Arts news

• Just How Big Were This Week’s Contemporary Art Auctions?

  16-05-2015 17:50 via artnews.com
  This has been an absolutely enormous week at the annual May postwar and contemporary art sales in New York, which began on Monday night with Christie’s setting a new all-time record for a work at auction, when it sold a … Read More
  
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• Is any painting really worth $179m?

  16-05-2015 16:59
  
  Pablo Picasso’s Les Femmes d’Alger (Version O) set a new world record last week for the most expensive painting sold at auction It must have been something to be in the room at the Rockerfeller Center last Monday evening. As bidding on Picasso’s Les Femmes d’Alger (Version O) reached $151m, Christie’s global president Jussi Pylkkänen – auctioneer for the night – said: “We’re in new territory.” As the final bids rose in $500,000 increments, he spread his arms wide, as if
  
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• New art show reveals chemistry between Picasso and Lee Miller

  16-05-2015 12:18
  
  The painter and his photographer muse feature together in a major exhibitionHe made her his muse and the subject of his erotic art, while being firm friends with her husband, the man who championed his work for decades in Britain. But could Lee Miller, an early supermodel who went on to be a famous female war photographer, have been more than just friends with Pablo Picasso? That is the question posed by her son and archivist, Tony Penrose, who has been working with the Scottish National Po
  
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• Frank Auerbach's London: the extraordinary life and loves – in pictures

  16-05-2015 10:00
  
  With their thick, heavy paint, Auerbach’s canvases reveal his unique vision of London’s streets – from the theatre of Camden Town caught in vibrant reds and greens, to the autumnal yellow light on Primrose Hill – and the friends who have sat for him over the yearsFrank Auerbach: ‘When you paint you have a fantastic time, you meet lots of girls’ Continue reading...
  
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• Frank Auerbach: 'When you paint you have a fantastic time, you meet lots of girls'

  16-05-2015 10:00
  
  The octogenarian artist on 60 years as a workaholic, Soho life with Bacon and Freud and how the art-price bubble will burstFrank Auerbach’s London: the extraordinary life and loves – in picturesWhen Frank Auerbach looks back over his nearly 70-year career as an artist he declares himself “lucky” that it was a process that moved slowly. “You’re at school and you like some reproductions in books: Van Gogh, Gauguin. Then you do a bit of painting and you think it’s fairly easy. When yo
  
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• William Hogarth, Georg Baselitz, Karen Kilimnik: this week’s new exhibitions

  16-05-2015 10:00
  
  From the Hogarth retrospective in Bristol to Karen Kilimnik’s sincere whimsy in London, Skye Sherwin and Robert Clark find out what’s happening in art around the countryWith their fevered – if coded – expression of his country’s buried traumas, the postwar German art great Georg Baselitz’s paintings have always been a touch operatic. Whether he’s depicting fragmented limbs, eagles, or the dark forests of 19th-century German romantic painters, his work always points to one thing: th
  
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• Frank Auerbach: 'Painting is the most marvellous activity humans have invented'

  16-05-2015 10:00
  
  The octogenarian artist on 60 years as a workaholic, Soho life with Bacon and Freud and how the art-price bubble will burstFrank Auerbach’s London: the extraordinary life and loves – in picturesWhen Frank Auerbach looks back over his nearly 70-year career as an artist he declares himself “lucky” that it was a process that moved slowly. “You’re at school and you like some reproductions in books: Van Gogh, Gauguin. Then you do a bit of painting and you think it’s fairly easy. When yo
  
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• As the English resist their national identity, here's a painter who reminds you there can be beauty in it

  16-05-2015 09:00
  
  It remains to be seen whether English nationalism will grow in response to the SNP’s surge – but Eric Ravilious’ benign, slightly mournful version is already booming inside one south London art galleryOn the way from West Dulwich station, we began to notice a certain kind of person taking the same direction through the spring greenery of this south-east London suburb. They were white and I suppose mainly middle-class men and women, some young, some old, several of them carrying linen
  
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• Manchester international festival 2015: your guide to every event

  16-05-2015 07:00
  
  From Björk and FKA Twigs to a Gerhard Richter/ Arvo Pärt double-header, here’s your guide to this year’s Mif, now celebrating its 10th anniversaryIt’s the 10th anniversary of the first Mif event this year. What’s been key across all our shows over the last decade is the focus on the artist: we go on a journey with them, nurturing long-term relationships and supporting them in their best, most ambitious work. It’s an organic, evolutionary process that has been a complete joy to be par
  
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• Connecting the odd couple: Gerhard Richter and Arvo Pärt

  16-05-2015 07:00
  
  For this year’s Manchester international festival, the great German painter and the earnestly spiritual Estonian composer have worked together for the first time. It might seem a strange pairing, but their careers are full of connections
  • The Guardian is the festival’s media partner Both Gerhard Richter and Arvo Pärt grew up in communist regimes. Richter’s home city of Dresden became the industrial centre of East Germany and he had worked as a social-realist mural painter before he
  
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• A whole new wonder.land: Lysander Ashton on seeing Alice anew

  16-05-2015 07:00
  
  The creative director of 59 Productions, video designers for Manchester international festival’s Carroll-based musical Wonder.land, explains the influences and ideas behind their new vision• The Guardian is the festival’s media partnerWhat form will the wonder.land visuals take?
  It’s a really interesting thing to be working on, because everybody has done a Wonderland. We did a lot of research looking at all the different visual approaches and it’s just extraordinary. Some of my favouri
  
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• Book ahead, Australia: tickets for Ryan Adams, Bello festival, Colour Sensation

  16-05-2015 06:44
  
  In our weekly tout of the hottest shows just announced, book now to see a abstract art exhibition, an environmental music festival and a play about fameWhen is a festival more than just another music festival? When it’s Bello winter festival, which includes a mini-environmental festival. Along with enjoying stellar acts like the Milk Carton Kids, Ash Grunwald, Ainslie Wills and Tinpan Orange, festival goers can learn about permaculture, propagation, Indigenous food gathering and other environm
  
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• William Eggleston's evocative portraits of America to be shown at Photo London

  16-05-2015 01:00
  
  In capturing the beauty of everyday American life in the mid-20th century, William Eggleston pioneered colour photography at a time when to be thought serious in the medium meant working in black and white.
  
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