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May 10 2012
Richard Hamilton's last painting to be centrepiece of posthumous exhibition
The artist, one of Britain's best-loved of the 20th century, worked on the National Gallery show until the eve of his death last year
The last unfinished picture by Richard Hamilton, one of the most admired and best-loved British artists of the 20th century, will be the centrepiece of a National Gallery exhibition on which he was working until the eve of his death last September.
Hamilton died just short of his 90th birthday, and in his last months he knew he would not get it finished and that the exhibition would prove a valedictory from beyond the grave. On his last working day he was completing the layout for the gallery's Sunley room, a labyrinth through earlier works leading to the last picture – which poignantly deals with the failure of art.
"This was the picture literally on his easel, or rather in his computer, on the day he died," curator Christopher Riopelle said. "The whole concept of the exhibition changed very much, shaped by his knowledge that it would be his last."
Hamilton, credited with launching the British pop art movement with his 1956 collage Just What Is It That Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing?, was a passionate supporter of free admission to national collections. The exhibition, which could well have been a moneyspinning blockbuster like the Lucian Freud retrospective around the corner in the National Portrait Gallery, will be free.
In order to ensure that his chosen works would be available for the National Gallery, he deferred a major international touring show which will be seen at four cities in Europe and the United States, including the Tate in London, from next year.
It will include many works linked to his lifelong interest in the art of Marcel Duchamp, and to pictures in the National Gallery collection including his startling version of Fra Angelico's 15th-century Annunciation, with two naked women taking the places of the demure angel and Virgin.
The exhibition will culminate in three large working versions of his last work, inspired by a 19th-century short story by Honore de Balzac, The Unknown Masterpiece, in which an artist invites his peers to view a painting in which he claims to have created a nude indistinguishable from real life: they see only meaningless swirls and daubs of colour. In Hamilton's multi-layered version, the artists are based on self-portraits by Poussin, Courbet and Titian, standing by a reclining naked woman based on a 19th-century photograph, in turn referencing classical nudes including Titian's sexy Venus of Urbino.
The work will be titled The Balzac. Hamilton's widow, Rita, thought he would not like it called The Masterpiece, in case people thought he was claiming that honour for himself.
"The origin of the exhibition was one day when Nick [Nicholas Penny, director of the National Gallery] said: 'Come on, we're going to lunch at Richard's," Riopelle recalled. "The food was excellent, as always at Richard's, as was the wine, as always at Richard's. We probably had far too much for lunchtime – but at the end of it the germ of the exhibition was there. We lost two giants within a few months of one another last year in Hamilton and Freud. I'm not sure we're realised the scale of the loss yet."
Richard Hamilton: the Late Works is at the National Gallery, London WC2N, from 10 October to 13 January
Futuro – the ideal home that wasn't
As the newly restored first edition goes on show, Justin McGuirk explores an emblem of 1960s architectural utopianism. Just don't call it a spaceship
Before the recession and the return of architectural probity, the phrase "like an alien spaceship" was all over architecture journalism like a cheap suit. Faced with anything that didn't look like a brick box, critics and headline writers would ransack their imaginations before inevitably reaching for the extra-terrestrial. Frank Gehry? Future Systems? Zaha Hadid? Yep, spaceship-mongers. Well there's only one building where that simile is inescapable, and that's the Futuro house, designed by Finnish architect Matti Suuronen in 1968.
Commissioned to design a ski lodge for a slope in Finland, Suuronen produced what he and many others believed was the prefabricated home of the future. An 8m-diametre "rotating ellipsoid" – geometry jargon for "like a 1950s Hollywood flying saucer" – the Futuro remains an emblematic image of the 1960s, despite having been a total sideshow as far as architectural historiography is concerned. Though they went into production in both Finland and America, only around 60 were ever produced (no one knows exact numbers). What is certain, however, is that the very first edition, cabin number 001, went on show last week at the Weegee Exhibition Centre in Espoo, 20 minutes from Helsinki. And as I was in Helsinki for the buildup to its festivities as World Design Capital 2012, I paid it a visit.
There it was, painstakingly restored and eye-achingly yellow, resting on its metal frame (the pod house was often helicoptered on to its legs), its hatch door with integrated staircase lowered invitingly. Entering a space that you know well as an image is usually either a shock or an anticlimax. In this case, it was the overpowering odour that struck me. It turned out to be the glue a restorer was using to put the finishing touches to the floor in preparation for the opening that evening. But it heightened the sense of being in a totally artificial environment. Circular rooms are strange in themselves, accustomed as we are to corners, but this plastic womb was more unheimlich than homely. With its built-in chaises longues arranged around a central hearth, it's more like a swinger's fantasy anyway – Playboy magazine featured it as the ultimate bachelor pad and it was used as the setting of a 1970s sci-fi porn film called The Goddesses of Galaxia.
