see his institution’s Parthenon Marbles displayed in both London and Athens. Nothing has been announced since.
The two relief sculptures in Vienna measure 26 by 29 centimeters (10 by 11 inches) and 36 by 35 centimeters. The one depicts two bearded men, and the other two young riders and the head of a horse. They were part of the 160-meter-long (520-foot) frieze that ran around the outer walls of the Parthenon, dedicated to Athena, goddess of wisdom.
Carved between 447-432 BC, the frieze and other sculptures remained largely intact until the temple — used by the Turkish garrison as a gunpowder store — was blown up during a siege in 1687. About half the surviving works were removed by British diplomat Lord Elgin in the early 19th century, while Athens was still under Ottoman Turkish rule. Since 1816 they have been a key part of the British Museum's collections.
Greece claims they were illegally acquired during a period of foreign occupation. British officials have rebuffed repeated demands for their return to Athens.
Most of the other works are in the Acropolis Museum, with scattered fragments in Paris, Copenhagen, Munich and Wuerzburg in Germany, and Vienna.
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Grieshaber reported from Berlin.
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Archaeologists in Egypt have discovered several tombs and chapels dating back around 3,300 years in an ancient cemetery at the site of Saqqara.
The biggest tomb belonged to a man named "Panehsy" who was the "overseer of the temple of Amun," Lara Weiss (opens in new tab), a curator of the Egyptian and Nubian collection at the Netherlands' National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden and author of the book "The Walking Dead at Saqqara (opens in new tab)" (De Gruyter 2022), who is one of the excavation leaders, told Live Science in an email.
Weiss noted that Panehsy "had a very nice tomb with wonderful reliefs which show large traces of colour." Inscriptions indicate that he didn't have any children, and that an employee arranged for offerings to be brought to the tomb. Human remains were found in Panehsy's tomb, but they seem to be from people buried at a later time and will be studied in detail in 2024, Weiss said.
Another newly unearthed tomb belongs to a man named "Yuyu," who was a "gold foil maker and hence a specialized artist in the royal treasury," Weiss said. While Yuyu's tomb is smaller than Paneshy's, it has some remarkable artwork that depicts "many interesting details such as many barque [a ship] bearers and a huge procession of mourners," noted Weiss. Four generations of his family are depicted, including "his parents, himself and his wife, his brother with wife and children, his own children and grandchildren," Weiss said.
One of the other newfound tombs, whose owner is unknown, has statues carved in relief and appears to show four people who likely belong to the same family. The statues appear to be unfinished, but the design of the statues is similar to those found in a nearby tomb belonging to a couple named Maya and Merit who lived about 50 years before this tomb was built, Weiss noted.
Live Science contacted scholars not involved with the excavation to get their thoughts. Francesco Tiradritti (opens in new tab), an Egyptology professor at the Kore University of Enna in Italy, was impressed by the relief. "The quality of this relief is amazing," Tiradritti said, noting that "the artist played on the tridimensionality and frontality of the four figures with a consciousness rare for the art of Ancient Egypt." Tiradritti said that the relief reminds him of monuments found in a necropolis near Memphis that date back to the Old Kingdom (circa 2649 B.C. to 2150 B.C.), a time when pyramids were being constructed in Egypt.
The work at Saqqara is ongoing and is being conducted by scholars from the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden and the Egyptian Museum in Turin, Italy.
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Owen Jarus is a regular contributor to Live Science who writes about archaeology and humans' past. He has also written for The Independent (UK), The Canadian Press (CP) and The Associated Press (AP), among others. Owen has a bachelor of arts degree from the University of Toronto and a journalism degree from Ryerson University.
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Archaeologists in Egypt have discovered broken statues of ancient royalty at a sun temple in Heliopolis, an archaeological site that was once a major city near what is now Cairo.
The stone-carved fragments include depictions of Ramesses II (reign circa 1279 B.C. to 1213 B.C.), Ramesses IX (reign circa 1126 B.C. to 1108 B.C), Horemheb (reign circa 1323 B.C. to 1295 B.C.) and Psamtik II (reign 595 B.C. to 589 B.C.), the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities said in a statement (opens in new tab) released March 20.
Sun temples are found at a number of sites in Egypt and are dedicated to Ra, the ancient Egyptian sun god, but the sun temple at Heliopolis was of particular importance. (Heliopolis is a Greek name; the Egyptian name was Iunu.)
According to ancient Egyptian belief, Heliopolis is where "the world was created, with the first sunrise," excavation dig leader Dietrich Raue (opens in new tab), the director of the Cairo department of the German Archaeological Institute, told Live Science in an email. "Here the connection of kingship to the creator and sun god was celebrated," Raue said, noting that pharaohs constructed statues, obelisks and other structures at Heliopolis to legitimize their rule and honor the sun god.
"Serving the gods was one of the major duties of ancient Egyptian kings, and dedicating statues is a part of this," Raue explained. "Ideally, no ruler of Egypt should be in office without the blessing of the sun-god."
The newly discovered statue fragments, which show the heads of the pharaohs on sphinxes, would have been placed in front of gates or beside obelisks at the sun temple, Raue said. At some point in antiquity, the statues were destroyed and reused as building materials, he added.
Live Science contacted scholars not involved with the excavation to get their thoughts. "The abundant statuary material found by the mission testify of the long-lasting importance of the site in pharaonic [times]," Massimiliano Nuzzolo (opens in new tab), an Egyptologist with the Polish Academy of Sciences who is studying a sun temple at Abu Ghurab in Egypt, told Live Science in an email. The pharaoh-sphinx findings also reveal "the wish of the kings of the second and first millennium [B.C.] to leave a tangible sign of their worship for the sun god Ra in one of the main places of Egyptian civilization," Nuzzolo added.
Peter Brand (opens in new tab), a history professor who specializes in Egyptology at the University of Memphis, said that there is much we still don't know about Heliopolis. For instance, while Ramesses II was a prominent pharaoh who expanded Egypt's empire, it's not clear if he rebuilt parts of this sun temple or continued using an older one.
"Archeologists have only scratched the surface of this area," Brand told Live Science in an email. "Much of its rich and complex history over the course of three millennia of pharaonic history patiently await[s] discovery beneath the desert sands."
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This brief experimental documentary about migration to Europe comes from the Italian artists Maria Iorio and Raphaël Cuomo and is a collage of unused footage from video pieces they have made together over the past 15 years. It’s a film with interesting things to say about the fortressing of Europe during that time, but I confess to finding it hard going and slightly frustrating. By the end I wondered if it might not have worked better as a gallery installation alongside the duo’s earlier works.It opens in 2006, at night on Lampedusa, the tiny Sicilian island where thousands fleeing war and poverty in Africa and the Middle East arrive on dinghies and small boats every year. We’re in a car parked on a busy dock and a man, heard not seen, hums a song, trying to remember words in Arabic. This is Abdelhamid, who is Tunisian and employed as a seasonal worker at a hotel on the island. He’s also an interpreter for the film-makers.In the present day we hear director Iorio reminding Abdelhamid of some of the experiences they shared: visiting an archaeological museum to see ancient mosaics, interviewing a researcher. But it’s not always easy to follow her voiceover.Chronicles of That Time is a film of fragments. Like a mosaic, scenes are tiles from which a portrait gradually emerges. We hear snippets of an interview with two Tunisian men in their 20s who talk about living and working undocumented in Europe before being deported. There are musical interludes and Iorio laments increasingly inhumane government policies against refugees.It’s daring and original not to make this film in the hand-wringing style of conventional documentaries about the so-called refugee crisis. But I did find myself feeling a little adrift, wanting to know more about the reality of the lives of people it features.
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Perfume companies love to give their products names like Eternity and Forever.
But now scientists really have bottled the 'scent of eternity', thanks to the Ancient Egyptians.
Researchers have recreated the scent of the embalming fluid used to preserve the remains of a mummy from the Valley of Kings so she could live forever in the afterlife.
The fragrance sheds light on the ingenuity of the Egyptians, almost 3,500 years ago, in protecting the organs of Senetnay - a lady known as the 'Ornament of the King' as a key member of the 'entourage' of Pharaoh Amenhotep II, after she breastfed him as his wet nurse during infancy.
The scent of the embalming fluid contains the sweet notes of beeswax, which would protect against bacteria, along with a vanilla-like scent from plant substances and the pine-like fragrance of tree resins.
However it also carries the less fragrant, distinctive smell of a freshly surfaced road, as the Ancient Egyptians used bitumen in mummification to seal off organs from moisture and insects.
Researchers, who painstakingly worked out the ingredients of the embalming fluid and helped to recreate its scent on paper perfume tester slips, are excited because their analysis suggests Ancient Egypt may have been practising international trade almost 1,000 years earlier than previously thought.
