Art Newspaper

The United Arab Emirates will host a high-level, international conference on terrorism versus culture, led by the French president Franois Hollande and the president of the UAE, Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan. The exact date is not yet fixed, but the event is due to take place in December in Abu Dhabi, when the Louvre Abu Dhabi building, designed by Jean Nouvel, is due to be completed.

Since 2015, France has taken the lead in this campaign. The decision to hold the conference, which will bring together ministers as well as museum and heritage experts, was made in May by the G7 summit in Japan, on a proposal from Hollande. Along with the other G7 members, France and the emirate are gathering a coalition of states to support the initiative, according to information from the Elyse Palace in Paris. It is expected to be formally announced at the Louvre today (5 July) during a visit by Hollande and a high-ranking official close to the emir, who will be in charge of this mission. According to our information, a French special envoy has already been appointed: Jack Lang, a former minister of culture and the president of the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris.

The prime minister of Japan, Shinzo Abe, invited Jean-Luc Martinez, the director of the Louvre, to present his plan to protect cultural heritage to the heads of state at the G7 meeting. Among a series of 50 proposals, Martinez stressed the need to control freeports around the world. Hollande expressed the hope that the conference in December will enable the creation of a global fund for endangered heritage. Hollande has already contacted Irina Bokova, the director-general of Unesco, to get the organisation involved; Frances wish is to create a global movement similar to the one launched three decades ago to fight HIV/Aids, which involved United Nations agencies as well as public and private donors such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Terrorism attacks men, women and children, but also the sites of our collective memory and civilisations, Hollande said at the G7 meeting. Terrorism wants to eradicate history, to wipe out any trace. It destroys works; sometimes it sells them, exploiting the dreadful traffic of humanitys history. The international community must reply, and this is why I asked for this report from the Louvre.

The report was commissioned in March last year after the destruction of the Mosul Museum and the ancient city of Nimrud in Iraq. The French president also proposed to open shelters for cultural goods before they could be attacked or sacked, and record the memory of cultural sites, using all forms of media, to keep them alive and restore them one day.

The specifics should be provided on 5 July at the Louvre, but we understand that the conference in December will be held on a ministerial level and will include a strong scientific contribution. The one-day ministerial segment will be preceded by a meeting of experts, planned with the full support of the Louvre. The museum could not say at this stage how it would co-operate with other institutions and museums such as New Yorks Metropolitan Museum of Art, the British Museum in London or the Pergamon in Berlin.

Abu Dhabi was selected as the location because of the planned opening of a Louvre on Saadiyat Island, which is increasingly presented as a crossroads of culture by the team that took over the project in 2013. The opening was planned for December and could have coincided with the conference; unfortunately, the construction of Nouvels spectacular museum has been delayed by technical issues. The Louvre and the French government have declined to confirm an opening date (this will probably be in 2017). But the conference will take place when the building itself is finished, allowing for a symbolic ceremony led by Hollande, with the heads of state and other leaders present in Abu Dhabi.

Celebrate US Independence Day this 4th July with some quiet contemplation of recently restored fireworks books. The Metropolitan Museum of Art announced in a blogpost last week that they have conserved 19 books in their Department of Drawings and Prints on firework displays. The books cover more than four centuries of pyrotechnics, and include spotty 19th-century Japanese depictions reminiscent of colour-blindness tests; a 17th-century British engraving of how to make a fire-breathing dragon; and an 1818 German hand-coloured etching of an exploding chrysanthemum with a smiling face in the centre. Some of the books are straightforward manuals on how to make the actual explosive devices, while others provide more fanciful, and permanent, renditions of the colourful sky-splashes that last mere seconds.

The leading Iranian artist Parviz Tanavoli was unable to attend a talk yesterday (3 July) at the British Museum in London after his passport was confiscated by the Iranian authorities. The lecture, which focused on the book European Women in Persian Houses, went ahead without Tanavoli, its author, who was left in the dark about why he was not allowed to travel.

The veteran artists sculptures are included in the Tate Moderns rehang alongside paintings by Warhol and Lichtenstein in a room called Beyond Pop. They were also featured in Tate Moderns exhibition The World Goes Pop last year.

Tanavoli was told by border officials on 2 July at Tehrans Imam Khomeini International Airport that he could not leave for London. The artist, who divides his time between Tehran and Vancouver, told us in an email: I am still pending and I still have no idea why I am kept here. They tell me soon my case will be sorted out. What case? When is soon? I have no idea.  Officials at the Iranian embassy in London declined to comment.

His new book, published by IB Tauris, examines why wealthy households in Iran at the turn of the 20th century collected and incorporated prints of glamorous, unveiled European women into the architecture of houses and residences.

Tanavoli was also due to speak at Asia House in London today (4 July) on the role of the lion in Persian art and culture. The talk pre-empts an exhibition due to open at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tehran next March entitled The Lion in Iran and the Art of Parviz Tanavoli.