What remains intriguing about Futuro, however, is that it's the closest housing ever came to product design. In the 1960s, the mechanisation of the domestic interior, particularly the kitchen, was in full force, as we accumulated labour-saving gadgets like washing machines and blenders. Suuronen's plastic capsule had the moulded integrity of a mass-produced consumer product, it was the house-as-gadget, a device for the nomadic lifestyle. What it relates to best is the pop space age furniture of the period – the Bubble chair designed by fellow Finn Eero Arnio or Joe Colombo's Boby trolleys – except this was furniture blown up to an architectural scale. Futuro belongs in a tradition of 1960s utopian radicalism. It picks up where Buckminster Fuller's earlier Dymaxion and Wichita houses (also designed for mass-production) left off, and it floats somehow in the same soup as Archigram's comic-book hi-tech or the Metabolists' capsule buildings. But it had none of the urban vision. For this reason, Futuro sits outside the architectural canon, a kitschy one-hit wonder. It was also a commercial failure.
When it came to London as part of the Finnexpo fair in 1968, the Daily Mail wrote (anticipating critics of the future): "This object, looking like everyone else's idea of a flying saucer from outer Space, is the Finnish idea of the perfect weekend cottage." Except that it wasn't. When the original owner of cabin 001, Matti Kuusla, installed it on the wooded shore of Lake Puulavesi, it caused a local outcry. Suuronen's capsule was far from their idea of the perfect country cottage, because the whole point of country cottages was nostalgic ruralism – the back-to-nature birch-whipping in the sauna that was their escape from the city and its encroaching plastic futurism. An American company, Futuro Corporation, had high hopes for it, but it was a flop there too, never rising above the level of the urban freak show – among other things it was used as a bank in the car park of the Woodbridge mall in New Jersey. The oil crisis of 1973, which tripled the price of plastic, was the final nail in the coffin. And there went another piece of 1960s utopianism. Well, if it calls itself the future, it's probably not.
Warhol Double Elvis sells for $37m at Sotheby's auction
Roy Lichtenstein's Sleeping Girl and Ai Weiwei's Sunflowers attract record prices at Sotheby's contemporary art sale in New York
Andy Warhol's Double Elvis sold for $37m (£23m) and works by Roy Lichtenstein and the Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei broke their own records at Sotheby's contemporary art sale on Wednesday.
Lichtenstein's Sleeping Girl, depicting a woman with closed eyes and flowing blond hair, fetched $44.9m; Weiwei's one-tonne, handmade porcelain Sunflower Seeds brought $782,500.
Warhol's Double Elvis (Ferus Type), a silver silkscreen image of Elvis Presley depicted as a cowboy, fetched $37,042,500. It had been expected to sell for $30m-$50m. The auction house said it was the first Double Elvis to appear on the market since 1995. Warhol produced a series of 22 images of Elvis. Nine are in museum collections.
Elvis is shown armed and shooting from the hip, with a shadowy and faintly visible double in the background. It was offered for sale by a private American collector, who acquired it in 1977.
The record for a Warhol is $71.7m for his Green Car Crash Green Burning Car I, sold at Christie's in 2007.
Another major work on the auction block Francis Bacon's Figure Writing Reflected in Mirror sold for $44,882,500. The buyers' names for each of the four pieces were not released.
The sale came on the heels of art auction history. Last week the auction house sold a version of Edvard Munch's The Scream for $119.9m, making it the most expensive artwork ever sold at auction.
"The reason for these record-breaking sales is, quite simply, the quality of material on show," said Michael Frahm, a contemporary art adviser at the London-based Frahm Ltd. "The key is quality."
Lichtenstein's Sleeping Girl was one of a series of sexy comic book-inspired images created by the artist in the 1960s, The work was exhibited only once at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 1989-90. It was sold by the estate of Los Angeles collectors and philanthropists Beatrice and Phillip Gersh, who were the founding members of MOCA.
Lichtenstein's I Can See the Whole Room! ... And There's Nobody In It! held the previous auction record for the artist. It sold for $43.2m at Christie's in November 2011.
Weiwei's Sunflower Seeds was one of an edition of 10 and was accompanied by a certificate signed by the artist. The ceramic seeds, which can be arranged in myriad shapes, were the subject of a Tate Modern exhibit in 2010. The previous Weiwei auction record was $657,000 for his Chandelier, set at Sotheby's in 2007.
Bacon's Figure Writing, which depicts the artist and his partner, George Dyer, writing at a table, was included in a 1977 Paris exhibition alongside Triptych, a 1976 work by the artist that sold for $86.2m at Sotheby's in 2008. It held the record for any contemporary artwork at auction until Tuesday night when Mark Rothko's Orange, Red, Yellow claimed that title when it sold at Christie's for $86.8m.
The Elvis silkscreen was exhibited at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles in 1963, the year it was created. The auction catalogue described the work, based on a movie publicity photo, as "the deification of a contemporary warrior-saint, the towering, pre-eminent idol bearing a deadly weapon as if protecting the mythical world of celebrity itself".
May 09 2012
Photographer Richard Mosse's best shot
'This is a pool at one of Saddam's old palaces. I had 14 minutes, then they barked at me to pack up'
I wanted to document the US troops stationed inside some of Saddam Hussein's old family palaces. There are 84 dotted around Iraq, but it was 2009, and the clock was ticking as soldiers were being withdrawn. You need media accreditation to get embedded with the US military and, although editors liked my idea, no one was willing to take responsibility for my safety. Eventually, the Yale Daily News agreed. It became a running joke among journalists in Iraq that I had a press card from my old college paper.
