Arts news

Hitler’s favourite artists: why do Nazi statues still stand in Germany?

07-09-2021 16:46

A shocking new exhibition reveals the thriving postwar careers of artists the Führer endorsed as ‘divinely gifted’. Many made public works that remain on show todayA photograph from 1940 shows three conquering Nazis in Paris against the backdrop of the Eiffel Tower. Within a few years one of these men, Adolf Hitler, was dead by his own hand; another, Albert Speer, was writing his memoirs in Spandau prison, having eluded a death sentence at the Nuremberg trials. But the third, Ar

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Muse and model or painter-poet? Elizabeth Siddal given fresh portrait

07-09-2021 10:32

RashDash’s new theatre production honours the pre-Raphaelite by focusing on her own art and poetry – and shifting from tragedy into comedyWan, pale, tragic. Elizabeth “Lizzie” Siddal is remembered for how she was portrayed by the 19th-century men who saw her as their muse: artists Walter Deverell, her husband Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and most famously John Everett Millais, who pictured her as his ethereal, drowned Ophelia. But Siddal was an artist in her own right, and her

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‘All of life is here. And it’s too much!’ – Mixing It Up: Painting Today review

07-09-2021 07:00

Hayward Gallery, LondonGhosts, fetish-wear, smokers, swimmers, monks, aubergines, birds, lots of cats … and Saddam Hussein. Our writer is overwhelmed by this attempt to survey contemporary paintingPaintings have people in them. There is always someone, somewhere, even in the most terse abstraction; the painter for a start, the viewers who look, and all the painters and commentators and viewers who came before. If we didn’t already know what paintings were, we wouldn’t know how

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‘Find freedom in the music’: City of Melbourne to release 40 albums as part of arts revival program

07-09-2021 02:05

Lockdowns have paused live performance, but that hasn’t stopped the city council’s Flash Forward program from rolling out new musicReleasing an album can take years, but, by December, the City of Melbourne-run Heavy Machinery Records imprint will have commissioned and released dozens of them in little more than a year as part of Flash Forward – a vast series of commissions linking 40 music acts with 40 contemporary visual artists, who will bring their work to 40 Melbourne lanew

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