Tanavoli is known for pioneering a new form of Pop art in Iran in the 1960s. Like Basquiat making art at another time and in another place, he roamed the streets of south Tehran in the 1960s, finding discarded objects, says Shiva Balaghi, a visiting scholar at Brown University in Rhode Island, who co-organised a retrospective of Tanavolis work last year at the Davis Museum, Wellesley College in Massachusetts.

The Saqqakhaneh school, which also included the artist Hossein Zenderoudi, flowered in Tanavolis Atelier Kaboud workplace in south Tehran. This new school fused avant-garde theory with Iranian folk culture motifs, producing a Middle Eastern strain of 1960s modernism rooted in popular culture.

A new initiative at the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow aims to make the institution more hospitable to disabled visitors (Co-thinkers, 7 June-9 September). The programme is uncharted territory for Russia, where disabled people have historically lacked equal access to cultural institutions and disabled children have been shut out of mainstream schools, according to Human Rights Watch.

Despite new laws that went into effect in January banning discrimination against the disabled, we have this legacy of the Soviet period, when people with disabilities were largely segregated, says Maria Sarycheva, the coordinator of Garages department of inclusive programmes. (Although some Russian institutions, including the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, offer disability services, most do not facilitate full access to galleries for all disabled visitors.)

For the general Russian audience, there is a lack of information on contemporary art, says Garages curator Anastasia Mityushina. For blind, deaf or otherwise disabled visitors, the amount of easily accessible information is like 1% of that, she says.

Garage hopes the Co-thinkers exhibitionthe first in a series of annual projects co-produced with four collaborators with different disabilitieswill help change that. The show brings together 18 works by 17 contemporary artists including Maurizio Cattelan, Robert Rauschenberg and James Turrell, among others, that in some way examine or alter perception. All of the works are on loan from Moscow-based private collectors.  

The show also includes 3D models of each object that all visitors can touch. To fully experience the exhibition, you do not need to come to reception and announce your disabilityyou just come and explore, Mityushina says.

In September, Garage plans to host around 50 curators, education and other museum professionals from across the country for its second annual training session on inclusion and disability services. This years programme will focus on increasing access for deaf visitors.

Conservators at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York have done the seemingly impossible: they have brought Bruce Conners CHILD (1959-60), a haunting sculpture of a gas chamber execution, back from the dead ahead of a major travelling exhibition.

Conner (1933-2008) made the work, a black-wax figure of a boyits head thrown back and mouth open as if screamingcovered with nylon webbing and strapped to a high-chair, in response to the planned execution of career criminal Caryl Chessman. In 1948, Chessman was sentenced to die in the gas chamber for kidnappinga crime punishable by death in California at the time. Although the severity of his sentence for a non-lethal crime divided public opinion, he was eventually executed in 1960 after several widely publicised attempts to overturn his conviction.   

The US artist originally wanted to cast the work in bronze (and encase it in glass so it would look like a gas chamber) but eventually settled on sculpting it from casting wax on which he poured hot wax. It sits in a childs chair once owned by the Abstract Expressionist Sonia Gechtoff, who was horrified when she learned it was used in this piece, says Roger Griffith, MoMAs associate sculpture conservator. The figure is covered in nylon webbing, in keeping with the artists interest in the macabre early in his career. He wanted objects to look old and to create a sense of revulsion and pain, says Laura Hoptman, the museums painting and sculpture curator. She has co-curated a major survey of Conners work with colleagues from MoMA and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art--the organiser of the show. It will travel to San Francisco after its New York debut in July. 

Whitney no-show
When it entered MoMAs collection in 1970, CHILD was in a deteriorated state and so has never been exhibited there. In fact, the piece has not been on public display since 1995, when it was pulled from a show at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York at Conners request. The slouched figure that confronted the artist at the Whitney more than two decades ago was a far cry from Conners original creation. Among other things, its head had collapsed onto its chesta change that drastically altered the meaning of the piece. CHILD was intended to show pain at the moment of execution and, over the years, its head had slumped so it looked dead, Hoptman says.

Following CHILDs return to MoMA in 1995, conservators made several attempts to restore the piece, and sought Conners advice on its original appearance and the materials used in its creation. Unfortunately, these attempts failed. It was brought out of storage again in 2014, six years after the artists death, when conservators, curators and representatives from the Conner Family Trust came together to discuss the work. It was decided that CHILD deserved another shot at life.


Nylons not pantyhose
The only way to treat CHILD was to take it apart. A key part of the process involved constructing an internal armature, which the figure lacked and led to its head falling on its collapsed chest. Before Conner died, he accepted that certain additions were needed to restore the piece to its 1960 appearance. The support is made out of sheets of polycaprolactone, a thermoplastic polyester resin once used in the medical industry and now embraced by artists such as Matthew Barney, who uses a different form of it to create his pour pieces. This is MoMAs first experience with the material and conservation fellow Megan Randall says its benefits include being endlessly reheatable so it can be bent over and over to adjust the shape as needed.