I spent a month riding within the US war machine, going from base to base. At one point we stayed at an oil refinery, a picture of hell with an overwhelming stench of crude oil. There was a military dog (it actually held the rank of sergeant) who detested me and would chase me down, savagely biting my heels. The GIs laughed, saying he only attacked insurgents.
We finally reached this palace in the Jebel Makhoul mountains to the north. It was used by Uday Hussein, Saddam's notorious eldest son. I was given just 14 minutes at the site. While setting up my camera for an initial shot of the palace foyer, I looked over my shoulder and noticed soldiers lounging around the empty, ruined pool. What I saw struck me as the long-lost hidden link between the 19th-century French painter Géricault and David Hockney.
Without quite believing my eyes, I intuitively spun my camera around. The subjects had arranged themselves better than I could have imagined: the soldier to the right is spreading his arms like a figure in a classical painting. I had to put my tongue back in my mouth and remember to press the cable release. It's so rare to have that "decisive moment" – especially while using a large, wooden 8in x 10in format camera on a tripod in a warzone. A cloud even passed in front of the sun to soften the hard desert light. I took a single exposure, then a few more elsewhere, before I got barked at to pack up.
The site overlooks the River Tigris: for me, there is something sinister and circular about an occupying army lounging around a toppled dictator's pool, in the area archaeologists call the "cradle of civilisation".
CV
Born: 1980, Dublin.
Studied: English literature at King's College, fine art at Goldsmiths, London; photography at Yale School of Art, US.
Influences: WG Sebald, Werner Herzog, Caspar David Friedrich, Thomas Struth.
High point: Opening my show Infra, of shots of the Congo, in New York.
Low point: The moments between projects. They're like jumping out of a plane without a parachute.
Tip: Don't go to art school initially. Do a degree in something real like physics or music. Then you will have something to make art about.
Daniel Buren's Excentrique(s) takes over Grand Palais
Daniel Buren becomes the fifth artist to take part in Paris's Monumenta project with his kaleidoscope installation
The 2012 Monumenta site-specific commission in the vast, airy nave of Paris's Grand Palais is like being plunged into a pool of coloured light. Daniel Buren is the fifth artist to take on the annual Monumenta project in the belle epoch Grand Palais, originally built for the 1900 World Fair. It is a far more daunting site than Tate Modern's Turbine Hall. If the scale doesn't get to you, the architecture does.
A canopy of hundreds of horizontal circles, each touching the next, some larger, some smaller, some a little higher, some lower, fill the space. Each open steel O is stretched with a membrane of translucent plastic film, either in blue, yellow, orange or green. These are supported by black and white vertical posts, so many that they become a forest, half-drowned in colour and shadow.
Buren's colour choices are determined by the fact that these are the only colours the film comes in, and the order of his colours is dependent on the alphabetical order of their names. He works with the given. Even the height of the canopy is determined by the minimum ceiling heights of Paris apartments.
The building arches above, visible through and between the abutting circles, which veil the sky beyond. Being here has a submarine quality. You feel in the depths, shoaling and drifting with fellow visitors beneath the huge volume of contained light and space above. I'm like a fish down here, gulping coloured air.
Rather than "contesting" the architecture or "challenging" the viewer, to use the banal phraseology of museum types, Buren's work is at the mercy of the light from the Paris sky, the scudding clouds, the slanting sunlight as it enters the building.
At night, the space will be swept by roving spotlights, and. all the while, rotating audio speakers send sound roaming through the nave; voices in many languages counting and running through the alphabet, to the odd snatch of tinkly music. The sound is fairly unobtrusive, but I'd be happier without it.
The overall effect is quite magical, but does Buren do more than decorate the space? It is all very ambient, and very pretty (not a word I often use in a positive way) but, the longer one stays, the more the visual complications of his project multiply. The posts take on the colours of the light, which sings along their vertical edges. When the sun is out, the world is reflected upside down above us, and the circles of light projected on to the floor come into disconcertingly sharp focus.
Beneath the building's central dome, Buren has made a clearing, where little circular mirrored podiums reflect the roof and sky beyond. You can stand on these dusty mirrors and examine the pattern of blue film he's fixed to the top of the dome. You can also catch a view of your own crotch.
For some, such inadvertent pleasures may provide the main attraction. But let's not underestimate pleasure. It is at the heart of Buren's benign art. He's had dinghies with striped sails racing on Grasmere, made art from bunting and awnings, and turned buildings inside out with visual conundrums. There's logic in his method and eccentricity in his choices. That said, his practical, pragmatic approach makes other artists' aesthetic choices and decision-making appear somehow arbitrary by comparison.
Buren's art always makes me feel he truly enjoys what he does and gets a great deal from pitting himself against limits and constraints.
The architecture almost always consumes whatever is in here, whether that's exhibitions, art and trade fairs, planes or train locomotives. Last year, Anish Kapoor inserted a gobsmacking behemoth, looking much like a daunting sex toy.
But it isn't so much the building that is a challenge, as what the previous four artists have accomplished here, all of whom have been highly established male artists. The best has been Richard Serra's 2008 Promenade, a work that still lives in my head.
