You are currently browsing the monthly archive for April 2010.
Natalia Goncharova, who died in 1962, was already the highest selling female artist at auction when Espagnole, painted during the First World War, sold in February for £6.4m. It beat her previous record of £5.5m set for Les Fleurs, sold in 2008 (Photo: Christie’s)
The Russians are coming. The multi-million pound herd of buyers who stampede around the world in pursuit of the art market’s “next big thing” is rushing this weekend to buy into what they hope will be the latest bubble: Russian art
Auctioneers in Manhattan shifted more than 600 works from the former Soviet Union in just two days of what is being described as a “Russian tidal wave”.
The surge is partly thanks to the economic downturn which has seen the volume of work sold by the relatively cheaper artists soar.
Andrew Johnson
The Independent
Can Brasilia really be just 50 years old?
Brasilia Cathedral, Brasília (Photo: Victor Soares/ABr)
When the new capital of Brazil was dedicated by President Juscelino Kubitschek on April 21, 1960, its grand avenues, laid out by Lucio Costa, and dramatic modernist buildings by architect Oscar Niemeyer seemed to symbolize one thing: the crisp newness of the modern world, unburdened by history or context.
In fact, Kubitschek was so eager to call attention to the city — built from scratch in a remote spot 600 miles inland from the old capital of Rio de Janeiro — that he held the dedication ceremony while most of Brasilia was still under a cloud of construction dust. The president was in a hurry not only to craft an up-to-date Brazilian identity but to mark a clean break with the nation’s complex past.
Christopher Hawthorne
Los Angeles Times
It’s a wrap: the Water Cube for the Beijing Olympics (Photo: Getty)
Picture, for a moment, the buildings you really loathe – the ones you think are such a brutish affront to humane urban life that they should be flattened. The NatWest tower in London, perhaps? Or, if you want to think mendaciously big, what about the whole of the centre of Croydon? Now re-imagine them, but this time encased in giant condoms. You needn’t be too shocked, because that’s exactly what a trio of Australian-based high-tech architects called LAVA are proposing – and they’ve said the Barbican in London is a suitable case for treatment.
The idea of sheathed buildings is not entirely trivial. And the forms that LAVA, or the Laboratory for Visionary Architecture, are proposing raise fresh ambiguities about architectural causes and effects. Will buildings with high- tech skins make architecture an increasingly superficial experience; or are we seeing the first strange expressions of a new kind of environmental design? These designers are not just theorists. Led by Chris Bosse, and working with engineers, Arup, LAVA created the visually and technically advanced bubble-wrap that formed the weirdly cellulitic facades of the Water Cube at the Beijing Olympics. This is very much can-do technology.
The Independent
Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa standing in front of the building they designed for the Zollverein School, Essen, Germany, 2006 (Photo: Thomas Mayer/arcspace.com)
A usually melancholy springtime ritual for lovers of the building art is the announcement of the latest winner of the Pritzker Prize for Architecture. Thus the revelation of this year’s surprise winners—Kazuyo Sejima, 53, and Ryue Nishizawa, 43, principals of the Tokyo firm SANAA (Sejima and Nishizawa and Associates)—has been cause for rejoicing among those who treasure the honorees’ delicately calibrated and deeply humane sensibility. They are further unusual in architecture as a female-male pairing not married to one another, and rarer still, one in which the senior partner is a woman.
Martin Filler
New York Review of Books
The Britain that Labour built: blocks of new-build flats for sale in Sighthill, Edinburgh. Photograph: Murdo Macleod
When Labour launched its manifesto last week, it chose a brand new building as a backdrop. This was the Queen Elizabeth hospital, Birmingham, where the first phases of a new £545m super-hospital will open in June. The forecourt where the cabinet gathered to brandish their paperless manifesto memory sticks looked somewhat bleak, but never mind. We were invited to admire the scale of the investment behind the V-formation of grinning ministers.
Labour has been an enthusiastic builder. It has embarked on a huge hospital building programme and has promised “to rebuild or renew nearly every secondary school”. It has celebrated construction which flourished in the prolonged boom. In his first conference speech as prime minister, Brown promised 240,000 new homes a year, a target that has shrivelled in the merciless drought of recession.
It also, in its early days, proclaimed the importance of architecture and design, to an extent never before heard from a British government.
Rowan Moore
Guardian
Sublime white wastes … Rachel Whiteread’s Embankment in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. Photograph: David Levene
Ian McEwan’s novel Solar is an allegory of entropy and the death of the planet, an eco-comedy, a dark meditation on how human failings make it unlikely that we will act on global warming. But it also has some jokes about contemporary British art.
The most sustained and hilarious episode in Solar tells how its bad-scientist antihero goes on a fact-finding trip to the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen to see the melting of the Arctic for himself. This journey to the frozen north is brilliantly imagined, with all the hallucinatory visual conviction that made McEwan’s early short stories so shocking. You are there, and when an unfortunate incident results from the character’s attempt to pee in sub-zero conditions (don’t keep it out too long!), it’s as bizarrely gripping as anything he has ever written.
Jonathan Jones
Guardian
Today marks the annual pilgrimage of 100,000 sun-seeking music fans to the Southern California desert for the three-day Coachella Music and Arts Festival. Sure Jay-Z’s playing. So are Thom Yorke, MGMT, DEVO, and Gorillaz–but there are also giant art and architectural installations created by a who’s who of Southern California architects. This year, Crimson Collective, an L.A.-based group of artists, architects, and designers constructed Ascension, a 45-foot tall crane with a 150-foot wingspan.
Alissa Walker
Fast Company
As the crowds trickled through the Sully wing of the Louvre one recent afternoon, a stocky, middle-aged Frenchman looked around furtively before whipping a gilt-framed painting from under his leather jacket and fixing it to the wall.
Placed alongside the august portraits of Salle 59, the miniature – a vanité depicting two skulls – held its own amid the splendour of the room’s more conventional treasures.
But its presence was not welcome and when the artist returned to see it today it had been removed by irate museum staff. “Now I have to write a letter to the president director-general or someone to get it back. It’s pathetic,” he said.
Pascal Guérineau, 47, has in recent weeks become the bête noire of Paris’s most prestigious galleries and their eagle-eyed security guards.
Lizzie Davies
Guardian
Wayne Clough, the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, detailed a plan on Monday to transform the 1881 Arts and Industries building into an education center, with programming that would emphasize the four themes outlined in the Smithsonian’s new strategic plan: biodiversity and sustainability, the American experience, exploring the universe, and valuing world cultures. The Arts and Industries building, which in the past housed temporary exhibits and has been empty since 2004, needs $65 million in structural renovations, according to Linda St. Thomas, the Smithsonian’s spokeswoman. On Monday, the Smithsonian’s Board of Regents reviewed a concept design for the building by the Los Angeles-based architecture firm Morphosis; its potential cost has not been determined, Ms. St. Thomas said. The Arts and Industries building has also been discussed as a possible site for a future national Latino museum. A presidential commission is currently studying the potential for such a museum.
Kate Taylor
New York Times
To expand downtown or not to expand downtown, this is the nagging, seemingly unanswerable question facing the Whitney Museum of American Art. The museum won’t know the right answer for sure until it tries it; if it doesn’t, it will never know. But it is right in asserting that it must do something to remain viable in what has become a cutthroat competition for museum visitors in New York.
Roberta Smith
New York Times