Reassembling the figure into the correct position in its chair was one of the biggest challenges. We didnt know how far he had shifted until we began to reassemble it, Griffith says. But, Randall says, the margins of error are very small because he only fits in the chair a certain way. The wax itself was in good condition. Its an incredibly durable material, says MoMAs chief conservator James Coddington, noting that it was used by ancient Egyptian artisans. It had not lost its substance, just its shape.

Over the years, many of the works original nylons had been removed so vintage onesnot pantyhose, as Conner was very specific about his choice of hosierywere sourced from what has become many conservators go-to retail source: eBay. We often find were bidding against colleagues, Coddington says. But the nylons that had remained were in remarkably good condition. Theyre more robust than we had thought, he says, adding that he wouldnt have a problem with CHILD being on view for extended periods.

In the end, Griffith estimates that, aside from the internal armature, the restored piece only contains between 1% and 2% of non-original materials. We were confident it could be [successfully treated] because the material was all there, Griffith says. Coddington was more sceptical. History had come to ask if this object existed any more, he says. Megan and Roger were confident; I was the counter voice.

Rarely in your career as a conservator do you get a chance to bring a work back to life, Griffith says. Im pleased the curators had the confidence in us to let us do it.

Bruce Conner: Its All True, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 3 July-2 October; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 29 October-22 January 2017

The public appeal to save the famed Armada Portrait of Elizabeth I is gathering momentum. The Art Fund charity is driving the campaign to raise 10m so that the historic painting, which is being sold by the descendants of Sir Francis Drake, can be saved for the nation. The #SaveArmada appeal was launched on 23 May with 1.4m in contributions from Art Fund and Royal Museums Greenwich, towards the 10m needed. The appeal total now stands at 2.7m with further approaches to major funders underway, says an Art Fund statement (7,000 public donations plus match funding and grants from charitable trusts have powered the funding initiative). The allegorical portrait shows Elizabeth I surrounded by symbols of imperial power, with two background scenes depicting the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588. The queens fingers cover the Americas, indicating her plans to expand into the New World. If the appeal succeeds (and people dig deep), the painting will hang in the National Maritime Museum's Queens House, built on the site of Greenwich Palace, the birthplace of Elizabeth I in 1533.

First World War soldiers appeared in public places across the UK yesterday (1 July), marking the centenary of the bloody Battle of the Somme that claimed the lives of more than 19,000 British troops on the first day of the Anglo-French offensive across the fields of northern France a hundred years ago. The men, who congregated in shopping centres, high streets and at railway stations, were volunteers in a human memorial devised by the artist Jeremy Deller, who is known for his re-enactment of the Battle of Orgreave in 2001. 

The UK-wide event, entitled Were here because were here, was commissioned by 14-18 Now, the official cultural programme for the centenary commemoration. Deller devised the piece in collaboration with 27 organisations including the National Theatre in London, the National Theatre of Scotland and Manchester Royal Exchange. 

The men, drawn from more than 1,400 volunteers, remained silent when approached, handing out cards with the names and ages of the battle casualties. At points, the participants sang the song Were here because were here to the tune of Auld Lang Syne, a popular song in the trenches during the First World War. 

Deller says in a statement: I wanted to make a contemporary memorial to mark the centenary of the Battle of the Somme, one that moved around the UK with an unpredictability in which the participants took the work directly to the public.

Claire Doherty, the founding director of the public art organisation Situations, said on twitter that the work is a reminder of the potential for public art to cut through the everyday and startle us awake. Jennifer Higgie, the co-editor of Frieze magazine, also called the work amazing on social media. 

The project was backed by Arts Council England, the Heritage Lottery Fund, the Art Fund, the Paul Hamlyn Foundation and Creative Scotland, the funding and development agency for the arts.

The Cass Sculpture Foundation in West Sussex in the south of England has commissioned 16 Chinese artists to participate in the most extensive installation ever undertaken on its 26-acre site, says the curatorial director Claire Shea. A Beautiful Disorderthe foundations first major show of commissions by international artistsis the result of almost two years of research and production overseen by Shea and her co-curators, Wenny Teo from the Courtauld Institute, London, and Ella Liao from the Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai.

The title comes from a 1743 letter by the French Jesuit missionary and court painter to the Chinese emperor, Jean-Denis Attiret, who gave an enthusiastic account of the imperial gardens irregular design. The quote takes on a political edge in the exhibition, which includes Zheng Bos yellow, red and green flowerbed spelling out the 1950s propaganda slogan Socialism is good and Song Tas Why Do They Never Take Colour Photos? (2016), a fibreglass copy of a sculpture of a young Chairman Mao. The exhibition is sponsored by the foundation.

A Beautiful Disorder, Cass Sculpture Foundation, Goodwood, West Sussex, 3 July-6 November

Twenty-first century museums have moved beyond their traditional core functions of conserving and promoting their collections, says Alberto Garlandini, the president of the Italian organising committee of Icom Milano 2016, the triennial conference of the International Council of Museums (Icom) being held in Milan until 9 July. They have new social goals and larger territorial responsibilities than in past times, he says, adding that museums should promote the landscapes they are part of as well as their collections.