There was tantalising evidence, from peppercorns in the nostrils of the mummy of famous Pharaoh Ramses II, of trade with southern India, as these peppercorns would only have been available there.
But now a fragrant resin called dammar, which the scientists believe they have detected in the embalming fluid used for Senetnay, suggests international trade could have been in place much earlier, at the time of her death - 250 years before that of Ramses II.
Dammar would likely have been sourced from dipterocarp trees which grow in south-east Asia.
If the presence of dammar resin is confirmed, it would suggest that the ancient Egyptians had access to south-east Asia almost a millennium earlier than evidence had previously suggested.
Barbara Huber, who led the study from the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology, said: 'These results show how advanced the Ancient Egyptian mummification process was - but recreating the scent of eternity is also like a time machine.
'People are used to looking at mummies and reading museum descriptions, but this helps them to actually experience how the past smelled.'
The ancient aroma will be presented at the Moesgaard Museum in Denmark in an upcoming exhibition, allowing visitors to catch a whiff of the ancient Egyptian process of mummification.
It was recreated by taking samples from two jars containing the liver and lungs of Senetnay, which were removed from the famous Valley of the Kings in Thebes, which is now Luxor, by the archaeologist Howard Carter more than a century ago.
The embalming fluid was broken into individual molecules using scientific processes including chromatography, which bombards substances with gases to separate them out based on how they break down differently into fragments.
The scientists worked closely with the French perfumer Carole Calvez and the sensory museologist Sofia Collette Ehrich to recreate the scent of the embalming fluid.
The researchers describe the six complex ingredients of the embalming fluid in the journal Scientific Reports.
These complex ingredients indicate the extraordinary privilege of Senetnay, which is also apparent from her presence in the Valley of the Kings - a necropolis normally reserved for pharaohs and powerful nobility.
The ingredients including resin from the Pistacia tree, which has also been used in other tombs to mummify food items like chicken for people to 'eat' in the afterlife.
Miss Huber said: 'The scent of eternity represents more than just the aroma of the mummification process.
'It embodies the rich cultural, historical, and spiritual significance of Ancient Egyptian mortuary practices.'
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by Jincy IypeDec 27, 2022
Equipped with a theme that speaks to the globalised design circle, the London Design Biennale looks at the country-specific division of Biennale as a tool to visualise international cooperation. The title—The Global Game: Remapping Collaborations—goes beyond borders and territories to enact new forms of participatory design. As part of this year's showcase, the Biennale will also highlight design-led innovations from leading research centres. 'Eureka' will feature university research departments, demonstrating cross-disciplinary invention and creativity taking place now and changing the world of tomorrow. Exhibitors of this section include the research done by Kingston University, Sheffield Hallam University, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow School of Art, The UK National Centre for Ageing (NICA), Canterbury Christ Church University, and King’s College London.
Aric Chen, General Director, Het Nieuwe Instituut, elaborated on the intention of this year's theme saying, “The Global Game: Remapping Collaborations aims to create an alternative geopolitical landscape driven not by competition nor conflict, but rather cooperation. We all agree that global challenges require global collaboration. This is easier said than done, but in some small way, we hope real international exchanges will arise from this biennial in a way that also invites visitors to become part of the process.”
Keeping the Biennale’s mission in mind, the 2023 edition will continue to demonstrate how design can help better our world. The presenting exhibitors will share perspectives, and in some cases, solutions to global issues. Different countries explore areas from the urban environment to traditional practices and environmental sustainability to the humanitarian response to conflict. One of the most notable examples is perhaps the Polish-Ukrainian installation. Designers from across Ukraine will come together to draw on its history of creative richness to demonstrate collaboration's vital role in forging new means of connection and communication in a time of war. Poland will reinterpret the window as a symbol of cross-border collaborations, referencing the donations of windows from Poland to Ukraine to help those whose homes have been destroyed.
Another collaborative installation for the fourth edition is between Spain and Peru. Here the idea is to demonstrate how historical design practices might offer alternative means of collaboration today, as symbolised through the ‘cajón.’ This percussion instrument, which is a part of the Afro-Peruvian tradition, has become a ‘traditional’ instrument of flamenco music. The Automorph Network will bring together designers from France, Italy, Israel and the United States to examine how the process of biomimicry learnt from nature can be copied in our own designs to drive innovation.
Responding to themes of societal disorientation, the Netherlands pavilion will be an ever changing site-specific installation distributed throughout Somerset House to support moments of gathering, assembly and reflection among other participants. The European Union delegation to the United Kingdom will present the New European Bauhaus initiative—a movement to facilitate and steer the transformation of our societies. Romania will emphasise humanity’s interconnection with nature and the need for regenerative practices.
Abu Dhabi will highlight a more focused look at the traditional Al-Sadu technique of weaving. Practised by Bedouin women in the UAE, the method is used to create tents and social spaces where families and visitors convene. This technique was recently added to the UNESCO List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Need of Urgent Safeguarding. Malta, in the Somerset House courtyard, will adapt the form of the village square, demarcated with fabrics using traditional Phoenician-Maltese dyes, to highlight ancient approaches to the urban environment. India will invoke the sensory impact of a chowk—an open market at a four-way junction of streets—through the visual metaphor of a charpoy, a traditional woven daybed.
Taiwan will showcase collaborations across industry, trade, natural resources and the economy. South Korea will use mixed reality to bridge the gap between past and future, imagined within the surroundings of the traditional Korean garden. The world’s first ultra-realistic robot artist, Ai-Da, will prompt questions about how collaboration with artificial intelligence might shape our future and its impact on creativity. The Democratic Republic of the Congo reimagines the country’s national museum as a virtual world, exploring the country’s rich and varied communities and culture.
The Care Pavilion asks us to focus on the politics and ethics of care—be that 'caring for,' 'caring about,' or 'caring with'—and how it can manifest itself in relation to humanity and beyond. Portugal will bring attention to the issue of violence against women through their voices, to catalyse change. Mudac, the Museum of Contemporary Design and Applied Arts in Lausanne, Switzerland, will speculate on a global management system for planetary issues by bringing together different types of intelligence around a control console.
Victoria Broackes, Director, London Design Biennale, mentioned, "The previous biennale took place towards the end of the global pandemic and once again the global context has drastically changed. Despite this, international design teams continue to demonstrate the possibilities of what can be achieved through design and design thinking. The Biennale is the place to see what is on people’s minds, across the world, right now. This year we will see exhibitors presenting design in all its forms—from ancient weaving traditions through futuristic urban planning, from AI systems to collaborative humanitarian efforts.”
At the time of publishing this article, the following pavilions were confirmed to be participating—Abu Dhabi, the humanoid Ai-Da Robot, Automorph Network, Care Pavilion, Chatham House, Chile, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Dubai, India, Malta, the Swiss museum Mudac, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, South Korea, Spain and Peru, Taiwan, The Delegation of the European Union to the United Kingdom and Ukraine.
London Design Biennale 2023 edition will take place at Somerset House from June 1-25.
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Image source, de Brécy TrustImage caption, The team found the de Brécy Tondo was highly likely to have been created by RaphaelNew facial recognition technology has found a painting previously attributed to an unknown artist is highly likely to be a Raphael masterpiece.A team from the University of Nottingham and University of Bradford used the technology to examine the painting, known as the de Brécy Tondo.They found the faces were identical to those in a Raphael altarpiece.They said this means the paintings were highly likely to have been created by the same artist.The team compared the de Brécy Tondo, which sits in a collection set up by Cheshire businessman George Lester Winward and was thought by some experts to have been a Victorian copy, with the Sistine Madonna altarpiece.The similarity between the Madonnas in the two paintings was found to be 97%, while comparison of the child in both works produced an 86% similarity. A similarity above 75% is considered identical.'Exciting'Dr Christopher Brooke, honorary research fellow at the University of Nottingham, is an expert in digital image analysis and co-authored a research paper about the find.He said: "Direct facial comparison comes out at a match of 97% - a very high statistical probability that the artworks are by identical creators."Further confirmation comes from analysis of the pigments employed in the Tondo, which have demonstrated that the painting's characteristics are considered to be typical of Renaissance practice and therefore highly unlikely to be a later copy."This is an exciting piece of work that promises much for the future examination of works of art."Image source, Getty ImagesImage caption, The similarity between the Madonnas in the two paintings was found to be 97%The artificial intelligence facial recognition system was developed by Hassan Ugail, professor of visual computing at the University of Bradford.Prof Ugail said: "Looking at the faces with the human eye shows an obvious similarity, but the computer can see far more deeply than we can, in thousands of dimensions, to pixel-level."Based on the high evaluation of this analysis, together with previous research, my fellow co-authors and I have concluded identical models were used for both paintings and they are undoubtedly by the same artist."The research builds on previous work by Howell Edwards, from the University of Bradford, who had previously carried out extensive examination of the painting.Mr Winward bought the Tondo in 1981 as part of a collection of art spanning from the 16th to the 19th Century. In 1995, two years before he died, he set up the de Brécy Trust Collection, named after his French ancestors, to preserve his collection of paintings and drawings and make them available to art scholars for study. Timothy Benoy, honorary secretary of the de Brécy Trust, said: "The trust is absolutely delighted that this new scientific evidence confirms the Raphael attribution of the Tondo."It illustrates very forcibly the increasing value of scientific evidence in the attribution of a painting."An academic paper on the analysis is due to be published shortly.Follow BBC East Midlands on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Send your story ideas to eastmidsnews@bbc.co.uk.Related Internet LinksThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.