Next time, Monumenta has to be given to a woman. Nevertheless, Buren's project makes you very aware of the act of looking. It is not at all monumental in the way some previous projects have been. It is a work dedicated to visual and corporeal pleasure – the not-so-simple pleasure of being here. It almost had me dancing for a minute, except the song in my head was The Windmills of Your Mind, a deeply eccentric song which, I recall, was composed by a Frenchman.
Thomas Kinkade: the secret life and strange death of art's king of twee
The works of the Painter of Light have been reproduced on furniture and inspired the building of a whole village, but the verdict into his death reveals a bleaker picture
In death, the man who at his peak claimed to be the world's most successful living artist perhaps achieved the sort of art-world excess he craved.
On Tuesday, the coroner's office in Santa Clara, California, announced that the death of Thomas Kinkade, the Painter of Light™, purveyor of kitsch prints to the masses, was caused by an accidental overdose of alcohol and Valium. For good measure, a legal scrap has emerged between Kinkade's ex-wife (and trustee of his estate) and his girlfriend.
Who could have imagined that behind so many contented visions of peace, harmony and nauseating goodness lay just another story of deception, disappointment and depravity, fuelled by those ever-ready stooges, Valium and alcohol?
Kinkade was a self-made phenomenon, with his prints (according to his company) hanging in one in 20 American homes. At his height, in 2001, Kinkade generated $130m (£81m) in sales. Kinkade's twee paintings of cod-traditional cottages, lighthouses, gardens, gazebos and gates sold by the million through a network of Thomas Kinkade galleries, owned by his company, and through a parallel franchise operation. At their peak (between 1995 and 2005) there were 350 Kinkade franchises across the US, with the bulk in his home state of California. You would see them in roadside malls in small towns, twinkly lights adorning the windows, and in bright shopping centres, sandwiched between skatewear outlets and nail bars.
But these weren't just galleries. They were the Thomas Kinkade experience – minus the alcohol and Valium, of course. Clients would be ushered into a climate-controlled viewing room to maximise the Kinkadeness of the whole place, and their experience. Some galleries offered "master highlighters", trained by someone not far from the master himself, to add a hand-crafted splash of paint to the desired print and so make a truly unique piece of art, as opposed to the framed photographic print that was the standard fare.
The artistic credo was expressed best in the 2008 movie Thomas Kinkade's Christmas Cottage. Peter O'Toole, earning a crust playing Kinkade's artistic mentor, urges the young painter to "Paint the light, Thomas! Paint the light!".
Kinkade's art also went beyond galleries through the "Thomas Kinkade lifestyle brand". This wasn't just the usual art gallery giftshop schlock: Kinkade sealed a tie-in with La-Z-Boy furniture (home of the big butt recliner) for a Kinkade-inspired range of furniture. But arguably his only great artwork was "The Village, a Thomas Kinkade Community", unveiled in 2001. A 101-home development in Vallejo, outside San Francisco, operating under the slogan: "Calm, not chaos. Peace, not pressure," the village offers four house designs, each named after one of Kinkade's daughters. Plans for further housing developments, alas, fell foul of the housing crisis.
In the years before his death, Kinkade's business and his life took a battering. There were allegations of malpractice, and his company declared bankruptcy, unable to pay its creditors following a series of court judgments ordering him to pay $860,000 for defrauding the owners of two failed franchises.
Following his separation from his wife and spiralling alcoholism, Kinkade's behaviour became erratic: he allegedly caused a scene at a Siegfried & Roy show in Las Vegas by repeatedly shouting "Codpiece!" at the ageing illusionists. He also engaged in what he termed "ritual territory marking" at a California Disneyland hotel, urinating on a Winnie the Pooh figure.
Kinkade's death went largely unnoted in the art world. There were no lengthy obituaries in the quality press, critics did not line up to extol the beauty or the influence of his art. Maybe they missed a trick. For while Kinkade's work is at best humdrum and technically adequate, its popularity tells us something about his public, about a desperate yearning for nostalgia that pervades parts of American life, a return to the safe glow of some imagined past.
"It's not the world we live in," Kinkade said of his painting, "it's the world we wished we live in. People wish they could find that stream, that cabin in the woods."
And it could be that with his mastery of the market, and his understanding of how to sell his work – "When I got saved, God became my art agent," he once said – Kinkade was the natural heir to the apostle of mass production, Andy Warhol.
"There's been million-seller books and million-seller CDs," Kinkade explained. "But there hasn't been, until now, million-seller art. We have found a way to bring to millions of people, an art that they can understand."
Sketchnoting the world of data and design
Written reports of conferences and events are so passe: the future is 'sketchnoting' - producing notes as illustrations. Eva-Lotta Lamm has spent the past few years sketchnoting dozens of key design and tech conferences. Now you can see the results
cheg00
Kaleidoscope eyes: Daniel Buren's Monumenta installation opens in Paris
French conceptual artist Daniel Buren is the fifth artist to take over the Grand Palais in Paris, with Excentrique(s)
Tate announce 2013 programme
Art lovers will be able to enjoy a major retrospective of Roy Lichtenstein's work and find out how LS Lowry was influenced by the French, as the Tate galleries reveal next year's programmes
Comic strips, matchstick men and David Bowie will hit the Tate in 2013, along with Marc Chagall, Gary Hume and Paul Klee. The four galleries – Tate Britain, Tate Modern, Tate St Ives and Tate Liverpool – have announced their programmes for next year, which include the first major retrospective of Roy Lichtenstein's work for 20 years and a show that will demonstrate how LS Lowry was influenced by French painting.