The relationship between museums and cultural landscapes is the theme for the 24th general conference, where museum professionals will come together to discuss the changing responsibilities of todays museums and what role these institutions can play in interpreting their local cultural heritage and preserving the cultural landscape, which Unescos assistant director-general for culture, Francesco Bandarin, says embodies centuries of traditional knowledge, experiences and practices. He sees museums role of conserving, interpreting and preserving these landscapes as necessary actions to learn from their past and transmit their richness to the future.   

The Italian architect Michele de Lucchi, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist and museum founder Orhan Pamuk and the artist Christo are among the keynote speakers. The hot topics of the illicit trafficking of artefacts and destruction of cultural sites will be addressed in a panel discussion that includes Egypts antiquities minister Khaled El-Enany and Markus Hilgert, the director of Berlins Pergamon Museum, and in the screening of the new documentary film The Destruction of Memory.

Installation and case manufacturer Goppion Museum Lab and the banking group Intesa San Paolo are the main sponsors of the conference.

 

Art lovers can access buildings and sites in central London this weekend that are usually off-limits thanks to a new initiative called Art Night. From 5pm until late today (2 July), visitors can sample an installation by Turner prizewinner Laure Prouvost at Admiralty Arch on the Mall, take in a new video series by Argentine artist Cecilia Bengolea in the East Piazza of Covent Garden and savour a new work by the choreographer Alexandra Bachzetsis at Two Temple Place on the Thames. The UK premiere of the performance Reanimation by the veteran artist Joan Jonas, and jazz pianist and composer Jason Moran, will be held in Southwark Cathedral.The new festival, devised by Unlimited Productions, is co-curated by the Institute of Contemporary Arts and Kathy Noble. Phillips auction house is backing the project.

A Bacon exhibition opening in Monte Carlo on Saturday 2 July reveals the close links between the artists obsessive gambling and his paintings. Both depended on chance. As Rebecca Daniels, a contributor to the Grimaldi Forum catalogue explains, so inextricably linked were gaming and art that Bacon regarded his losses on the roulette table as an expense related to painting. He once used this as an argument for his dealer to advance more money.

Francis Bacon loved the French Riviera, but what made Monaco particularly attractive was its gambling opportunities. He moved to the independent principality in 1946 and spent most of the next five years there, returning often up until his death in 1992.

Bacons haunt was the Casino. He recalled: I spent whole days there... you could go in at ten oclock and neednt come out until about four oclock the following morning. Bacon would quickly dispense any winnings on champagne and the finest food for friends. It was his symbol of living in the present.

Among the paintings in the Grimaldi Forum show is Study for a Figure (1950), which includes a vaguely outlined circular object. This picture was assumed to have been lost, but in 2006 it was rediscovered on the reverse of a canvas. Lucian Freud then recalled having seen it in 1950, describing the circular object as a roulette wheel.
    
Bacon even owned his own roulette wheel, with which he would play with friends back in England. This relic of the artists tortured life has recently gone to Monaco, when it was purchased by Majid Boustany for his Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation.


Taking risks
Daniels believes that Bacon approached gambling and art with the same spirit, displaying a determination to take risks and allow chance to intervene. Bacon wrote that the vice of gambling... is for me intimately linked with painting. Clive Barker, a sculptor and a friend, recalled that Bacon would talk endlessly about how chance affected his paintings, with success or failure being likened to the spin of a roulette wheel.  

Bacon would persevere with a painting until it either became a masterpiece or a complete failure. When the gamble went wrong, he would simply destroy the work. The Grimaldi Forum exhibition presents 62 of Bacons paintings that relate to his visits to Monaco and France, showing his deep interest in French culture. These essentially represent the successes, but the artist also destroyed hundreds of pictures where his gamble had failed.

A failure of a different kind in Bacons early career was the idea to sell his work to the Casino. In 1946 he wrote to his friend Graham Sutherland: I always feel with a little clever manipulation the Casino would buy our pictures. They never did, and instead its magnificent Belle Epoque rooms are decorated with paintings of languorous females, who still today sooth the disappointments of the unlucky as they lose their chips.

Just for this summer, Bacons work has returned to Monaco, at the Grimaldi Forum, a modern conference and exhibition centre a few minutes walk from the Casino. For anyone going to see the show, do go on to the Casino for its magnificent interiors and to imbibe the theatrical atmosphere of the gaming. To see Bacons roulette wheel, take a guided tour of the Francis Bacon MB Foundation with its artworks and memorabilia (advance booking required).


Francis Bacon: Monaco and French Culture, Grimaldi Forum, Monaco, 2 July-4 September.

After the death of the British painter Christopher Wood (1901-30) at the age of 29, he was quickly overshadowed by his great friend Ben Nicholson, who became a figurehead of British Modernism. A show at the Pallant House Gallery, which often casts a spotlight on overlooked Modern British artists, aims to redress the balance. Although Woods work is sometimes viewed within the context of his friendship with Ben and Winifred Nicholson (as at a show at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in 2014), this overview focuses solely on the work of this conflicted young man. The exhibition includes 80 works from Woods entire career, from his early years in Paris to his last days in England. The show focuses on his search for purity in both his life and art, says its curator, Katy Norris. The exhibitions chief sponsor is the Italian appliance manufacturer DeLonghi.