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It was the first Pakistani film to premiere at the Cannes film festival; the first to make it to the Oscars’ international feature film shortlist. But Joyland, Saim Sadiq’s remarkably accomplished Punjabi and Urdu-language debut, is equally groundbreaking in other ways. At the core of the film is a love triangle, between Haider (Ali Junejo), the gentle son of an overbearing father; his smart, independent wife Mumtaz (Rasti Farooq, terrific) and Biba (Alina Khan), the feisty trans woman dancer who gives him a job. But the picture transcends the tragic romance narrative, to achieve something rather more complex and satisfying.
Richly detailed and superbly acted across the board, the film cast a scathing eye over the rigid social constraints that ensnare anyone who fails to conform. Of the three, Biba is perhaps the most comfortable with her own identity. But then Biba is also the most vulnerable to the hate that spews towards anyone who doesn’t fit the norm. Her defence mechanism is a lacquered layer of ruthlessness. Haider, with his guileless puppy eyes and passivity, is smitten by Biba, but as much by what she represents as who she is. And Mumtaz, reluctantly pregnant and watching helplessly as her freedoms are stripped away, despairs of the future.
Sadiq has a keen eye: a sequence with a towering cardboard cutout of Biba is a show-stopper of an image, but other, smaller details are equally potent.
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Understanding the role of pareidolia in early human cave art
A psychological phenomenon where people see meaningful forms in random patterns, such as seeing faces in clouds, may have stimulated early humans to make cave art.
Research published in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal by the departments of Archaeology and Psychology at Durham University has found that Ice Age cave art made as early as 40,000 years ago was influenced in part by a visual psychological phenomenon called pareidolia.
Pareidolia and early human artists
The research team, led by Dr. Izzy Wisher, who was a Durham Ph.D. student at the time of the study, examined paintings of animals in caves in Northern Spain to look for any evidence that pareidolia had an influence on the early artists.
If so, they would have expected the majority of depictions to include features of the cave walls within them (such as cracks and curves) and to take relatively simple forms.
The researchers also used modified virtual reality gaming software to model the cave walls and replicate the light sources used by the artists, (most likely flickering firelight produced by small torches or lamps), to understand the visual effects on the cave wall by tracking the eye-movement of participants.
Influence and inspiration
Their study found that over 50% of depictions showed a strong relationship to the natural features of the cave wall and were simple in nature (lacking detail such as eyes or hair), suggesting strongly that pareidolia partly guided artists' creations.
Examples included where the curved edges of the cave wall were used to represent the backs of animals such as wild horses, or where natural cracks were used as bisons' horns.
However, pareidolia cannot explain all the images and the researchers believe that the art may have been part of a "creative conversation" with the cave walls—with early artists both guided by what they saw emerging from the cracks and shapes of the cave wall, but also using their own creativity.
Systematic testing
The team believes their study offers the first systematic testing of the much-discussed theory that pareidolia influenced cave artists and is the first to utilize simulated lighting conditions in virtual reality as part of this. It advances Durham's research into visual paleopsychology.
More information: Izzy Wisher et al, Conversations with Caves: The Role of Pareidolia in the Upper Palaeolithic Figurative Art of Las Monedas and La Pasiega (Cantabria, Spain), Cambridge Archaeological Journal (2023). DOI: 10.1017/S0959774323000288
Journal information: Cambridge Archaeological Journal
Provided by Durham University
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Art and Culture
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Archeologists in Wales have unearthed a glitzy, golden hair-ring and the oldest wooden comb ever found in the U.K. from a roadside burial pit dating back to the Bronze Age.
The pit contained the 3,000-year-old remains of a person who was cremated with the glamorous artifacts, which may have facilitated the "extremely rare survival" of the comb as charcoal, according to a statement.
"The gold ring is obviously the most eye-catching object to accompany the cremation," Dave Gilbert, project excavator and the director of operations at Red River Archeology, a U.K.-based archaeological firm, said in the statement. "However, the most important artifact is what may at first glance seem the more mundane: the wooden comb, which is a find without parallel in Wales, if not the U.K."
Eight narrow teeth remain on the comb. Wooden and other organic artifacts usually decompose rapidly in soil, but the fact that the comb was burned during the cremation may have saved it from disintegrating completely.
Until now, the oldest wooden comb found in Britain was a small Roman accessory dated between 140 and 180 A.D. An undergraduate archeology student picked it up from the ground during a visit to Bar Hill Fort, a Roman ruin near Glasgow, in Scotland, in 1936.
The fine gold ring, which measures less than half an inch (1.1 centimeters) in diameter, displays an expertly crafted chevron and herringbone pattern and may have served to bedazzle hairstyles. In 2021, archeologists in Germany unearthed a similar hair ornament from a Bronze Age burial. At the time, researchers said the use of gold for the ring could indicate the high social status of the deceased.
"The gold ring is a very early, well-made and small example of its type, offering new insight into the development of hair-rings as a form of early jewelry across Britain and Ireland," Adam Gwilt, the principal curator for prehistory at the Amgueddfa Cymru Museum Wales, said in the statement.
Mourners may have chosen these accessories, which date to the Middle Bronze Age (1300 B.C. to 1150 B.C.), as cherished objects to accompany the deceased into the afterlife.
The discovery highlights "the importance of these objects to the person buried with them," as well as "attention to detail and pride in appearance" paid by inhabitants of the Vale of Glamorgan region of southern Wales thousands of years ago, Gilbert said.
Archeologists discovered the burial pit during excavations ahead of a road construction project and removed the objects, as well as the cremated remains. An independent committee will estimate the value of the treasure before it joins the Amgueddfa Cymru's collections.
"This cremation burial, with its accompanying gold ring and wooden comb, gives us a glimpse of life and death in Bronze Age times," Gwilt said. "This grave is just one example of a much wider wealth of prehistoric burial evidences now being discovered across the Vale of Glamorgan."
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Sascha is a U.K.-based trainee staff writer at Live Science. She holds a bachelor’s degree in biology from the University of Southampton in England and a master’s degree in science communication from Imperial College London. Her work has appeared in The Guardian and the health website Zoe. Besides writing, she enjoys playing tennis, bread-making and browsing second-hand shops for hidden gems.
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Art and Culture
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Her boyfriend asked her to draw a comic about their relationship. Hilarity ensued.
The series combines humor and playful drawings with spot-on depictions of the intense familiarity that long-standing coupledom often brings.
"It was all his idea."
An offhand suggestion from her boyfriend of two years coupled with her own lifelong love of comic strips like "Calvin and Hobbes" and "Get Fuzzy" gave 22-year-old Catana Chetwynd the push she needed to start drawing an illustrated series about long-term relationships.
Specifically, her own relationship.
The drawings are refreshingly touching, honest, and instantly recognizable to anyone who's ever had to learn to live with, for, and around a long-term partner.
Chetwynd says her goal is to explore the peculiar aspects of relationships at different stages, using her own as the master template.
The series combines humor and playful drawings with spot-on depictions of the intense familiarity that long-standing coupledom often brings.
The comics are almost too real — and really, really funny.
If the following comics capture your relationship to a T, you're most definitely not alone.
(All images by Catana Chetwynd.)
"When I started doing the comic, we hadn't lived together or anything yet, and now we've done the whole thing of moving in together and meeting the parents and everything," Chetwynd says.
The evolution of their relationship provides the creative fuel for the comic strip. Thankfully, her boyfriend John Freed is fully on board with being depicted in (digital) ink — despite having to occasionally awkwardly explain things that appear in the strip to their family and friends.
The connection she has built with Freed, Chetwynd says she wouldn't trade for anything — especially now that it inspires her art.
"The end goal for me was always to have somebody that I could be comfortable with in this way, and I think I got that."
This article originally appeared on 05.12.17.
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Art and Culture
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New book investigates the literature of Britain's waterways
Britain's changing relationship with its canal network and the implications of how canals contributed to our reliance on fossil fuels are at the heart of a new book from Professor Jodie Matthews.