Lichtenstein, whose comic-strip-style paintings made him one of the forefathers of pop art, will be shown at London's Tate Modern from February. The exhibition will include landmark works including Whaam!, his famous 1963 picture of a fighter plane being shot by another, and Drowning Girl, both appropriated from contemporary comics, as well as the Artist's Studio series which saw him bring his graphic, pop style to his own surroundings and other real-life art works. It will also display lesser known late work including a series of female nudes and Chinese landscapes.
The gallery's autumn show will be dedicated to Klee, a pivotal figure in 20th century art, who taught at the Bauhaus school and whose intense, radiant paintings, replete with symbolism and references to the unconscious, draw on cubism, surrealism and primitive art. It will be the first Klee exhibition to take place in the UK for more than 10 years.
The Lowry show will take place at London's Tate Britain from next June, the first of its kind since the artist's death in 1976. Last year, the actor Ian McKellen accused the Tate of neglecting the artist, after claiming that it had shown only one of the 23 Lowry works it owns – a claim the Tate denies. Though Lowry's images of matchstick-style workers in industrial landscapes are some of the most famous in British art, the exhibition promises to reveal how he was influenced by 19th-century French painters such as Camille Pissarro and Maurice Utrillo.
Tate Britain promises to unveil its refurbished galleries in early summer next year, including a re-hang that has already aroused some controversy, with Burlington magazine claiming that it was prioritising modern works over pre-20th century ones. It will also stage an exhibition of work by Hume alongside that of Patrick Caulfield, who died in 2005.
Tate Liverpool will approach another aspect of popular British art with its show Glam! The Performance and Style, which promises to demonstrate the influence of the glam rock era, from 1971 to 1975, on other art forms in Europe and America. The gallery will also host Chagall: A Modern Master, the first exhibition of the Russian artist's work for 15 years.
Open thread: A new audience code of conduct
What should be included on our new new audience code of conduct?
We are writing a new audience code of conduct. Leo Benedictus has spoken to our arts critics and compiled their suggested list of behaviour that should be outlawed in every cinema, playhouse and concert venue across the land and judging by the comments left under his articles, this is a subject on which you have a lot to say. So, this open thread is your chance to banish antisocial audience behaviour, or at least air your bugbears. Rustling sweet papers, late comers, Tweeting; what behaviour would you like to banish? Please add your suggestions to the thread below and we'll pull the best argued and/or most popular suggestions into the list.
Here's what's been suggested so far:
Don't throw ANY liquids
Suggested by ChristyL:
'throwing away hideously overpriced beer at rock gigs is just weird. Spot fines should be instituted to enable the impoverished to have a drink.'
Ban heckling
Suggested by oldirtybusstop:
'Heckling at a stand-up show is neither expected nor acceptable. NOBODY goes to a stand-up show to hear the audience talk. If somebody interrupts they should be ejected from the club/theatre immediately. Heckling is not an art. 99% of every audience would prefer it if nobody heckled, why try and pretend that stand-up is some sort of gladiatorial arena, it's a spoken word performance not a battle to the death.'
No fondling
Suggested by David91:
'People are increasingly treating both the cinema and theatre as if they were watching at home. Hence, they text, talk, eat, sleep and, on occasions, fondle each other. It's like going back in time to the Pit at The Globe when the unwashed masses jostled each other, holding a Subway in one hand and a coke in the other'
If you're bored, leave
Suggested by Ortho:
'I've pretty much stopped going to the opera and to concerts because I don't want to pay a fortune for a seat and then have to listen to some moron in another seat talking all bloody night.'
List updated at 15:23 with suggestions from Twitter and the thread below
Respect the boundaries
Suggested on Twitter by @TonysConsultant:
@guardianstage @churlishmeg #stage Remember people sit either side of you. Don't fill intoadjoining seatas Jonathan Ross did to me.
— David Balcombe (@TonysConsultant) May 9, 2012
Only silent cold food allowed
Suggested by katypie:
'I'd like clarity on the eating issue: what's acceptable and what's not? Clearly sweets and ice cream must be otherwise theatres wouldn't sell them. But where's the line? Not hot food, obviously. I recently had a date pull out a large baguette from a rustly paper bag while at a show and felt very embarrassed...my instinct is that anything small, discreet (noiseless) and coming in little bite-sizes is probably acceptable, but anything that borders on a meal or picnic (sandwiches!), not ok.'
No coughing or blowing noses
Suggested by joolsbaby:
'keep your bloody cold germs at home too. No one wants to hear you coughing and sniffing through a performance.'
Concentrate on the performance
Suggested on Twitter by @acwilson:
@guardianstage Parents who bring kids to an event and then talk through it/read their newspapers/fall asleep. (My events are that good...)
