The Week in Art

This week: the Art Basel fair has opened in Switzerland, but are the collectors back and are they buying? We talk to Jane Morris, an editor-at-large at The Art Newspaper, about the art on show and whether the galleries’ jitters ahead of the fair have proved founded. Also, we hear from the classicist Mary Beard about her new book, Twelve Caesars, looking at representations of power across 2,000 years of art history, from Roman coins and busts, to 18th-century fakes, lost Titian masterpieces and Tudor tapestries. And in this episode’s Work of the Week, we focus on Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s L’Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped—the last ever wrapping project by the late duo. Vladimir Yavachev, Christo’s nephew, who has overseen the final stages of the project in Paris, describes the technical challenges of cloaking one of Paris’s most famous monuments. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week: as a tribunal in London hears of human rights atrocities against the Uyghur community and other Muslim groups in China, how will museums, galleries and other cultural institutions working with government-supported institutions in China respond? We talk to The Art Newspaper’s editor-at-large Cristina Ruiz, who has heard many hours of disturbing evidence at the tribunal, and to Sir Geoffrey Nice, the tribunal’s chair.Also, this week, Martin Bailey tells us about his latest book, Van Gogh's Finale, looking at his final months, his death and his legacy. And in this episode’s Work of the Week, we talk to Kenneth Tyler, the master-printmaker who has collaborated on some of the great prints of the post-war era, about his collaboration on a group of six woodcuts by Helen Frankenthaler, The Tales of Genji (1998), now on view in an exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

As a huge survey of contemporary painting opens at the Hayward Gallery in London, we ask: is the time-honoured medium of painting the art form best suited to exploring the complexity of our age?We look at the thriving and diverse contemporary painting scene in the UK and explore the Hayward director Ralph Rugoff’s suggestion that this ancient medium “seems like the best technology there could possibly be for reflecting on what it's like to live in a culture where image is the primary currency it is”. We talk to two emerging artists in that show: Baghdad-born Mohammed Sami and Beijing-born Vivien Zhang, who are both based in London. We meet Doron Langberg, the Brooklyn-based painter, and discuss his latest work reflecting on queer desire and identity and landscape as a space of mourning. And we ask art advisor Lisa Schiff, founder of SFA advisory, about paintings and collectors. And in this episode’s Work of the Week, we explore a newly restored canvas by one of the greatest of all painters, Johannes Vermeer—Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window (around 1657-59) has just been unveiled in its full glory for the first time in centuries at Dresden’s Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, fully revealing a hidden image of Cupid, painted by Vermeer but painted over by someone else. And we hear about new research on the painting. Plus, the latest big stories in the world of art and heritage. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We're back with a new season of The Week in Art, which takes us right up to the holidays.In this episode, we reflect on events in Afghanistan in recent weeks. We hear from an anthropologist and an Afghan artist about the country's people, art and heritage as the Taliban assume power again. Melissa Chiovenda, an assistant professor of anthropology at Zayed University in Abu Dhabi, discusses the sixth-century Bamiyan Buddhas that were destroyed by the Taliban in 2001 in the context of the Hazara people that live in Bamiyan city and province, and reflects on what the return to power of the Taliban means for that community. The artist Yama Rahimi addresses the implications for artists in Afghanistan and reflects on the contemporary art scene there over recent years. He also talks about the situation facing those people, including artists, that are able to leave Afghanistan and seek asylum in the West—a situation whose complexities he is familiar with as an asylum-seeker living in Germany.We also hear about a work being made in Notre Dame in Paris by the sound artist Bill Fontana, who is recording the cathedral's bells as they resonate to the sounds of the city. Fontana's project is the first to be made in Notre-Dame since the catastrophic fire in 2019. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It's an all-woman line-up on this week's podcast. Nancy Kenney speaks to Andrea Nelson, the curator of The New Woman Behind the Camera, an exhibition opening at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and touring later to the National Gallery of Art in Washington. Aimee Dawson talks to Camille Morineau, a former Centre Pompidou curator, about the Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions (Aware), an organisation she founded in order to rewrite art history from a more gender-equal perspective. And in this week’s Work of the Week, Helen Stoilas interviews Orin Zahra, a curator at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC, about a group of photographs in the series SHE (2019) by Rania Matar. