Arts news

• Pavement plaques for fictitious everyday heroes | Brief letters

  12-01-2026 18:21
  Rupert Clamp’s work in Newcastle | Nato’s article 5 | Trumpian culture | Robot dreams | A cheer for KeirIn Newcastle city centre there are four witty and thought-provoking pavement plaques (Letters, 5 January), designed by the local artist Rupert Clamp, which honour fictitious everyday heroes. My favourite says: “Mrs Mary Howard adjusted her hat in the reflection in this window, 3rd June 1921”. No less brilliant is the plaque that recalls a disappointing day: “Anne
  
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• ‘Her time has come’: did Mondrian owe his success to a cross-dressing lesbian artist who lived in a Cornish cove?

  12-01-2026 17:14
  Piet Mondrian found fame, fortune and glory with his grid-like paintings lit with basic colours. But did many of his ideas come from Marlow Moss? Our writer celebrates an extraordinary British talent who died in obscurityIn 1972, the mighty Kunstmuseum in the Hague bought three paintings by a little known British artist called Marlow Moss. The prestigious art gallery was keen to show the enormous influence of Piet Mondrian – the famous Dutch painter acclaimed for his black grids lit with b
  
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• ‘I’m the product of a smashed-up family’: how Sean Scully became the greatest abstract painter alive

  12-01-2026 06:00
  He has survived loss, breakdown and schooling by ‘scary nuns’, but the anguish is still there in his art. As his new show thrills Paris, the US-based, Irish-born artist talks about the pain that drives himWhen I ask Sean Scully what an abstract painting has over a figurative one it’s music he reaches for. “You might ask, what’s Miles Davis got over the Beatles? And the answer is: doesn’t have any words in it. And then you could say, what have the Beatles got o
  
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• Hawaii: A Kingdom Crossing Oceans review – a feather-filled thriller full of gods, gourds and ghosts

  12-01-2026 01:01
  British Museum, London
  This retelling of Captain Cook’s death and the merging of two cultures is a trove of miraculously preserved wonders – but beware of the shark-toothed club!
  Relations between Britain and the Pacific kingdom of Hawaii didn’t get off to a great start. On 14 February 1779 the global explorer James Cook was clubbed and stabbed to death at Hawaii’s Kealakekua Bay in a dispute over a boat: it was a tragedy of cultural misunderstanding that still has anthro
  
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