Christopher Wood: Sophisticated Primitive, Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, 2 July-2 October

Eighty-two portraits of friends and acquaintances, all in the same format with blue or turquoise backgrounds, comprise the majority of David Hockneys latest exhibition at Londons Royal Academy of Arts (RA), which opens in July.

The acrylic-on-canvas paintings, which will be hung chronologically, will allow visitors to see how the series developed from 2014 until this spring, when it was completed. Among those depicted are art world figures such as John Baldessari, Larry Gagosian, Benedikt Taschen, Frank Gehry and Norman Rosenthal, who were each painted in Los Angeles over a three-day period. Hockney regards the 83 paintings (one still life is included) as a complete work of art and does not intend to split them up. Like Hockneys 2012 exhibition at the RA, which drew more than 600,000 visitors, this show is expected to attract massive crowds. For the first time ever, the RA will require visitors to book their tickets in advance.

The exhibition is sponsored by Cazenove Capital Management.


David Hockney RA: 82 Portraits and 1 Still-life, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2 July-2 October

The "Meet Vincent van Gogh Experience", a lavish multimedia presentation about the Dutch expressionists life, launched in Beijing earlier this month at the Golden Resources Shopping Mall (until 16 September). The showcreated in partnership between Hollands Van Gogh Museum, the exhibition development firm Artcomm and the Wai Chun Culture companyis expected to attract more than 2,000 visitors daily (a five-year, 30-city tour of Greater China, taking in Shanghai in November is also on the cards). However, Axel Rger, the director of the Van Gogh Museum, says that the Experience does not rely on the original artworks in our collection, many of which are now too fragile to travel. This is, he adds, a complete experience, an intimate journey through Van Goghs life, mixing projections, reproductions, films, and sets, so visitors are transported back to key locations in Vincents life. And visitors will get new insights into an under-the-radar topic, mental health, which remains taboo in China. His illness is integral to this story and therefore plays a major part, Rger says.

The Belgian collector Guy Ullens yesterday announced plans to sell his Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art (UCCA) in Beijing to a new benefactor and owner. Ullens also plans to sell the remainder of his collection of Chinese contemporary art, which is held separately from the gallery.

We are looking to make an agreement with the right buyer to secure the future of UCCA for the years to come, a spokesman for Ullens and his centre tells The Art Newspaper. "UCCA will continue to function, presenting exhibitions. he added. The decision to sell aims to secure the long-term future of the organisation with a new patron taking over Guy Ullens role as benefactor and owner, he said. One option would be to create a UCCA Foundation to provide long-term financing, our sister publication The Art Newspaper China reports. 

UCCA is one of the oldest and most respected private museums in China. Its founding in 2007 in Beijings 798 art zone foreshadowed Chinas private museum boom; its exhibitions have facilitated the internationalisation of the countrys contemporary art scene and attracted some four million visitors. The UCCA directors Philip Tinari and the US-based Rauschenberg Foundation have co-organised the current show, Rauschenberg in China (until August 21). The current management team will remain in place, and they will be continuing to organise some of the best exhibitions in China, Ullens and the UCCA spokesman said.

The chief executive of the UCCA, May Xue, released last year the gallerys annual operating costs of around Rmb41m ($6m), 25% from Ullens, 25% from corporate sponsorship, 20% from their charity auction, 10% from individual donors, and 20% generated by the centre.

News of the sale was first broken on Thursday (30 June) by the anonymous art blogger Route 66. The post sent the Chinese art world into a frenzy of speculation on social media, with laments that the institution might lose its integrity or might shut down entirely. UCCA is not closing, the spokesman stressed.

The first Matisse exhibition on the African continent is opening in Johannesburg, South Africa, at Standard Bank Gallery in July. Titled Rhythm and Meaning, the exhibition has been organised with the Muse Matisse, Le Cateau-Cambrsis in northern France which has loaned most of the works. The idea came from the French Institute in Johannesburg and the French embassy.

Federico Freschi, the dean of the faculty of art, design and architecture at the University of Johannesburg, has curated the show with Patrice Deparpe, the director of the Muse Matisse du Cateau-Cambrsis, which was founded by Matisse in his birth town.

Regarding the choice of Standard Bank Gallery as the venue, Deparpe says, When the Embassy of France contacted me to arrange a Matisse exhibition, I visited all the possible places. It turns out that the 'traditional' museums absolutely don't answer to the minimum criteria of security and conservation for this kind of exhibition. He adds that Standard Bank Gallery has already worked with the Muse Rodin in Paris and the Muse des beaux-arts de Lyon.

The running thread through the exhibition is freedom. Featured are around 70 works, including paintings, drawings, collages and prints covering the dominant themes in Matisse's work. A central exhibit is the suite of 20 impressions for the prints in Matisse's book Jazz (1947), which indicate how he was inspired by Kuba cloths from the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire). His correspondence indicates that he would hang these cloths on the walls of his studio and look at them for long periods, waiting for inspiration, informs Freschi, adding that these abstract forms also influenced Matisse's paper cut-outs in the 1940s and 1950s.

