Arts news

• ‘You can’t escape danger’: the artist making ‘risky’ playgrounds – and splitting opinions

  13-11-2022 15:00
  New Zealand engineer Mike Hewson has raised eyebrows with his ‘risky play park’ in Melbourne. But the kids are voting with their feetGet our weekend culture and lifestyle emailOn Monday, an inner-city playground opened as part of a $44m council upgrade to create open space in Melbourne’s most densely populated suburb, Southbank. The monkey bars, slides, swings and ropes signalled fun; children swarmed.But this playground was not like others. The climbing equipment was draped on
  
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• Making Modernism review – four female trailblazers up close and personal

  13-11-2022 14:00
  Royal Academy, London
  Intimate and exquisite revelations from Paula Modersohn-Becker, Käthe Kollwitz, Gabriele Münter and Marianne Werefkin are constrained by gallery spaceHead in hand, Käthe Kollwitz leans towards you out of the darkness. Her face is so superbly drawn you sense the nerve and bone beneath the life-worn surface. There are the deep-set eyes and snub nose familiar from more than 100 self-portraits, but this one presses so close to the viewer it is as if Kollwitz has
  
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• Artemisia Gentileschi nude painting to be restored and digitally unveiled

  13-11-2022 11:46
  Six-month project under way to restore Italian artist’s 1616 work Allegory of InclinationArt restorers in the Italian city of Florence have begun a six-month project to clean and virtually “unveil” a long-censored nude painting by Artemisia Gentileschi, one of the most prominent women in the history of Italian art.Swirling veils and drapery were added to Allegory of Inclination about 70 years after Gentileschi painted the lifesize female nude, believed to be a self-portrait, in
  
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• John Constable’s favourite Hampstead pond to be restored after two centuries

  13-11-2022 11:00
  Branch Hill pond dried up in the 1880s. Now it will teem with wildlife again, as it did in the artist’s heydayIt was a view that John Constable sketched and painted dozens of times. From the top of Hampstead Heath, London’s highest point at 134 metres (440ft), the artist would look west and north towards today’s suburbs of Willesden, Edgware and Harrow. About 100 metres away, down below, was a beautiful natural pond.But in the 1880s, Branch Hill pond dried up. Now, nearly two c
  
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• Brussels tries to cool locals’ anger over ‘racist’ street murals – with QR codes

  13-11-2022 11:00
  City authorities hope to soothe those who are ‘deeply shocked’ by the comic-strip trail of Belgium’s rich historyIn the centre of Brussels, close to the monumental Palais de Justice, is a brightly coloured cartoon painted down a strip of a scruffy four-storey building. Playing on the stories of crime and judgment unfolding in the nearby courtrooms, the mural shows heaven and hell. In the blue skies, a caricatured police officer flies over a topless woman sunbathing, while a whi
  
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• The big picture: William Eggleston at Mississippi Fred McDowell’s funeral

  13-11-2022 08:00
  After befriending the bluesman​ years earlier, the renowned photographer​ caught this enquiring glance ​when he attended his burialWilliam Eggleston, the old master of American colour photography, took this picture at the funeral of the Mississippi bluesman Fred McDowell in 1972. Earlier, he had made a photograph of McDowell in his coffin, his head surrounded by white satin. The pair of them had become friends after Eggleston knocked on McDowell’s door one day and asked i
  
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