Arts news

• Rodin's mistress Camille Claudel steps out of sculptor’s shadow with a museum of her own

  26-03-2017 23:00
  
  More than 70 years after her death, the sculptor Camille ClaudelAuguste Rodins muse and mistresshas a museum of her own. The Muse Camille Claudel opened in her former family home in Nogent-sur-Seine, around 70 miles southeast of Paris, on 26 March.
  Better known for her passionate, tragic relationship with Rodin and her 30-year confinement in a psychiatric hospital near Avignon, Claudel was largely forgotten as an artist until the late 1970s. The new museum holds most of the sculptures that
  
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• Pushkin monument, a meeting point for Moscow protests, shut down for ‘restoration’

  26-03-2017 23:00
  
  Russian authorities have hit on a novel solution for preventing anti-corruption protests. Or just maybe, an iconic monument to Alexander Pushkin, Russias most important 19th century poet, really was in dire need of a touchup. Either way, the monument in Pushkin Square, created by the sculptor Alexander Opekushin and unveiled in 1880, was barricaded off on 27 March and shut down until September. That was just one day after it served as the focal point of the largest of dozens of anti-corruption
  
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• New consortium seeks to promote Indian art in New York and beyond

  26-03-2017 23:00
  
  In my undergraduate art history education, I cant remember a single Indian artist mentioned, says Rachel Weingeist, a specialist in South Asian art. The New York-based India Center Foundation, which recently appointed Weingeist as its senior curator, wants to change that.
  Earlier this month, the organisation launched a consortium to help bring Modern and contemporary Indian art to new audiences in New York and across the US. Early members include Sothebys, the New York-based Aicon Gallery, the
  
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• Guggenheim Abu Dhabi should be postponed or downsized, says the man who launched the project

  26-03-2017 23:00
  
  The plan to build a Guggenheim in Abu Dhabi should be postponed or downsized believes Thomas Krens, the former director of the Guggenheim Foundation in New York, who brokered the 2006 deal to establish a Guggenheim designed by architect Frank Gehry in the United Arab Emirates. 
    
  Speaking on the podcast In Other Words, produced by the art advisory firm Art Agency Partners, Krens said the project to establish a major cultural complex on Saadiyat Island with five new museums was c
  
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• Christie’s cancels June contemporary art auctions

  26-03-2017 23:00
  
  Christies is cancelling its June postwar and contemporary art auctions, the auction house confirmed on Friday. In a statement, it says this year is particularly busy for collectors, with Venice, later New York sales in May, Documenta 14 and Art Basel all putting a squeeze on the art world summer calendarand consignments.The move comes amid a string of belt-tightening measures announced under the leadership of Guillaume Cerutti, who was appointed chief executive in December. These include closin
  
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• BMW Art Journey shortlist announced

  26-03-2017 23:00
  
  The artists Lin Ke, Julian Charrire and Astha Butail have been shortlisted for this years BMW Art Journey, which enables artists almost anywhere in the world to develop new ideas and envision new creative projects, according to a project statement. Judges include Alexandra Munroe, senior curator of Asian art at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, and Claire Hsu, the director of the Asia Art Archive. The winner of the Art Basel-backed initiative is due to be announced this summer. Past
  
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• Letters: Gustav Metzger obituary

  26-03-2017 17:21
  
  Russell Clarke writes: In December 1962 Gustav Metzger gave a lecture at Ealing Technical College & School of Art, now part of the University of West London, entitled Auto Destructive Art, Auto Creative Art: The Struggle for the Machine Arts of the Future. It clearly inspired all who saw it, including Pete Townshend, then a graphic arts student at the college.Shortly afterwards in a nearby pub, he watched as the double bass player Malcolm Cecil sawed his instrument in half while still attemp
  
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• Kangaroo pictures found at RCS may be Australia's earliest oil paintings

  26-03-2017 17:05
  
  John Lewin canvases from about 1800 pre-date his still-life of fish hanging in Adelaide galleryA pair of Australian oil paintings believed to be the first in the country have been discovered at the Royal College of Surgeons in London.The two canvases, showing groups of amiable kangaroos sitting in a leafy landscape, were unearthed by an academic in the collection of the Hunterian Museum at the RCS. Continue reading...
  
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• David Rockefeller obituary

  26-03-2017 14:51
  
  Chairman of Chase Manhattan bank and one of the US’s leading philanthropistsDavid Rockefeller, who has died aged 101, was the patriarch of the Rockefeller family and the last of the grandchildren of John D Rocke- feller, who founded Standard Oil and as the US’s first billionaire was at one point considered the world’s richest man.Unlike his brothers Nelson, vice-president of the US and governor of New York, or Winthrop, governor of Arkansas, David never sought public office; in
  
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• Solange, tattoos & Judy Chicago's latest work at SFMoMA bash

  26-03-2017 12:13
  
  The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is marking the first anniversary of its heralded refurbishment in style, with a performance by the pop songstress Solange Knowles and the inauguration of new works by Judy Chicago and Clare Rojas. The Birthday Bash benefit, scheduled to take place 26 April, will unfold in two concurrent parties, says a statement: the Birthday Supper, a seated dinner in the museums fifth-floor Jean and James Douglas Family Sculpture Garden and the Surprise Bash, an inte
  
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• Howard Hodgkin: Absent Friends review – hello, not goodbye

  26-03-2017 09:00
  
  National Portrait Gallery, London
  This show of portraits – or are they? – by the late painter is as noisy as it is contemplative. And, always, a dancing blaze of colourThe National Portrait Gallery’s new Howard Hodgkin show borrows its title from Absent Friends, a picture (2000-1) in which broad strokes of black and brown gradually shade into stripes of muddy, fleshy white and then, finally, into a band of the artist’s favourite turquoise. To my eyes, this painting is not
  
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• Rachel Whiteread: thinking inside the box

  26-03-2017 08:01
  
  Once a key part of a generation of artists who transformed east London, the sculptor talks to Eva Wiseman about doll’s houses, her fellow YBAs, and why she left ShoreditchIt wasn’t just that Rachel Whiteread was moving house, it was that she was leaving Shoreditch, east London, the last artist standing, responsible for turning off the lights. “Shoreditch, my great love,” she sighs, wistful. She left a year ago, relocating with her husband and two sons to north London, a j
  
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• Studio Swine's designs on the world

  26-03-2017 07:00
  
  Husband-and-wife team Studio Swine’s work is a real flight of fancy – and it’s taking the design world by storm, says Becky SunshineEarly next month design duo Studio Swine heads to the Milan Furniture Fair. They are not there to present a new sofa or lighting range like many of their contemporaries, but instead to unveil a 6m high blossoming tree sculpture crafted from recycled scaffolding metal. Every five seconds the tree will dispense vibrating vapour bubbles from its 30 br
  
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