The fact that Matisse collected carved African figurines and masks, as well as Inuit masks and objects from Oceania, is being emphasized. Of particular interest to South African audiences is the inspiration he took from African and other non-Western art forms during the early 1900s while struggling to find a new visual language to express the particular experience of the new, modern age, says Freschi.

In conjunction with the exhibition, a bus is being transformed into a workshop so that school children in Soweto township can work on Matisse's paper cut-outs.

Henri Matisse: Rhythm and Meaning, Standard Bank Gallery, Johannesburg, 13 July-17 September 2016

Anyone who saw early presentations of Joel Shapiro's sculpture in New York will remember a small untitled floor piece from 1973: a foot-long wood mannikin pulled limb from limb, its wire spring ligaments exposed.

The bad boy gesture of this anomalous pieceits dismissal of sculpture's future as a representational art, its equation of construction with destructiongot immediate attention. Critics quickly connected it with Alberto Giacometti's Surrealist bronze Woman with Her Throat Cut (1932), another floor piece whose grisly insinuations punish a viewer's impulse to take it too literally.

Yet right down to his current Nasher Sculpture Center exhibition in Dallasan ensemble of ostensibly abstract sculpture and drawings deftly fitted into the museumShapiro has pursued and elaborated what we might call, with the faintest echo of Surrealism, the haunting of forms by our reflex to representational ways of seeing.

The big new untitled centerpiece of the Nasher show has the entry hall bay of the Center's elegant Renzo Piano building all to itself. In this work, Shapiro deploys all the resources of his art: assertive geometry, palpably improvised composition, the undisguised artifice of exposed internal joints and supports, pointed ambiguities of finish and, most dramatically, color. (A painted maquette of the piece in a separate gallery demonstrates his knack for knowing when a multi-color composition the size of a breadbox will work at the scale of a civic monument, without inflation of sentiment or of aesthetic magnetism.)

Intimations of figural anatomy, of architecture and art historical allusionparticularly to the crisp, utopian dreaminess of Constructivismpervade the big central work. Shapiro has left various faces of the sculpture's boxy wood components unpainted, evoking the appearance of surface grain by which many of his bronzes acknowledge the carpentered originals behind their casting. This variable treatment leaves a viewer vacillating between seeing the sculpture's parts as slabs of solid color, or as (incompletely) colored slabs.

Despite the exposure of small joints and footings that stabilise the sculpture, its compositional coherence renders unnoticeable the wide, low, white plinth on which it sits. In effect the work incorporates its base, foreshadowing more stagy levitations in the works that follow in the show.

As a maturing artist Shapiro studiedly flouted minimal sculpture's avoidance of pedestals, of easy illusions, hidden armatures, gravity defying structures and human reference. He toyed with mass, scale and shape in ways that activated bodily awareness of perception (as contemporaneous works by Carl Andre and Richard Serra did) while teasing the eye with figural inklings, such as recurrent rhombhedral forms suggestive of a generic house. Such forms, properly positioned or abridged, as a few appear in the Nasher, can also suggest heads: metaphoric, if sometimes inhospitable, dwellings of the mind or self.

A second bay of the Nasher building contains an installation of five new works intended for the space, each painted a single color.


A large, faceted construction in blue, the most figural of the lot, sits on the floor. A viewer may want to say it sits "upright," though its form implies no possible alternative position. Its crumpled L-shape somehow troublingly brings to mind the images of 21st century American war veteran amputees that occasionally interrupt the smooth image traffic of the common culture. (A number of small hanging, stunted figures he made in the past decade also conjure thoughts of the "stress positions" inflicted on designated "enemy combatants.")

Formally, the work rebukes the cubistic mumblings of lesser sculptors such as James Rosati and Bruce Beasley. Its title,  Really Blue (after all) (2016), evokes a memory of Yves Klein's signature hue, and of the imagined bodily aftermath of Klein's famous staged (and manipulated) photograph, Leap into the Void (1960).

Shapiro's twists of form, their felt yet impossible-to-decode fluctuations of scale, volume, implied mass and symbolism, seem to obey an unconscious logic subtending the self-conscious etiquette of reception.

A yellow solid, guyed to the floor and ceiling with thin cables like the other hanging pieces here, recalls the enigmatic polyhedron that furnishes Albrecht Durer's 1514 engraving, Melencolia I, an allusionif we count it onethat dims emotionally the sculpture's sunny color.

The least characteristic thing here, hanging kite-like near the ceiling, is a not a solid, from most vantage points, but a gray open form that reads like a torn-away corner of fragile architecture, or a pesky fragmentary memory of a Donald Judd box.  

Surprisingly, this five element installation reminded me most forcefully of Shapiro's early dismembered lay figure, not by any overt visceral echo, but the way it again raises so many questions: what holds a work of art (or an ensemble) together? What holds its interpretation together? And, ultimately, what holds together the responsive self?

