Arts news

• What academics can teach us about Isil

  08-05-2016 23:00
  Those who are really in-the-know about places where art history and the thinking of the past are studied venerate the Warburg Institute. It may be a dreary 1950s University of London building but it houses a unique library that is extraordinary in its rich esotericism, including subjects that modern thought had consigned to the bin of intellectual dead ends or superstition, such as astrology, alchemy, secret codes, fortune-telling and magic. 
  To understand the past, you must know what furn
  
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• Object lessons: the best of this week's New York auctions

  08-05-2016 23:00
  
  Francis Bacon, Two Studies for a Self-Portrait (1970)Contemporary art evening auction, Sotheby’s, 11 May
  Estimate $22m-$30m“People have been dying around me like flies and I’ve had nobody else to paint but myself,” Francis Bacon told the art critic David Sylvester in 1975. Despite Bacon’s increasing tendency towards self-portraiture at the time, Two Studies for a Self-Portrait (1970) is rare: the artist made only two other diptych self-portraits, one of which sold
  
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• (Not) Bound to Fail: solid results for Christie's 'curated' auction in New York

  08-05-2016 23:00
  
  Christie’s kicked off the spring auction season in New York last evening (8 May) with Bound to Fail, a curated sale that set seven new artist records, including a new high for Maurizio Cattelan whose statue of Adolf Hitler, Him, sold for $17.2m with premium. Despite the sale’s title, only one of the 39 lots on offer failed to sell. The work by Cattelan was the highest-selling lot of the evening as well as the last one. Bidding was healthy over the five minutes it took to attain
  
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• La Bella Principessa: still an enigma

  08-05-2016 23:00
  Seeing some of my works from back in the early 1980s and late 1970s, a time when I think I did my best stuff, even though I was still quite young, is always a pleasure. They always look better than I remembered them.” With this apparently innocent passage from his memoir, A Forger’s Tale, Shaun Greenhalgh opened a new chapter in the drama of La Bella Principessa, a controversial drawing that has prompted headlines worldwide since being recognised by a handful of experts as a work by
  
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• How Prince Charles did his royal best to bring Henry VIII portrait to London

  08-05-2016 23:00
  
  The National Gallery was thwarted in an attempt to borrow Holbein’s Portrait of Henry VIII from Heini Thyssen despite Prince Charles’s best efforts, newly released gallery records reveal. The heir to the throne, who became a National Gallery trustee in the late 1980s, even flew one of the Queen’s aircraft to Lugano for talks with the collector, whose father, Heinrich, had bought the painting, Holbein’s only surviving portrait of the king, in the 1930s from the Spencer fa
  
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• Gently does it at Phillips evening sale

  08-05-2016 23:00
  
  It was a mixed bag for Phillips’ contemporary evening sale last night (8 May). On the face of it, the results were solid—the auction hammer total of $39.3m fell just shy of the lower estimate of $40.1m (with premium that total rises to $46.6m), and the sale achieved a 92% sell-through rate. Of the 37 lots on the block, only three failed to sell. But more than half of them, 20 to be precise, were guaranteed either by the house or by a third party.
   
  Apart from a few lots, there
  
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• Greece looks to international justice to regain Parthenon marbles from UK

  08-05-2016 20:41
  
  As 200th anniversary of artefacts’ removal approaches, Greek culture minister says government will appeal to courts and the likes of UN Greece has not abandoned the idea of resorting to international justice to repatriate the Parthenon marbles and is investigating new ways in which it might bring a claim against the British Museum.As campaigners prepare to mark the 200th anniversary of the antiquities’ “captivity” in London, Athens is working at forging alliances that wou
  
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• Tate to face information tribunal over payments from BP

  08-05-2016 17:53
  
  Action brought by arts group Platform despite oil company severing ties with Tate earlier this yearTate will come under fire again over its relationship with fossil fuel companies when it is forced to defend its refusal to disclose details of financial payments made to it by BP. Related: BP to continue arts sponsorship deals despite cutting ties with TateContinue reading...
  
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• Earliest view of Niagara falls saved from export after public appeal

  08-05-2016 15:44
  
  National Army Museum acquires 1762 painting by English army officer with Art Fund and Heritage Lottery Fund grants and public donationsThe earliest known eyewitness view of Niagara falls, an awed record of the rainbow crowned horseshoe of cascading water recorded in 1762 by an English army officer and amateur artist, has been acquired by the National Army Museum after a public appeal to save it from export.It was painted by Capt Thomas Davies, a Royal Artillery officer who served four tours of d
  
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• Earliest view of Niagara falls kept in UK after public appeal

  08-05-2016 15:44
  
  National Army Museum acquires 1762 painting by English army officer with Art Fund and Heritage Lottery Fund grants and public donationsThe earliest known eyewitness view of Niagara falls, an awed record of the rainbow crowned horseshoe of cascading water recorded in 1762 by an English army officer and amateur artist, has been acquired by the National Army Museum after a public appeal to save it from export.It was painted by Capt Thomas Davies, a Royal Artillery officer who served four tours of d
  
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• Wolfgang Tillmans: ‘I see myself as a product of European cultural exchange’

  08-05-2016 10:00
  
  Fired up by the EU referendum debate, the Turner-winning German artist has designed a set of posters backing the Remain campaignYou have designed 25 posters against Brexit. What prompted you, as an artist, to make this high-profile, pro-European statement?
  Several things. First, it is a much more complex issue than all the shouting you hear in the media by those wishing to leave. It’s not about Boris versus Cameron. It has huge consequences for Britain and for Europe, but the debate is bei
  
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• Mona Hatoum review – more lightbulbs than enlightenment

  08-05-2016 09:00
  
  Tate Modern, London
  Bright ideas abound but deeper meaning proves elusive at Tate Modern’s Mona Hatoum retrospectiveMona Hatoum’s most famous work lies in wait around the first corner of this show, a spectacle of fleshy revulsion and creeping claustrophobia. It is experienced in a cubicle the size of a miniature space capsule. Here you stand in the darkness, sardine-tight with your fellow viewers, staring down at the film beneath your feet, which shows a headlong tumble down a moist
  
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