"The British Industrial Canal—Reading the Waterways from the Eighteenth Century to the Anthropocene" examines writings about the canals to look at how our use of them has changed, taking in trade, leisure, wartime and as 'linear parks'—spaces that give people somewhere to have time to themselves. The book considers the place of canals in our broader culture, a neglected topic.
It also touches on the role that canals played in Britain's relationship with its Empire, and how their connections to the slave trade still reverberate today.
The book builds on earlier work by Professor Matthews, where she explored the representation of canal boat people and the attitudes towards them and other traveling communities in two articles for the journal Nineteenth-Century Contexts.
"When the Duke of Bridgewater was building his canal, the first of the industrial era in mainland Britain, he was not doing it because he wanted to start a national network of waterways," says Professor Matthews, Professor of English Literature and Head of Department for Communication and Humanities. "He simply wanted to get his coal to Manchester.
"When it opened, the price of coal in Manchester halved almost overnight. But in addition to the implications of the effects of the Bridgewater Canal, it was an incredible feat of engineering as all canals were—it's engineered water. The canals were not just a transport system, but an energy system because they primarily transported coal and that's what made industrial Britain 'go.' Here we are today, living with the consequences of our use of fossil fuels and of pollution, with a future that is very uncertain."
"I think our relationship with water changed in the era of the industrial canal. We might think of water as just H2O, the same wherever we find it, but I'm suggesting that the water of the industrial canal is also historical and social.
Professor Matthews' book looks at literature about the canals from each century up to the present day. The writings she looks at range from Boys Own-style travelogs, to journals from middle-class women who worked the waterways when thousands of men were away at war, to modern "canal noir" fiction.
"The middle-class women who worked on the canals wore badges that said IW for Inland Waterways, and this led to the ironic nickname of 'Idle Women,'" adds Professor Matthews. "They were sometimes called the land girls of the canals as their role was seen as similar.
"More recently, there has been a sub-genre of new nature writing about the canals, where people write about the canals as a space in the 21st century and what they hold for nature. They are writing about the way in which canals can heal our troubled souls."
Key to Professor Matthews' book is how the perception of these feats of engineering, cutting edge technology in their day, have changed over the course of two and a half centuries.
"What holds it together is our relationship with the waterways over the centuries and the way in which this canal space has meant so many different things to different people," she adds. "They have never meant just one thing. If you ask anybody about their nearest canal and what they feel about it, every person who answers will give you a different response."
Professor Matthews has also been Honorary Research Fellow for the Canal and River Trust, and has previously investigated the links between the profits of slavery being invested in the building of the canals.
"There's no sense in which canal history is marginal history. The waterways run through every aspect of British history since the mid-18th century. That includes the histories of science and engineering, but it includes our history of Empire, our relationship with slavery, attitudes to class, labor and gender.
"The canals are part of our culture and part of our society, and therefore every other aspect of our history that we're re-examining in the twenty-first century. I'm excited by the possibilities that the study of literature holds for understanding how we got to where we are now, including in the fields of science and engineering."
Provided by University of Huddersfield
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Art and Culture
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A painting valued at $15,000 just two years ago is now expected to fetch up to $18 million at auction after being identified as the work of the Dutch master.
The Adoration of the Kings has been virtually unseen since the 1950s, when it first came to light. It was acquired by a collector in Amsterdam in 1955 and his widow sold it to a German family in 1985, where it remained until it was sold by Christie’s in Amsterdam two years ago. At the time of the sale, Christie’s attributed the biblical scene to the “Circle of Rembrandt,” suggesting it had been carried out by a student or an artist close to the famous painter, and estimated its value at up to $15,800.
Even with such a low estimate, it seems clear that more than one bidder had a feeling the painting was rather more special than Christie's experts had thought, as the winning buyer eventually splashed out $860,000.
Two years later, the painting is heading back to the market again - this time through Sotheby’s. In the intervening period, the artwork has undergone a long and complex verification process that included multiple forms of scientific imaging that ultimately concluded that the painting was not the work of one of Rembrandt's apprentices, but of the master himself. This has wildly transformed its value, now estimated to be around $18 million.
The auction house believes it was painted early in Rembrandt’s career, around 1628, when he would have been about 22 and living in the Dutch city of Leiden.
“I would say that it’s particularly significant because it adds to our understanding of Rembrandt at this crucial date in his development and career, when he was clearly very ambitious and developing very quickly as an artist,” George Gordon, co-chairman of Old Master Paintings Worldwide at Sotheby’s, told CNN.
The painting is currently on show at Sotheby’s in Hong Kong, after which it will travel on to New York, Los Angeles and London, where it will be auctioned on 6 December.
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Art and Culture
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The world's oldest surviving Scottish tartan is over 400 years old and, though now faded, once sported green, brown, red and yellow, a new analysis of the centuries-old fabric reveals.
The tartan was found in a peat bog in Glen Affric — an area in the Scottish Highlands carpeted with woods, lakes and moorland — in the 1980s, but this is the first time that scientists have examined it with dye analysis and radiocarbon testing.
Tartan is a specific type of textile made from colored wool yarn woven in crisscrossing horizontal and vertical bands. The places where the bands of color cross form the tartan's iconic diagonal lines, and the color blocks repeat to form a pattern of lines and squares. Since the 19th century, different tartan patterns have been associated with specific Scottish clans.
Measuring 22 inches by 17 inches (55 by 43 centimeters), the scrap of tartan was found in a peat bog just 19 miles (31 kilometers) west of Loch Ness. This area of wetland is covered in dead plants such as mosses, and that combination produces high acidity and low levels of oxygen that can preserve organic material for millennia. Peat bogs throughout the U.K. and Ireland have been known to preserve wood, butter and even human bodies.
Before testing the Glen Affric tartan, scientists carefully cleaned the peat staining off of it. Then, an analysis of the yarn dye was done at National Museums Scotland, using high-resolution digital microscopy. The scientists identified the four colors, which were produced by natural dyes such as woad, a flowering plant in the mustard family that can be used as a blue dye. The lack of artificial dyes suggested a pre-1750 date for the tartan, according to the statement.
Additional testing was then done at the Scottish Universities Environmental Research Centre (SUERC) Radiocarbon Laboratory in East Kilbride. The most probable date for the scrap of tartan is between 1500 and 1600, making it the oldest "true tartan" found in Scotland.
"Although we can theorize about the Glen Affric tartan," Peter MacDonald (opens in new tab), head of research and collections at the Scottish Tartans Authority, said in a statement (opens in new tab), "we don't know who owned it." The rustic nature of the cloth means it was mostly likely a garment someone wore while working outdoors, he said.
Earlier possible examples of tartans have been found in England. The Falkirk tartan (opens in new tab), which dates to the third century A.D., was found a century ago in Scotland near the Antonine Wall, stuffed into a ceramic pot with thousands of Roman coins. Although the fabric was woven in two colors, the pattern is a simple checkered design, and there is no evidence the yarn was dyed, meaning it is not a "true tartan."
"The Glen Affric tartan is clearly a piece of national and historical significance," John McLeish (opens in new tab), chair of the Scottish Tartans Authority, said in the statement. "There is no other known surviving piece of tartan from this period of this age. It is a remarkable discovery and deserves national attention and preservation."
The newly dated tartan fragment will be displayed starting April 1 at the Tartan exhibit at V&A Dundee, Scotland's design museum.
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Art and Culture
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The British Museum came under pressure this week after it sacked a member of staff over treasures reported "missing, stolen or damaged".
The museum, one of the nation's biggest tourist attractions, is dedicated to human history, art and culture, and is home to millions of valuable objects.
Police are now investigating the theft of items including gold, jewellery and gems of semi-precious stones.
Here's what we know about what has happened so far, as well as a look back at some other big thefts.
What happened?
It is understood the missing items were taken before this year and over a "significant" period of time. Some of them ended up on eBay, being sold for considerably less than their actual estimated value.
None of the treasures, which dated from the 15th Century BC to the 19th Century AD, had recently been on display and had been kept primarily for academic and research purposes, the museum said. The majority of them were kept in a storeroom.
The British Museum's outgoing current director Hartwig Fischer said this week that the museum would "throw our efforts into the recovery of objects".
"This is a highly unusual incident," said Mr Fischer. "I know I speak for all colleagues when I say that we take the safeguarding of all the items in our care extremely seriously.
"We have already tightened our security arrangements and we are working alongside outside experts to complete a definitive account of what is missing, damaged and stolen."
The perpetrator
Legal action is being taken against the staff member who was sacked, added the museum, which has started its own independent review of security.
However, the sacked member of staff has not been identified as the suspected thief.
London's Metropolitan Police is investigating the thefts but no arrests have been made as yet.
BBC News has not been able to independently verify the identity of former employee involved. We have contacted the museum and the police but neither have confirmed their identity, or said exactly why they were sacked, how the items went missing or what they were.
