Art and design

The highest price for the ugliest painting: that was the supposed Leonardo sold for $450m last month. Does anyone really want to look at this monstrous Jesus, a heavily restored hippy scarcely anybody believes in? This was an alarming low point, where art sank from mere investment to cultural boast: Abu Dhabi buying a surprisingly un-Islamic painting for its new Louvre, all sides presumably insured against the future discovery that the painting is no better than it looks. A shameful year for the art trade, then, but a golden year for art. 2017 gave us Russia and America as never before. A tremendous succession of masterpieces flew in from the US, including Grant Wood’s deathless American Gothic – the long-faced couple standing sentry before their wooden house, pitchfork in hand – in Britain for the first time at the Royal Academy, along with Charles Sheeler’s eerie Ford plant in winter and Edward Hopper’s hauntingly mysterious New York Movie. The Royal … [Read more...] about Laura Cumming’s best art of 2017

Auguste Rodin never saw the Parthenon and believed it should one day return, like the human beings who made it, to dust. When the greatest of all classical monuments was damaged by an earthquake in 1894, he campaigned against its restoration. Given the profound influence of classical art on his own work, first to last, it is hard to regard this as anything other than startling hypocrisy. But the sculptor had strange ideas about ruins and time. The passage of millennia seems to have meant almost nothing to Rodin (1840-1917). His garden was strewn with classical sculptures casually got through dealers who bought them off tourists; he kept statues of Greek nymphs and gymnasts all over the house, specially lit by night for seductive effect. Headless, often limbless, these marble torsos twist, reach, strive and recline like the figures in Rodin’s own sculpture. Out of classicism, he forges modern art. This is as well known as Rodin’s debt to Michelangelo in all those non finito … [Read more...] about Rodin and the Art of Ancient Greece review – an extraordinary reversal

Malcolm Gladwell's new book promises to turn your view of the world upside down. We all think we know what happened when David took on Goliath: the little guy won. Gladwell thinks we all have it wrong, and opens his new book with a retelling of that story. Our mistake is to assume it's a story about the weak beating the powerful with the help of pluck and guile and sheer blind faith. But as Gladwell points out, it was Goliath who was the vulnerable one. He was a giant, which made him slow, clumsy and probably half-blind (double vision is a common side-effect of an excess of human growth hormone). The only way he could have beaten David was by literally getting his hands on him – but David had no need to go anywhere near him. David had a sling. Ancient armies contained teams of slingers, who could be deadly from distances as great as 200 yards. The best, like David, were lethally accurate, and Goliath was not a small target. Once David had persuaded the Israelites that single … [Read more...] about David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits and the Art of Battling Giants by Malcolm Gladwell – review

In just three weeks, the long-awaited third volume of John Richardson's mammoth A Life of Picasso will be published. Subtitled Triumphant Years, it takes the story from 1917 through to 1932, from Picasso's work with Diaghilev's Ballets Russes to his impassioned neoclassical period in the Twenties. But that still leaves 41 years before the artist died. And Richardson is now 83. Forget the art, do the maths. The fourth volume, which was always planned as the last, looks destined to remain uncompleted, and perhaps unstarted. There was an 11-year gap between the second and third volumes. And as Richardson writes by hand, there is little reason to assume he's going to get any faster. That said, he was slowed down by the job of writing two other books, apparently out of economic necessity. Many observers were surprised by this claim, not least because the Picasso books, which are glossy and expensive, have sold in their tens of thousands. But it turned out that reproduction rights on the … [Read more...] about Master chronicler of a flawed genius

The world’s first printed Christmas card, an artwork created in 1843 that went on to spawn a global industry, has gone on show at the Charles Dickens Museum in London. Designed by Henry Cole and illustrated by John Callcott Horsley, in the same year that Dickens’ A Christmas Carol was published, the hand-coloured card shows a family gathered around a table enjoying a glass of wine with a message: “A merry Christmas and a happy new year to you.” It was sent by a son to his parents. Of the 1,000 originally printed, 21 survived and one has been loaned to the museum by a book dealer in San Francisco. Cole’s original proof is also on loan. It was given as a gift in 1865 and has a pencilled note to the recipient in the bottom right-hand corner. Dickens and Cole worked at the same time, unknown to each other, shaping what would become popular traditions. Museum curator Louisa Price said: “This was a really important year for the development of the modern … [Read more...] about World’s first printed Christmas card goes on display at Dickens museum