— Anna Wilson (@acwilsonwriter) May 9, 2012
Whaam! Prepare to be hit by Roy Lichtenstein's finest comic book hour
The retrospective of Lichtenstein's work at London's Tate Modern will display the wit and glorious contradictions of his works
Roy Lichtenstein's Whaam! is an eerie modern version of the battle paintings that once decorated European palaces and council chambers. It is on a grand scale, split across two panels that together measure more than four metres in width. An American fighter unleashes a spurt of fire that blows up an enemy plane, giving the pilot no chance of escape. It is a picture of violence, but the violence is experienced third hand. The painting is meticulously translated from a DC War comic, the dots and bold colours of the original recreated by hand on an inflated scale. Our response to it is ambivalent. Is this a celebration of boys' comics, a comment on their glorification of war, a metaphor for the chilled and mechanised nature of modern killing – or nothing so serious?
It is, whatever it is, one of the most powerful monuments of 1960s pop art. Painted in 1963, Whaam! has been in the Tate collection since 1966 and has long been one of the most famous modern masterpieces in Britain. It is probably Lichtenstein's finest hour. We will have a chance to see it in the context of this artist's lifetime achievement when a retrospective of his work from the Art Institute of Chicago arrives at London's Tate Modern in 2013.
Lichtenstein made realistic paintings of an unreal world. His art is gloriously paradoxical – and the cleverest paradox is that, as in Whaam!, the unreal world turns out to have echoes in the actual one. Very early on, he hit on his comic book subject matter, and this gave his art a look it never lost – an enlarged, precise graphic style that incongruously translates efficient designs created for the page on to the generous scale of American abstract art. Like all the pop generation in America, he was working in the shadow of the abstract expressionists who in the 1940s and 50s widened the reach of painting, destroying the difference between the easel picture and the mural. Lichtenstein plays wittily on that epic scale, by filling it with comic book images that are the very opposite of the contemplative numinous clouds of Mark Rothko's visions.
In Whaam! this becomes a joke about freedom. The abstract expressionists have sometimes been accused of serving as propagandists for American culture in the cold war. The truth is more interesting. Jackson Pollock, the artist who defined abstract expressionism in the public eye, was indeed enacting freedom in the way he painted – the freedom of jazz music. With jazz 78s playing, he moved around a canvas laid on the ground, flicking and dripping paint. It was an improvisation, like Charlie Parker playing sax. In Whaam!, this free art is mockingly parodied. Lichtenstein carefully, accurately recreates an image – and that image shows a man finding freedom in machines. As he fires, the pilot obtains a sense of release. Like Jack the Dripper, he expresses himself – but does it by pressing a button.
Whaam! is still, as it was then, a comic image of American male freedom.
ArtHaus exhibition: art meets interior design - in pictures
ArtHaus is a new exhibition set in a London apartment, featuring the work of up-and-coming artists to show how art can enhance your home
Saatchi captures the confusion of contemporary photography
The Saatchi Gallery's messy, sprawling Out of Focus show reveals uncomfortable truths about the current state of photography
I have visited Out of Focus: Photography, the Saatchi Gallery's big contemporary photography show twice now. The second time around, it seemed, if anything, even more of a messy sprawl of styles, strategies and conceptual conceits. The title, Out of Focus, may have been meant ironically, but it takes on a more pointed meaning if you approach the show as a mirror of the fractured world of contemporary practice.
For me, the most coherent thing about the show is William A Ewing's catalogue essay, which begins by stating the obvious – "Photography is a very strange place to be right now, either inside looking out (the producer) or outside looking in (the public)" – then takes us on a humorous journey though the various continents that currently make up "the entire World of Photography": Commercia, Documentaria, Amateuria, Artistica and Artcontemporanea. As Ewing rightly points out, these continents view each other across vast oceans of mutual disdain. Many commercial photographers, for instance, think documentary photographers are hopelessly old-fashioned, while the latter view the former as corporate whores in thrall to the filthy lucre of advertising. Both watch the continent of Amateuria, "a continent so vast it has never been properly mapped, never mind explored", with a mixture of pity and contempt that cannot quite conceal their nervousness.
Artistica too, the realm of conceptualism and fine art, is currently under threat from the Artcontemporanea arrivistes – artists who use photography having once looked down on it as an inferior form. At the Saatchi Gallery, this "disunited nation" jostles for space, though the majority of the world on display comes from the continents of Artistica and Contemporanea. Mikhael Subotzky is the token documentary photographer, for instance, his large format pictures of the grim small town of Beaufort West in South Africa hanging desolately next to the conceptual pranksterism of Broomberg and Chanarin.
This is as political it gets on planet Saatchi, a rarified place where the main thrust is towards the conceptual. There is a lot of photography about photography: Jennifer West's enlarged strips of film of surfers, all gaudy pinks and blues, point towards both psychedelia and Eadweard Muybridge's photographs of movement. Mat Collishaw's big mosaics, made of ceramic, cement, wood and paint, suggest pixellated computer images. John Stezaker's photographic collages bring new life to old photographs found in film and theatre archives, postcards and catalogues.
There is contemporary portraiture and landscape aplenty, too. In the first big room, there are perhaps too many of Katy Grannan's hard painterly studies of old people caught in unforgiving sunlight on the sidewalks of Los Angeles and San Francisco, just as, upstairs, there are too few – just one, in fact – of Elina Brotherus's stark studies of human alienation. In both instances, the power of the work is undercut. It was good to see Hannah Starkey's mixture of street photography and participatory portraiture again, which seemed quite humble in intent (she finds an intriguing spot then asks passers-by to become part of the picture) in comparison to the work around it.