Other thefts at the British Museum
Among the treasures that have previously gone missing from the British Museum are a Cartier ring worth £750,000 and a 12cm marble head.
During the 1970s, the museum said a number of historic coins and medals were stolen.
In 1993, Roman coins and jewellery worth £250,000 were taken after thieves broke in via the roof.
In 2002, the museum reviewed security after a 2,500-year-old Greek statue, believed to be worth around £25,000 was stolen by a member of the public.
The marble head was taken from the Greek Archaic Gallery which had been open to the public without a permanent guard on duty.
In 2004, it was reported that 15 "historically important" Chinese artefacts - including jewels, ornate hairpins and fingernail guards - had been taken by a member of the public.
In 2017, it was revealed that an expensive Cartier diamond had actually been missing since 2011.
High-profile museum thefts elsewhere include:
- The robbery of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre in 1911 by handyman Vincenzo Peruggia
- The theft of The Scream, stolen from the Munch Museum in 2004 but recovered two years later
- The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston had 13 works, worth a combined $500m (£392m), stolen in 1990. The case remains unsolved
- A slick thief known as "Spider-Man" stole five masterpieces from a Paris museum in 2010
- Impressionist masterpieces were taken from a Paris museum as the public looked on in 1985
- The same year, amateurs took 124 beloved artefacts from a Mexican archaeological museum
- The Nazi looting of Europe during World War II, and Russian looting of Ukraine during the 2022 invasion
Contested artefacts
The British Museum has been under increasing pressure itself in recent years to return items in its collection to their countries of origin.
The demands by Greece for the return of the Parthenon Sculptures, often still known as the Elgin Marbles, are the most high profile example in this contested debate.
They were removed by the diplomat and soldier Lord Elgin in the 19th Century and later bought by the British government and placed in the British Museum.
In March, the Vatican returned three fragments of Athens' Parthenon temple it had kept for centuries.
Restitution issues more commonly apply to countries which experienced colonial conflict.
Ethiopia wants the British Museum to return ceremonial crosses, weapons, jewellery, sacred altar tablets and other items taken from Maqdala in the north of the country during British military action in 1868.
The Nigerian government has also formally asked the museum to return 900 Benin Bronzes.
And ruler of Ghana's Asante people has pressed the museum to return gold items in its collection.
Elsewhere in May, Greece said it had recovered hundreds of looted artefacts, including a 2nd Century bronze statue of Alexander the Great.
The British Museum was established by an Act of Parliament in 1753 and is currently governed by the British Museum Act 1963.
Its principal regulator is the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport (DCMS), which also sponsors it. A non-departmental public body, the museum operates at arm's length from government, but is accountable to parliament.
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Art and Culture
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Halfway through this magnificent exhibition hangs a portrait by Goya so famous it has its own nickname – The Black Duchess. It shows a fiercely intelligent woman standing outdoors in a romantic landscape dressed in crackling black lace. Her eyes flash, her sash blazes scarlet, the yellow and gold of her bodice burn like flames through the lace.The Duchess of Alba is as beautiful as she is haughty. One hand on hip, she points down with the other to some words written in the sand beneath her feet. Solo Goya – Only Goya. Is it a pledge of love, or an imperious summons, as if the artist should kneel before her? He puts himself, and us, on eye level with her gilded slippers. The duchess was his patron and friend, and perhaps more. What the portrait – and its subject – meant to him may remain forever undisclosed but Goya never let the painting go. It was with him until his death.This masterpiece is seldom seen except by habitués of the Hispanic Society Museum & Library on 155th Street and Broadway in Upper Manhattan. Founded in 1904 by the wealthy philanthropist Archer M Huntington, this is the most expansive collection of Iberian culture anywhere outside Spain. Anyone who has walked through the dark-wood galleries knows the sudden elation of coming upon El Greco, Zurbarán, Velázquez, Goya and more, but now the experience is available at the Royal Academy, while the Hispanic Society closes its doors for restoration. A whole museum, in essence, has been transported to Britain.Jewellery from the Palencia Hoard, c172–50BC. Hispanic Society of America, New YorkSilver bracelets that once spiralled up the arms of Celtiberian women centuries before the birth of Christ gleam in the spotlit darkness. The face of Pan, horns curving sinuously from his shaggy bronze locks, stares out of a lamp found in a Roman villa in Málaga. A belt buckle made of garnets and glittering green glass throws up the sensation of the man (or woman?) who wore it, this great heavy work of art, strung across their navel. The people of the past are everywhere apparent.Huntington collected across four millennia and in every medium. He bought Giovanni Vespucci’s elaborate nautical map of the world, made in Seville in 1526, with its great parchment-white oceans and curious illuminated details, such as the harvest of nut wood along the coast of Brazil. He acquired medieval door knockers featuring crab claws, dragons and the heads of bats; Alhambra silks shining with eight-pointed stars and gleaming Valencian lustreware. A deep plate, made in Manises in the 1370s, its cobalt and gold patterns shimmering like nacreous shell, stretches across nearly half a metre.Huntington learned Arabic to understand Spain’s Moorish past, and studied the country’s colonial history. Here are Mexican portraits and manuscripts showing the devastating encounters between Indigenous Americans and invading conquistadors. Bowls made of black micaceous clay in Tonalá, Mexico, are sculpted inside with all kinds of fish, fronds and serpents. To drink from the waters of the vessel was to come upon an undulating subaqueous world.Everything here is so unexpected. You think you are looking at a tiny oil portrait on a bit of card that resembles nothing so much as an El Greco only to discover that’s exactly what it is – the rarest of miniatures. A Last Supper from Bolivia, meanwhile, is worked in oil paint and inlaid mother-of-pearl that shines with sudden and mobile light.Andrea de Mena’s Mater Dolorosa, 1675. Hispanic Society of America, New YorkThe carved wood sculptures of saints and sinners, so famous in 17th-century Spanish art, here include works – for once – by a female artist, Andrea de Mena. Her weeping Virgin is as small and delicately carved as it is deeply poignant, shot through with maternal suffering.And hanging alongside the Duchess of Alba is one of Goya’s black ink and wash drawings from Album B, known as the “Madrid” Album, showing a woman standing by the marital bed in the middle of the night. Her husband lies stolidly slumbering as she investigates her white chemise for fleas (or something worse). It is gentle, tender, full of empathy for the put-upon wife.“To Spain I do not go as a plunderer,” wrote Huntington. “I buy no pictures [there], having that foolish sentimental feeling against disturbing such birds of paradise upon their perches.” Instead he bought from auctions and from other collectors; and some of his paintings were commissioned directly from contemporary artists. There is a whole gallery here of sunlit-flickering gardens, seascapes and picnics by the fin-de-siècle Valencian painter Joaquín Sorolla.Sea Idyll, 1908 by Sorolla. Hispanic Society of America, New YorkBut what strikes is the searing art of 17th-century Spain: El Greco’s stark Pietà, where the body of Christ and the weeping women are all contained within the embracing form of the Virgin Mary, and his monumental Saint Jerome, naked against a flaring sky, looking with such compassion upon the figure of Christ on the cross. Zurbarán’s extraordinary portrait of Saint Rufina as a pale-faced Spanish beauty, eyes to the skies, dressed in green taffeta against rose-pink silk.Velázquez’s early portrait of the Spanish prime minister Count-Duke of Olivares soars up the wall. An overbearing bully in black silk and regalia, he also has the plump chins and kiss curls of a baby. Velázquez had only recently arrived at the court of Philip IV in Madrid but he already has the measure of this alarmingly powerful figure.But the jewel of the whole show is the most modest of all the works here: Velázquez’s portrait of a Spanish girl, innocent, dark-eyed, aged perhaps around six or seven and so tenderly observed by the artist as he works that one might surmise a family relationship between them, perhaps of grandfather and grandchild.Her clothes are just a rapid salad of marks. But her soft hair is touchingly unruly, his brush stroking a tendril that has come out of place. And he takes his time to paint her grave little face, flawless in the pearly light. This portrait, too, remained with the painter until his death. It is a painting of pure love.‘Flawless in the pearly light’: Portrait of a Little Girl, c1638-42 by Velázquez. Hispanic Society of America, New York Spain and the Hispanic World is at the Royal Academy, London, until 10 April
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Art and Culture
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If you like your period dramas with spirited heroines who swig champagne, sweeping coastal shots of brooding Dukes, and lavish ball scenes where secrets abound, you'll love The Buccaneers.
Based on Edith Wharton’s final novel, the eight-episode AppleTV+ series is a 19th century romance drama following five young American ladies drawn to England after one of their high society weddings to an English lord. Arriving in London, the newcomers are faced with deep judgment while bringing their own — and one hell of a cover of LCD Soundsystem's "North American Scum" sets the title credit tone. But there's also a landscape of eligible suitors on the horizon, including a forlorn Duke standing on a clifftop looking for a wife. Whatever will he do?