"The only thing I want to do is stick stuff in space," Shapiro says. It is a statement that serves as a finger in the dike to such effusions. And his ink-blot abstractions on paper, a few reminiscent of Henri Matisse or Sam Francis, others closer to Hermann Rorschach, bring us back to the child's play roots of Shapiro's art.

The show left me thinking of Nietzsche's definition of maturity: "to recover the seriousness one had as a child at play."

The Nasher invites a wide-minded reading of Shapiro's new work by grading it into the context of the museum's permanent collection, mingling earlier acquisitions of his work with germane, powerful neighbors such as Anthony Caro's deep green steel Sculpture 3 (1961), a pair of late 1940s figurines by Giacometti and Spider (1940) by Alexander Calder, which levitates forms in a manner worlds away from Shapiro's.    


Kenneth Baker retired in 2015 after 30 years as resident art critic for The San Francisco Chronicle. He is an Art Newspaper correspondent based in San Francisco.


Joel Shapiro, Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, until 21 August

The multidisciplinary work of Ragnar Kjartansson does not fall into conventional categories. Histories of film, music, theatre and literature all feed into his video installations and performances as well as his drawings and paintings. The 40-year-old Icelandic artist stages works that can go on for hours and even weeks. These epics oscillate between fact and fiction, the poetic and the absurd, and generally involve many participantsactors, musicians, friends, family members and himself. Partly inspired by his crazy godmother who sang for Sigmund Freud, he is also well known as a musician and singer and even has his own record label. He spoke to The Art Newspaper from his Reykjavik studio as he prepared for the opening of his first UK survey at Londons Barbican Centre.



The Art Newspaper: The Barbican seems the perfect venue for your first big UK show as, like much of your work, it encompasses art, music, film and theatre.

Ragnar Kjartansson:  It makes total sense. Ever since I was a kid we would go on trips to London and go to the Barbican and see the future.


Both your parents are actors. Was this theatrical background an important influence?

It was crucial. I was raised in the theatre and just being backstage watching these people in make-up and in rehearsal, when the same scene was repeated and repeated over and over again, was almost a sculptural thing, and a lot of my art comes from that. Also watching my parents and their friends discussing how they wanted to make people feel just seemed like crazy showbusiness and so unlike visual art.


What is real and what is play-acting seems to be a dominant theme.

Yes, its a really slippery thing and something Im always working with. Complicated things like irony make everything more honest in a wayits how we talk together and how we communicate. Honesty is just dull, at the end of the day.


Music, in one form or another, always features in your work.


I had this crazy godmother [Engel Lund] living in my basement, who spoke 20 languages and sang folk songs from all over the worldshe did a private concert for Freud in Londonand her legacy is still going strong all over the world. Another huge influence was the music scene in Reykjavik. Its a crazy city with so much going on, and when I was growing up it was the Sugarcubes and all this badass stuff happening there. Because grunge was the mainstream thing, we had the most polite band on Earth. It was called Ks.


Why did you choose to go to art school rather than just focus on making music?


Because art school was cool. If you want to be a pop star you go to art school. All the pop stars went to art school, so thats why I went. But then the art goddess took me by the hand and led me away from the silliness of the pop world.


In the Barbican show are 144 paintings you made daily over six months in the Icelandic pavilion at the 2009 Venice Biennale. Is painting an important part of your practice?


I look at most of my works as paintings or sculpture in a way. Even though they come from a performative plan, the painterly idea is always with me and I always continue to work as an artist-painter. If the video works dont work as paintings, then I dont show them.


What criteria do you apply for a piece to work as a painting?


Just something that is there and can become more profound while you are staring at it. Thats a painting, basically.


Your daily paintings in Venice were made while you were living in a palazzo, copiously drinking and smokingliving the dream (and the nightmare) of the clichd Romantic painter.


It was acting out what it was like to be the classical macho 20th-century artist, trying to be [one of] these hard-drinking painters that I was always intrigued by in art school. They are such a very funny tribe. Making paintings is not so hardcore, but it was hardcore to be always drunk while doing it. The performance was that we were making these paintings and that we had to constantly drink beer and smokeit was really disgusting.
 

Much of your work has an often extreme durational and repetitive element. Why is it so important to test the limits of both the audience and the participants?


Its not really about testing strength. Basically thats just our lives. Human beings just repeat stuff; we are really good at it.


But putting the final aria from The Marriage of Figaro in a 12-hour live loop or making your nieces repeat the same folk song for a six-hour stretch is rather more than just everyday stuff.


It is. But because its more sublime than everyday stuff its easier to do it than everyday life, in a way. Im very intrigued by this constant tension between the sublime and the banal, and also with ideas like beauty. Beauty is this Satanistic thing that I really like to flirt with.


Do you repeat things to make us appreciate them more?