The most crafted work here is Sohei Nishino's series of city dioramas – New York, Tokyo, Paris – made up of thousands of small photographs combined to create a surreal whole. They are mind-boggling in their obsessiveness and recall those wonderful wrong medieval maps of unexplored territories.
Too much of the work on display is too self-consciously arty or referential, and seems already peculiarly dated. More problematic still, there is simply too much on show to make the whole seem in any way formally unified. This is Saatchiland, though, so that was probably never the point.
What we are looking at is a collection parading as an exhibition. It shouts and screams and sometimes whispers for your attention, but you may, like me, find your mind constantly wandering – and wondering at the sheer size and range of it all. It is a glimpse at some of the continents that make up the world of contemporary photography, but the choices often seem random and the staging haphazard. A big mess of a show, then, but one worth seeing – if only to have your confusion about the current state of photography confirmed.
Now see this
At Gallery One and a Half, Laura Pannack is showing her – no pun intended – revealing photographs of Young British Naturists. As always, it is the casual, everyday nature of the nudity that is most surreal.
Martin Parr and Tom Wood's images of the working class on holiday in new Brighton, The Last Resort, were first shown to great acclaim in 1986. This glimpse of an already lost time is now on show at the Third Floor Gallery in Cardiff.
Edgar Martins's series This Is Not a House is at the Wapping Project, Bankside, London. It explores the fallout of the sub-prime mortgage industry in America. It caused considerable controversy when it was revealed that he had "digitally reshaped" some of the photographs.
Peter Duggan's Artoons: David Hockney
In cartoonist Peter Duggan's latest take on art history, we dive back into David Hockney's photo album to see if a third group of friends made A Bigger Splash than his last set of visitors
From the archive, 9 May 1994: Edvard Munch's stolen Scream recovered in undercover sting
Scotland Yard detectives played a key role in the undercover sting operation which recovered Edvard Munch's stolen masterpiece from a south Norway hotel
• From the archive blog: Edvard Munch's worthless art
Scotland Yard detectives played a key role in the undercover sting operation which recovered the stolen Norwegian painting, The Scream, it was revealed yesterday.
Norwegian police found Edvard Munch's masterpiece virtually undamaged at a hotel in south Norway on Saturday. Three Norwegians were later arrested.
According to the daily newspaper Dagenbladet, two Metropolitan Police officers fooled the thieves by pretending they would buy the painting for £250,000.
Norwegian police had contacted London shortly after the theft and the Norwegians worked closely with Chief Inspector John Butler, head of Scotland Yard's Arts and Antiques squad.
"While John Butler worked with [Norwegian police inspector] Leif Lier...two of Butler's agents had already been in touch with people who claimed they could get hold of The Scream," the paper said.
Scotland Yard issued a brief statement confirming it had co-operated but left the Norwegians to release any further details. Knut Berg, director of the National Gallery in Oslo, said the painting had a microscopic pinprick but he described the work as undamaged.
"The thieves must have handled it with extreme caution," he said. "It was wonderful to see the painting again and we hope to have it back on the wall on Wednesday," Mr Berg said.
Two men, filmed by video, carried out the theft on February 12, on the day of the opening of the Winter Olympics at Lillehammer. They smashed a window, grabbed the painting and disappeared in less than a minute.
"I am extremely happy and relieved that one of our greatest and most well-known art treasures has been recovered. This has been an eye-opener," said minister of culture, Aase Kleveland.
The painting, which art experts say would be impossible for thieves to sell on the open market, was found in Aasgaarstrand, a beach resort where Munch had a cottage and where he painted some of his most famous works.
British police are in the forefront of tracking down Europe's stolen art, partly because an estimated 60% of it ends up in London.
[A pastel version of The Scream sold for a record $119.9m (£74m) at an auction in New York on 3 May.]
May 08 2012
Guardian Camera Club: Paul Andrews on photographing a journey
Paul Andrews participates in the photographing a journey assignment
Guardian Camera Club: Kristikina on photographing a journey
Kristikina participates in the photographing a journey assignment
Guardian Camera Club: Puppkin on photographing a journey
Puppkin participates in the photographing a journey assignment
Portrait of the artist: Trisha Brown, choreographer
'Climbing trees and playing sports were my first lessons in art'
What got you started?
I grew up in Aberdeen, in Washington state, which provided a luscious green environment for an imaginative mind. I climbed trees, played sports, hunted and fished with my dad. These were my first lessons in art. I have early memories of movement while playing outside as a child – and I integrate playing into my dance. Of course, I also had formal training: I studied ballet, tap and acrobatics, although I didn't know whether I wanted to go into visual art or dance. I lived between those two until the Accumulations [a series of accumulating pieces made in the 1970s]. Now I live between them again.
What was your big breakthrough?
It was in a now infamous improvisation workshop in New York led by Anna Halprin in 1959. That's when I first got to "fly" [leaving the ground in a spectacular way]. I've been smitten with improvisation ever since: the spirit of playing, and its rhythmic structure, transports me back to my childhood days. And I've always wanted to fly.
Who or what have you sacrificed for your art?
For me, it's all connected. Anything I've done for my art has never felt like a sacrifice.
Your work is closely associated with the precepts of visual art. Are artists too often expected to conform to just one art form?