If you're craving the next season of Bridgerton, The Buccaneers will satiate your thirst with diabolical narrative twists, simmering romantic leads, savvy performances, a killer modern soundtrack, and the lavish design of our society ball dreams.
What is The Buccaneers about?
Set in the upper echelons of society in 1870s New York and London, the series revolves around five young women on the cusp of "marriages, men, and parties" in deeply patriarchal 19th century society.
There's protagonist Nan St. George (Kristine Frøseth), the headstrong best friend of the vivacious Conchita Closson (Alisha Boe), who is getting married for love to English Lord Richard Marable (Josh Dylan) — much to his parents' chagrin back home. Conchita's bridesmaids are Nan's older sister Jinny St. George (Imogen Waterhouse), who holds the weight of family responsibility on her shoulders, as does the eldest of the Elmsworth family, Lizzy (Aubri Ibrag), who endures a traumatic experience at the hands of a powerful man. And her younger sister, Mabel Elmsworth (Josie Totah) has her own secrets in this heteronormative society.
Following Conchita's appointment as Lady Marable, the group are invited to England to meet the Lord's family: the deeply judgy Brightlingseas. Debuted into society at the Queen's Ball, the bridesmaids are introduced to a world of suitors, delightful and otherwise, including the heinous Lord James Seadown (Barney Fishwick). But while the ladies are getting settled in, it becomes apparent that Conchita's acceptance into English culture is more difficult and sinister than she'd imagined. Instead of helping his new wife, Richard laments, "Will she work in England, will she fit in?"
Meanwhile Nan, seen as the most "unruly" unwed young woman of the group, is sent to the seaside of Cornwall to avoid "distraction" from her sister, Jinny. Here, she meets the roguish Theo (Guy Remmers) who she believes is an artist but is actually the Duke of Tintagel, "the greatest match in England". But there's already another who has caught Nan's eye, his best friend, Guy Thwarte (Matthew Broome), whose closeness to Nan has meant she's revealed a personal secret that could ruin her.
Feeling more Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette than Joe Wright's Pride and Prejudice, The Buccaneers takes liberties to allow its broad spectrum of characters more modern behaviour in their dalliances — a subtle brush of the hand is not enough for this series.
The ladies of The Buccaneers are gloriously brash
"There are women and then there are wives." It's the core philosophy of most of the male characters and the older generations in The Buccaneers, but the series allows its core female characters room to scorn it — even Nan and Jinny's mother, played to perfection by Christina Hendricks, hopes her daughters "will always be tall" and true to themselves. The series reveres the silliness, intelligence, wit, creativity, beauty, and power of women and girls within a society that puts them on a pedestal then closes them into a purely domestic life. But the series importantly doesn't make them all staunchly open feminists. This is the 19th century, after all.
As the protagonist, Nan feels the most modern of the characters, openly rejecting what's expected of her in a barefooted assuredness that even Elizabeth Bennet would envy. Within minutes of meeting Nan, she's climbing down the facade of a building to rescue her best friend's earring, then blustering through a meet-cute with undeniable self-confidence. "Girls are taught to believe that if a story isn't a love story then it's a tragedy and I had no interest in being involved with either one of those," she says through voice over. But involved she becomes, with both Theo and Guy on the horizon, all while her own sense of identity is thrown into the air.
If "young ladies of refinement" are what this society requires, the American ladies rattle the more subdued, conservatism of their English counterparts — they stomp around and giggle, swig bubbly, and raise their voices above a whisper. "You are the most beautiful thing I have ever seen," Nan cackles to Conchita, currently drinking champagne on the toilet in her wedding dress. The script takes liberties with what would boot a young woman out of society — when Nan claps back at an English ball-goer for lambasting Americans as "outspoken and vulgar" she sparks the interest of the Duke instead of being kicked out. Conchita's unchaperoned girls weekend in Runnymede sees the ladies going for a waterfall dip with her husband and his friends, which is as far away from Jane Austen's distanced admiration as you can get. Much of the interactions between the characters happens unchaperoned with more physical contact than most 19th century novels — and it's wildly welcome.
The Buccaneers pits England vs America
At times, one could see the series as being distinctly anti-English, pro-American with modern sensibilities of self expression and feminism only allowed to the American characters. "Get used to an ocean of silence and swim about in it as well as you can," Conchita warns her sisters on their arrival in England. "I haven't drowned yet."
As her light threatens to be stamped out, Conchita becomes the embodiment of American defiance throughout the series, granted, something she's privileged to do as a married woman in an influential family, but she's also noticing a change in her husband since they left New York — he now expects the new Lady Marable to "be the wife" and "behave". Hosting a girls weekend in Runnymede, Conchita pontificates about cultural differences: "Since when were we ever shy of a party? Girls, have you not noticed? We're not them. We're Americans. When did we ever care what people think of us? I mean, the English are so fascinated by their history. Well, we have a history of being fascinating. It's time that they learn from us."
Richard's family is full of disdain for Conchita and her friends — "Before you know it there won't be a family left in England without American poison in its veins," scoffs Lord Brightlingsea. However, the series acknowledges that Conchita's particular treatment is steeped in racism, not just English prejudice against Americans, and her character deeply struggles with this.
Unfortunately, one of the main issues I have with The Buccaneers is the general positioning of English women in the series as happily accepting of their restrictions, of "volunteering" to be dutiful and upholding patriarchal requirements of etiquette and behaviour. Though Conchita is allowed open laments over her frustration, Richard's intentionally unwed sister Honoria Marable (Mia Threapleton) is not, though both women feel equally frustrated with their limitations, including Honoria's closeted sexuality. "You've seen English girls. They just nod and obey and do embroidery," says Conchita. "We're like a whole other species."
It's here the series also runs into problematic "not like other girls" territory, especially through the character of Nan, who quite literally says aloud, "I'm not one of those girls who gets in trouble and needs helping down from horses." Jinny and Conchita also come to a head over what's "proper" behaviour as a married woman, each throwing each other under the bus as "different". Don't get me wrong, I love The Buccaneers' representation of women and girls being exhausted and simply done with patriarchal bullshit, but it doesn't feel great seeing it at the expense of other women like Jinny, whose responsibilities to their family see them sacrifice the freedom of expression and independent spirit Nan enjoys.
The inescapable influence of Bridgerton
By no means the only period drama steaming up our screens in recent years but one of the most influential, Bridgerton's influence on contemporary 19th century romances cannot be understated — Shonda Rhimes' series has defined the streaming era's resurgence in pop music-fuelled balls, long courtships, and revisionist takes on the expectations of the time, particularly for women.
Following similar modern takes like Persuasion, The Pursuit of Love, The Great, Sanditon, and more, The Buccaneers takes more than a few cues from Bridgerton, from the series' conversations and representation of sex, but also its reliance on contemporary music, from Warpaint to Japanese Breakfast. In one particularly notable scene, Taylor Swift and Phoebe Bridgers' duet "Nothing New" whirls as the camera pans through young women in white ready to make their debut at the Queen's Ball. It's straight out of Bridgerton and it's glorious. Coppola's Marie Antoinette rings through the halls too, from the series set design filled with peacocks, pink-dyed poodles, gilded mirrors, and cornucopias of fresh flowers, to the frank conversations the series' female characters have about sex, marriage, and female pleasure.
Notably, the series goes where we'd love for Bridgerton to go, introducing closeted queer characters Horonia and Mabel and the lack of options for lesbians in 19th century society beyond covert relationships.
Able to run where its predecessors paved the way, The Buccaneers is a lavish period drama that feels fresh and modern, with a fast-paced, twisting narrative, grandiose set and costume design, and enough chemistry to keep you guessing between matches. It's a little Gossip Girl, a little Marie Antoinette, and a lot of Bridgerton, and it's gloriously impolite society.
How to watch: The Buccaneers is now streaming episodes 1 to 3 on Apple TV+, with a new episode every Wednesday.
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Art and Culture
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Christine Coulson, who spent 25 years working at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, has written a short, clever novel that tells the story of a woman over the course of her life in a series of museum wall labels. In doing so, she acknowledges a sad but undeniable truth — that for much of the 20th century and perhaps even today, a certain kind of wealthy, white socialite in America was nothing more than an object to be critiqued, described, evaluated and displayed.
The woman’s name is Caroline Margaret Brooks Whitaker, better known as Kitty, and she is indisputably the star of “One Woman Show.” We are meant to read her life story as if we were walking through an exhibition at a museum like the Met, gazing at a set of related decorative objects laid out in chronological order in a series of vitrines.