Absolutely. Its like looking at a painting: you stare at it and it unravels for you. Thats what repetition does to things that are performative or narrative in their essence. When you repeat them, the narration goes out of them and they become like a painting or a sculpture and unravel. Thats why I use repetitionto somehow unravel stuff. When I was in art school that was my normality. People were repeating stuff in my family all the time, and then I got to know Bruce Naumans work and it was, like, OK, they do it in art also!


Do you consider yourself part of the performance tradition of Bruce Nauman, Chris Burden, Marina Abramovic, et al?


I am absolutely a disciple of those Titians.


But your work plays with artifice and reality in a different way.


Seeing those works in art school, I guess I saw through them at the end of the day as being showbusiness. I love them to bits and pieces, but theres a lot of showbusiness. For example, Chris Burden has to make sure hes not shot in the heart. But that doesnt make the work any worse; I think it makes the work more profound. Marina Abramovic becomes more multilayered when you realise her work is so dramatic and truthful but its also matter of showbusiness at the same time.

Every five years from 2000 onwards you have made a film in which your mother repeatedly spits into your facewhy?


I was still at art school and I think the idea came from a work I saw by Gillian Wearing where there is a mother beating up her daughter [Sacha and Mum, 1998]. That piece was with actors, but then I realised, Wow! I have the real thing! I can ask my real mom to spit on me. So I was ripping off Gillian Wearing but, because I didnt know his work then, I didnt realise I was also ripping off Bruce Nauman.


But why every five years?


Because it becomes a memento mori. My mother is very good about it. She sometimes has trouble explaining it to her friends, but its become this family tradition and nobody questions it any more.


Are you trying to make a direct emotional connection with your audience?


Yes, I think so. Like all artists I guess I make work for myself, because I somehow want to see it and I hope that maybe somebody will dig it. But Im always very, very aware of having no expectations with the viewers. The minute I as a viewer feel that a work is trying to please me, then I dont have any interest any more: its just not sexy.

Ragnar Kjartansson, Barbican Art Gallery, London, 14 July-4 September

Its the summer of Ai Weiwei in Pittsburgh. The Chinese artist and activist discusses two exhibitions on show in Andy Warhols hometown in this video interview, made available exclusively to The Art Newspaper (Andy Warhol | Ai Weiwei at the Andy Warhol Museum, until 28 August, and Zodiac Heads at the Carnegie Museum of Art, until 29 August). Ai travelled to Pittsburgh in June for the openingshis first visit to the US since his travel ban was lifted by the Chinese government.

Although the two artists never officially met, Ai spotted Warhol from across the room at crowded downtown art events when they were both living in New York in the 1980s. You hear people say, Andy is here! and you realise you can see his hair somewhere in the crowd, Ai said.

 

There was a sense of occasion during last nights curated anniversary sale, which saw Christies offer 31 lots of art by British artists.

The sale fetched 87.2m (99.5m with fees), just below the total estimate of 95.7m-138m, and saw an 87% sell-through rate, with 27 out of the 31 lots finding buyers. The only disappointment of the sale was Lucian Freuds Ib and her Husband (1992), which carried an estimate of 18m and failed to sell. It had previously sold at Christies New York in 2007 for $19.4m with fees. Sometimes works just dont perform as wed expect, said the auctioneer Jussi Pylkkanen after the sale.

The rest of the sale took a much more positive turn, however, with auction records set for seven artistsFrederic Leighton, Henry Moore, David Roberts, Frank Auerbach, Lynn Chadwick, Bridget Riley and Thomas Daniell. The lot of the evening was Henry Moores monumental Reclining Figure (1951), cast as an edition of five, which sold above estimate for 22m (24.7m with fees). Bridget Rileys Untitled (Diagonal Curve) (1966) almost doubled the artist's previous record, selling for 3.8m (4.3m with fees; est 2.5m-3.5m). Riley herself was in the building during the sale, but was taking in her other works in a non-selling exhibition downstairs and was uninterested in what her works were selling for, according to Pylkkanen.

The benefits of a devalued pound sterling for foreign buyers were made apparent by the large number of Asian and US bidders on the phones. At least two spirited Asian bidders helped make an unlikely star of Alfred James Munnings' painting The Queen and Aureole in the Paddock at Epsom before the Coronation Cup (1954). Estimated at 400,000-600,000, lengthy bidding saw the work eventually sell for 1.8m (2.1m with fees). The Queen was undoubtedly a contributing factor, said John Stainton, the international director and head of British paintings, after the sale.

A number of house guarantees were converted last minute into third-party guarantees, indicating that the house may have been a little nervous given the current political and financial landscape, but specialists were pleased, and no doubt relieved, by the result. Weve never had 32 countries bidding on British art before, Pylkkannen said.

The contemporary sales this week proved the market is holding up well, and indeed the only disappointment of the June sales was Christies Impressionist and Modern evening auction of 22 June. Coincidentally, or not, the noticeable lack of bidders that night occurred on the eve of the UKs EU referendum vote, at a moment when global markets and currency traders were expecting to see the pound sterling soar against other currencies as a result of the UK voting to stay in Europe. For foreign buyers, it would have arguably been the worst night to buy art, as they could have risked spending much more on a work once their own currencies had been converted.