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week: should the Science Museum in London stop taking money from the oil company Shell? We talk to a student activist, Anya Nanning Ramamurthy of the UK Student Climate Network, who held a protest at the Science Museum over the weekend of 19 and 20 June, and Chris Garrard, co-director of the ethical sponsorship campaigners Culture Unstained, about fossil-fuel sponsorship and the increasing pressure on the museum. Louisa Buck talks to the British artist Michael Landy about his exhibition Michael Landy's Welcome to Essex at Firstsite in Colchester in the southeastern English county of Essex. And in this week’s Work of the Week, Pakistani American artist Shahzia Sikander, who has a new exhibition at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York, talks to Helen Stoilas, our editor in the Americas, about Kṛṣṇa and Rādhā beneath a flowering tree, a manuscript miniature in the Indian Nathadvara style, painted between 1825 and 1850, which is in the Morgan’s collection. Sikander discusses the way she has brought a contemporary perspective on this work and the broader tradition of manuscript painting in South and Central Asia in her own practice. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week, we look at a much anticipated exhibition, Slavery at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. The Rijksmuseum is the Netherlands’ national art and history museum and the curators of the exhibition state in the catalogue that the country’s colonial past has been "insufficiently examined in the national history of the Netherlands, including at the Rijksmuseum”. Ben Luke talks to Valika Smeulders, head of history at the Rijksmuseum and one of the four curators of the exhibition, focusing on several works in the show and exploring the people—from enslaved men and women to wealthy Amsterdam denizens who benefit from slavery—who feature in the exhibition. Also in this episode: as next year’s Venice Biennale is named after The Milk of Dreams, a children’s book by the Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington, Ben talks to Joanna Moorhead, a relative of Carrington’s and the author of The Surreal Life of Leonora Carrington, about the stories, what they tell us about the author, and what they might mean for the next Venice Biennale. And this episode’s Work of the Week is actually two works: Peter Paul Rubens’s two landscape masterpieces The Rainbow Landscape and A View of Het Steen in the Early Morning, which have been reunited for the first time in 200 years at the Wallace Collection in London. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week: two festivals of art. Aimee Dawson talks to Frida Kahlo and Kathe Kollwitz of the Guerrilla Girls about their ongoing activism and their new billboards for Art Night, while Ben Luke discusses Glasgow International with its director, Richard Parry, and then reviews the work in the festival with The Art Newspaper’s contemporary art correspondent Louisa Buck. And in this week’s Work of the Week, Ben talks to Samantha Friedman, co-curator of the Museum of Modern Art in New York’s Cézanne Drawing show, about a study sheet of pencil sketches by the French artist, with an apple, a self-portrait, a bather and a portrait of Francisco Goya. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week: Mary Beard on Nero, one of the most infamous Roman emperors. Was he the sadistic murderer of legend, the emperor who fiddled as Rome burned, or has he been a victim of spin and myth? As well as getting Mary’s take on this infamous figure and Nero: the man behind the myth, the exhibition about him that’s just opened at the British Museum in London, Ben Luke also talks to the exhibition's curator Thorsten Opper. Also this week, as the first London Gallery Weekend begins—with 140 galleries from Mayfair to Mile End taking part—The Art Newspaper's editor-at-large Georgina Adam speaks to Jeremy Epstein, co-founder of Edel Assanti gallery and one of the founders of London Gallery Weekend initiative. And in this episode’s Work of the Week, we talk to the artist Nina Katchadourian about a very personal piece of embroidery, created by her adopted grandmother, which has inspired a new work by the artist in her show at Pace in New York. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week: Viking-age treasures—what the medieval gold, silver, textiles and even dirt in a hoard found in 2014 in Scotland can tell us about the Viking age, its people, its art and its international networks.Ben Luke talks to the curator Martin Goldberg about the Galloway Hoard, which has just gone on view at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh. Also this week: six proposals for the highest-profile public art commission in London, the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, have gone on view at London’s National Gallery. We discuss the proposals and the current climate for public art in London with Ekow Eshun, Chair of the Fourth Plinth Commissioning Group, and Justine Simons, London’s Deputy Mayor for Culture and the Creative Industries. And in this episode’s Work of the Week, we talk about Nike Air Force 1s, the design that changed the face of global sneaker culture, with Ligaya Salazar of London’s Design Museum. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.