At the start of the show, it is 1911 and Kitty, a girl of 5, is declared to be “a masterpiece,” “all fireworks,” a “golden child,” depicted under the watchful gaze of her doting parents, Minty and Whit Whitaker. At age 10, she already has “porcelain manners” yet senses her “suffocating” future: “the fragile need to be forever cared for according to someone else’s tastes and appetites.”
For the rest of the novel, the object labels offer up a road map of her well-bred life: from the Chapin School on Manhattan’s Upper East Side to Miss Porter’s in Connecticut, where Kitty practices balancing books on her head to improve her posture. Then the “privileged bohemia” of Smith College where, like former first lady Barbara Bush, she drops out after freshman year to get married. In her case, to the heir to a Pittsburgh mining fortune, whom she met at an Egyptian-themed spring cotillion in 1925. She is excited about being the centerpiece of a “new dynastic collection.”
Occasionally, Coulson inserts a page of dialogue to flesh out the motivations of the characters. But it is remarkable how much information she can convey about Kitty’s life, including her infertility, multiple marriages and touch of kleptomania, solely using wall labels.
At the beginning of the novel Coulson slyly announces that the exhibition, “One Woman Show,” opening Oct. 17, 2023 (when the book was to go on sale), was “made possible by gin, taffeta and stock dividends.” The closing image is haunting: a wrapped and crated Kitty, warehoused for lack of interest. “A classical form … Once flawless, inevitable. Now broken, irrelevant. Chipped, cracked, and packed away.”
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AP book reviews: https://apnews.com/hub/book-reviews
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Art and Culture
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ATHENS, Greece -- Finishing her class at The Julliard School of the arts in New York, Greek opera great Maria Callas gave her students a final word of advice.
“Keep on going the proper way: Not with fireworks, not with easy applause, but with the expression of the words, the diction, and to really feel what you feel. That’s what I want. I’m not good at words, so that’s that.”
The March 1972 speech was a detail little known to her admiring public, along with letters, jewellery and countless honors that include a postage stamp series from Kyrgyzstan and Congo.
Now they are on display. The City of Athens inaugurated the Maria Callas Museum in the center of the Greek capital Wednesday, marking a century since the birth to Greek parents of the legendary soprano in New York.
The museum, next to the city’s cathedral and with a view of the Acropolis, opens to the public Thursday, with sections of the museum connected by a red carpet.
The top floors offer a recreated room of her Paris apartment, an imaginary forest and a sound studio, along with recordings of her famed live performances and clips of her lessons at The Julliard School.
Other display areas have exhibits of her costumes, hand-written letters and a sketch of a Callas-inspired Manolo Blahnik design.
“I think we are primarily addressing a person who is the ordinary visitor who might not know much about opera. They might know much about Maria Callas,” museum supervisor Erato Koutsoudaki told The Associated Press.
“So we invite them to start with the spaces where you can listen and watch her perform iconic arias from the great operas. So you can just live it. Then you can learn more about who this woman was and why she was important, on the lowers floors that are more like a conventional museum.”
Born Maria Kalogeropoulos, the singer made her professional debut in Athens as an 18-year-old student and died in Paris aged 53 after a career that some still consider to be unrivalled in opera.
Callas would have turned 100 on Dec. 2, and her life has been honored with a year of artistic events in Greece as well as the upcoming movie “Maria” starring Angelina Jolie.
Athens Mayor Kostas Bakoyannis at the museum's inauguration thanked the staff and private donors. Many started work on the project when it was conceived 24 years ago, bringing the collection together through auction purchases, donations from private collections and negotiations for display rights with recording companies.
“This is the first museum dedicated to Maria Callas that … combines technology with lived experience,” the mayor said. “We welcome this museum with great joy and deep respect for the great diva."
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Art and Culture
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“Hip-hop was this movement of people who weren’t considered valuable creating worth,” said Sacha Jenkins, chief creative officer of Mass Appeal magazine and co-curator of an expansive new exhibition.
Celebrating hip-hop’s 50th anniversary, Fotografiska New York is displaying over 200 photos spanning the culture’s five decades, curated by Jenkins and Sally Berman, former director of photography for Mass Appeal. In addition to the exhibition itself, running through 21 May, Fotografiska is also offering event programming, including a curators’ talk, panel discussions, film screenings and even a dance workshop.
The exhibition feels as vast as it does energetic, capturing the excitement behind countless iconic moments of hip-hop history, all the way from the 1981 Village Voice cover image of Frosty Freeze – a major moment in the emergence of breakdancing – to Nas and DJ Premier conferencing during the recording of the groundbreaking album Illmatic, to contemporary superstars like XXXTentacion.
Emerging from block parties in the Bronx in the early 1970s, hip-hop culture made its unique mark on the world by seeing the transformative potential in everyday objects. “Something like spraypaint went from being a tool to an actual instrument,” said Jenkins. “Same thing with turntables. Hip-hop made them into instruments. These kids did it themselves, and in the process of doing it themselves, they made these great innovations. Now a turntable is an instrument in the way you’d see a guitar.”
Fittingly, Jenkins and Berman take us deep into hip-hop’s history, showing it as first and foremost a people’s movement. Early images like Jean-Pierre Laffont’s 1972 shot of Savage Skulls gang members having family time together showed hip-hop as a phenomenon of people in search of fun and community. “Before there was a rap industry, there were just kids, just people,” said Jenkins. “When I came to Queens in 1977, there was all this stuff just happening, breakdancing, music in the park. That was just what we did. All this stuff was by kids, for kids before there was an industry. No one had aspirations to put out albums that would inspire people in Singapore. Originally the MC was the guy on the mic telling you that your car was double-parked and could be towed away.”
While the early photos most often have the feel of documentary-style street photography, capturing hip-hop culture in situ, around the 90s things are changing. Janette Beckman’s 1990 shot of A Tribe Called Quest seems perfectly poised at that tipping point – is it a slice-of-life street scene of a rising hip-hop group, or is it a thoughtfully constructed, record-company-funded exercise in identity-building? Later shots, like Shawn Mortensen’s 1993 image of Tupac in a straitjacket, Geoffroy de Boismenu’s celebrated 1994 snap of The Notorious BIG smoking a spliff, or Christian Witkin’s 1998 photo of Missy Elliott blissfully playing with her gum have clearly crossed a line. By the time we reach the 2000s, the photos are even more elaborately staged, the clothes and props far more expensive, and the identities all the larger and more sophisticated.
Rap music is by far the most widely known of the four elements of hip-hop culture, and unsurprisingly, MCs dominate the collection. The show features many of rap’s major players, from early greats up through modern-day stars like Megan Thee Stallion, Tyler, the Creator, and Post Malone. Notably, Jenkins and Berman have taken pains to find photos that show particular sides of well-known rap personalities. For instance, Jay-Z is represented via a 1998 Chris Buck photoshoot for Blaze magazine built around the question of what the rap mogul’s life would have been if he had never made it out of the Marcy Projects. An almost unrecognizable Mary J Blige is seen in Lisa Leone’s 1991 photo, the product of a chance encounter shortly after the artist had signed her first record deal. Photos such as these offer freshness and intrigue, even for those who may know rap music inside and out.
Another notable aspect of the show is an attempt to highlight the women who have made their mark in an extremely male-dominated, frequently objectifying art form. The women featured in the show tend to come off as powerful and in possession of their bodies and their identities, something that is often not the case when it comes to rap music. “We were very conscious to make sure that women were represented in the show, because hip-hop wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for women,” said Jenkins. “Unfortunately, if you were to look at just the rap industry, you’d think that women were just eye-candy in music videos, which isn’t the case. I wish there were more women in this show, but honestly it’s a reflection of the rap industry.”
Ultimately, there is something bracing about being able to take in 50 years of hip-hop’s emergence and transformation all at once, offering us an opportunity to step back, assess and take stock. What comes across are the through-lines of the culture, the things that still remain present and prominent even as the deluge of corporate money and the media-industrial complex absorb hip-hop and attempt to transform it according to their own prerogatives. One also notes how the transgressive fierceness of individuals like Dr Dre and Snoop Dogg posing – with guns either pointed at the camera or at themselves – transforms into a more complicated relationship with the forces that seek to contain and define them as rap music becomes ever more mainstream and commodified.
But even as the exhibition reflects on global systems and abstract ideas, it always remains grounded in the human – it’s clearly no accident that the show centers so much around portraiture, and what it can show us about individual identity and the cultural influences behind it. For Jenkins, the most important thing about his exhibition are the people and the community that underlie hip-hop culture. “Ultimately, I believe that when it comes to Black music in America there are no genres,” he said. “The genre of hip-hop is just a timestamp from 1973 till now of where Black music is being created, taken from the streets to a mass culture of people who aren’t Black. I want people to walk away understanding that hip-hop is a reflection of the people. Hip-hop is people.”