I've never been worried about what is expected of me. When I first arrived in New York, much of my work was reacting against convention, pretension, romanticism and sentimentality. It was about art. Not visual art or dance art – just art. I'm disappointed to see these distinctions creeping back in. They were dissolved in the 1960s for good reason.
What song or piece of music would work as the soundtrack to your life?
My life has been located between the notes of Laurie Anderson, Alvin Curran, John Cage, countless marching bands, Bach and recently Jean-Philippe Rameau. It's a diverse and complicated soundtrack, but it is brilliant. Maybe William Christie can conduct it.
What are you most proud of?
My work with the National Arts Council in the 1990s [meeting US politicians to advocate for arts funding]. Art reflects the world around us and what the world could become. Bringing that message to those who control funding was a labour of love.
Which other artists, in any art form, do you most admire?
My dear friend Bob Rauschenberg. There aren't enough words for me to describe the friendship we had.
Complete this sentence, please: At heart, I'm just a frustrated ...
I'm not frustrated. I've been incredibly fortunate to have a rich, varied career where I could follow my impulses.
How would you like to be remembered?
As a dancer. I've said before that I'm a bricklayer with a sense of humour. I'd like people to remember that.
In short
Born: Aberdeen, Washington, 1936.
Career: Worked with the avant-garde Judson Dance Theater in the 1960s. Formed the Trisha Brown Dance Company in 1970 and is also an accomplished artist and opera director. Her company perform on 9 May at the Brighton Dome (brightonfestival.org or 01273 709709).
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Scream if you want to bid higher: the high cost of art
At £74m, The Scream went to a buyer with very deep pockets. Such prices destroy rather than celebrate creativity
What is the man on the bridge screaming in Edvard Munch's most famous work? I will tell you. He is screaming: "I am too expensive! I belong in a public collection!"
As an artist, the price of art makes me want to scream. Munch's pastel drawing of The Scream, one of four versions, sold for $120m (£74m) last week in just 12 minutes. When the bidding reached $100m, the audience applauded. As he recorded the final offer, the auctioneer joked: "I love you." What is that love born of? It would be mean to say the love the auctioneer proclaimed was simply born of greed. After all, perhaps you really have to love art, love The Scream, and love its buyers, to value it at £74m. But trophy prices that only the super-rich can afford are damaging. Few public collections could even begin to raise £74m for a single acquisition.
This version of The Scream is the only one to include a poem by Munch on the frame, which describes the inspiration behind the series. It reads: "I was walking along a path with two friends – the sun was setting – suddenly the sky turned blood red – I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence – there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city – my friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety – and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature."
A piece of this magnitude belongs where everyone can see it. The enjoyment, understanding and popularity of such iconic works is humanity's inheritance. Human beings can fall in love across generations; people from all over the world can come to understand each other through their cultures; and we can all celebrate together by listening to great music – but not if the great artefacts of our age are squirrelled away in a rich person's downstairs loo.
Even if a public collection could afford to plough huge amounts of its energy, effort and cash into making such a purchase, it would not be right: there is so much else you could do with that kind of money. Think how many great works by younger artists you could buy with just £500,000. Think what a difference a sum like that could make to gallery education departments (schemes aiming to widen access to the visual arts). From time to time, galleries do attempt to rescue an important work "for the nation"; but, despite some high-profile successes, such as the purchase last year of Bruegel the Younger's Procession to Calvary, the capacity to do this is more limited than is widely perceived. Crazy auction prices do nothing to help us hang on to our art.
There is another pernicious result of the art market's buoyancy. In this recession, art is still seen as a good investment: everything else may be in flux, but Picasso will always be Picasso. This inflates the value of public collections, meaning galleries come to be seen as places housing treasures with a high monetary value – not as buildings filled with ideas, aspirations and possibilities. National collections, with their armies of trustees, are protected from local councillors eager to sell off a Lowry to manage a deficit – but smaller ones aren't. Last year, a painting by John Everett Millais was sold by Bolton council for £74,400 to fund a new museum warehouse. Such de-acquisition should go from being a taboo to being illegal.
What's the solution? That's trickier. We can appeal to rich people's sense of public spirit, in the hope that they will donate, or at least long-lend, work to museums. But the problem is that public officials in museums are not there to chase and flatter wealthy collectors but to display the important art of the past, to reveal unseen histories, to reflect what is going on today while pointing to tomorrow.
Contemporary artists are split into two camps: those who are quite happy to create objects that work well as investment vehicles; and those (mainly younger) artists who couldn't care less. Neither group has a claim on making better art. You can make valuable, interesting, important art out of gold as well as sausages. I am keen on contemporary artists making a living, but we all need to beware the dangers of the inflated art market.
If contemporary art remains too expensive, it will not be bought by public museums. The collections of the future won't have good work that reflects, challenges or explains what is going on now. In the end, the best currency an artist can receive is footfall and discussion. There is no point in showing your work only to the "right people". Art shouldn't just be available to all, it should also be available in multiple ways – and we should encourage all people to make it.
Hey artists! Don't turn ideas into cash. Make art cheap. Give your art to public collections and don't demand a tax break. Make art that has no investment potential. Don't get caught up with making money. Get caught up with making things better.