Hip-Hop: Conscious, Unconscious is running until 21 May at Fotografiska, New York
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Art and Culture
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AMSTERDAM -- Some art lovers make it a mission to visit and view as many works as possible by 17th-century Dutch master Johannes Vermeer.
Starting Friday, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam is making their lives a whole lot easier.
A blockbuster exhibition at the Netherlands' national museum of art and history brings together 28 of Vermeer's paintings from seven countries around the world. Not bad considering only 37 paintings are generally ascribed to the artist who lived from 1632-1675 in the city of Delft.
Never before have so many Vermeer works been put on show together in a single exhibition. Seven of the paintings haven't been in the Netherlands in more than two centuries.
Rijksmuseum General Director Taco Dibbits believes the exhibition provides a chance for visitors to immerse themselves in the exquisite interior scenes for which Vermeer is best known including “Girl with a Pearl Earring” and “The Milkmaid,” but also early religious paintings and two cityscapes, both depicting his home town, Delft.
Looking at the beguiling simplicity of “Mistress and Maid,” one of three paintings loaned for the show by New York’s The Frick Collection, Dibbits said it “radiates this tranquility, this ideal world.”
Vermeer's use of light — often coming from a window situated on the left of the canvas — the bold colors and meticulous composition can be seen throughout the exhibition.
“Vermeer has this quality of kind of everything is perfect. Everything falls in place," Dibbits said. "There’s perfect happiness in his scenes. There’s tranquility, there’s intimacy.”
Vermeer earned the nickname “The Sphinx of Delft” because so little was known about him — he left behind no letters or diaries and there are no known portraits of him. But recent research has begun to unravel the mysteries of the painter. Studies being carried out around the exhibition are further broadening knowledge about his work.
“We’re really coming closer to Vermeer than we’ve ever been,” said Pieter Roelofs, the Rijksmuseum’s Head of Paintings and Sculpture. Recent research means that “we really understand more about his life, about his household, about his direct contacts, the people for whom he made these paintings, and what they mean,”
In preparation for the exhibition, the museum has been taking an extremely close look at its own Vermeer paintings, which include iconic “The Milkmaid.” High-tech scans that peer through the surface of the work have revealed that Vermeer tweaked the background as he painted, apparently to ensure that the focus shone solely on the woman pouring milk. A jug holder – similar to a wall-mounted coat rack – that was originally in the background was painted over.
Tracy Chevalier loved another of Vermeer's best-known works — “Girl with a Pearl Earring” — so much so that she wrote a novel about it that was in turn made into a film starring Scarlett Johansson and Colin Firth.
Chevalier was at a preview of the exhibition on Monday taking in that painting and the other 27 on show in a suite of 10 galleries.
“I think the curators really understood that for him, less is more. And I feel that way too; that you don’t need lots and lots of stuff. So this exhibition only has 28 paintings, but 28 is perfect because you have the space and the time to really take in each one."
“Girl with a Pearl Earring” only had to make a short trip from the Mauritshuis museum in The Hague, and isn't sticking around until the end of the exhibition. She returns home after March 30.
Other masterpieces have had a longer journey for the exhibition that has been some eight years in the making.
"Officer and Laughing Girl," “Mistress and Maid” and “Girl Interrupted at her Music” flew from the U.S. East Coast, leaving the Frick Collection while the New York museum undergoes restoration. That paved the way for more museums to loan paintings to the exhibition. More works come from The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Leiden Collection in New York. The National Gallery of Art in Washington, which, together with the Mauritshuis, staged the last major Vermeer retrospective in 1995-96, also sent paintings.
In total, the 28 paintings come from 14 museums and private collections in seven countries.
With such a comprehensive retrospective, the paintings that aren't in Amsterdam almost become almost as noteworthy as those that are. A few of the 17th-century works are so frail that they simply can't travel. One painting — “The Concert” — didn't make it to Amsterdam because it is among 13 artworks still missing after being stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in 1990 in one of the world's most notorious art heists.
The show in Amsterdam opens Friday and runs to June 4. It has already become the Rijksmuseum's most in-demand exhibition — Dibbits said the museum has so far sold nearly 200,000 tickets and has extended opening hours to accommodate more people.
For art lovers who can't get to Amsterdam or snag a ticket, there is already a digital show available narrated by Stephen Fry.
Online viewers can zoom in on minute details of ultra-high resolution photographs of some Vermeer paintings to see what makes his work stand out.
“I think for Vermeer, light is color, and color is light ...," Roelofs said. "And I think one of the things we will see is how how he really knows how to focus — and that makes him really exceptional.”
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Art and Culture
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Vivid depictions of battling gladiators on a clay vase are the first concrete evidence that these combatants duked it out in Roman Britain, new research finds.
The vessel, known as the Colchester vase, is well known to researchers; it was discovered in a Roman-era grave in Britain in 1853 and holds a person's cremated remains. However, nothing was known about the deceased, and it was unclear whether the vase had been crafted locally or in continental Europe, where gladiator fights were known to entertain audiences in the Roman Empire.
A forthcoming study, however, has revealed that the vase was made with local clay as a souvenir of a specific match in the second century A.D., giving researchers unprecedented insight into sporting events in the outskirts of the empire.
The town of Colchester, where the vase was found, is located in southeast England, about 60 miles (100 kilometers) from London. In Roman times, it was known as Camulodunum (opens in new tab) and boasted three theaters, as well as the only chariot racetrack in Britain. By the second century A.D., Camulodunum was a large city with a thriving pottery industry.
Measuring 9 inches (23 centimeters) tall and weighing over 2.2 pounds (1 kilogram), the Colchester vase depicts three gladiator scenes with three types of combatants: human-human, human-animal, and animal-animal. In one scene, "bestiarii" (beast fighters), labeled Secundus and Mario, are fighting a bear, while in another, Memnon and Valentinus fight as "secutor" (chaser) and "retiarius" (net man), a fight that pitted a lightly armored man against one with a trident and a net, as a metaphor for the fisherman and his prey. Valentinus is described as being in the 30th legion, which was stationed in northwestern Germany, and Memnon is annotated with the Roman numerals VIIII, meaning he fought and survived nine times.
Because of the intricacy of the decoration, it was long thought that the vase could not have been made in Britain (opens in new tab). But a growing body of evidence for the pottery industry in Colchester allowed the research team to identify the vase as a locally made vessel dating to A.D. 160-200.
Close examination of the inscription, previously assumed to have been created after the pot was fired, "shows it was made when the clay was soft, after the decoration had been applied," John Pearce (opens in new tab), a member of the research team and a senior lecturer of archaeology at King's College London, said in an email to Live Science.
The vase was likely created as a type of commemorative cup that was then repurposed as a funerary urn.
The detailed replication of the gladiator scenes on the Colchester vase reflects "the choice of a key moment in the proceedings," Pearce said. "The inscription helps make this a special memento and probably echoes the kind of promotional hype that characterized the build-up to the fight, such as placards paraded with names of fighters."
Scientific analysis of the cremated bones have revealed that they are the remains of a robust man who was older than 40 when he died. His teeth showed that he did not come from Colchester but rather southwestern England, or possibly from beyond the British Isles. But he wasn't one of the gladiators mentioned on the vase. "We don't think there's a strong case for making the remains those of a performer," Pearce said.
Steven Tuck (opens in new tab), a professor of history and classics at Miami University in Ohio who was not involved in this study, told Live Science in an email that "the cremated individual could have been a fan of gladiators in general or of a particular gladiator."
The use of the gladiator vase as an urn, however, may suggest an even more personal connection. "I think it more likely he was associated with this event in some way," Tuck said. "Since we know some of the trainers were former gladiators themselves, he could have easily been a retired gladiator who was still involved in the spectacle."
With its gladiatorial themes and locally sourced clay, the Colchester vase is a remarkable example of Roman-style games taking place in a far-flung part of the empire. Given the lack of written descriptions of events like these in Britain, the Colchester vase provides conclusive evidence that gladiatorial contests occurred there and that people took home souvenirs of their adventures.
"Identifying evidence that gladiatorial combats likely took place right here in Colchester 2,000 years ago is incredibly exciting," Colchester Councillor Pam Cox (opens in new tab) said in a statement. "We are grateful to all the researchers who have helped uncover this and other secrets from the vase."
The Colchester vase will be featured in an exhibition on gladiators (opens in new tab) at Colchester Castle starting July 15.
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Art and Culture
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Subsets and Splits
Unique Topics Sorted
Provides a simple list of all unique topics in the training dataset, which helps identify the range of subjects covered but offers minimal analytical insight beyond basic categorization.
List Unique Topics
Simple retrieval of unique topics from the dataset, useful for basic exploration but lacks deeper insights.