Articles

It’s not sheer chance that great historical art centers such as Venice, Amsterdam and New York all became important commercial centers at around the same time. That is also part of Antwerp’s story. Antwerp is world renowned for its diamonds, its port, its fashion mecca as well as its international art center. In 1600 its Golden Age came to an end and a young Rubens walked through its streets.

"The ability to create is first perceived as a rare skill reserved for a few exceptional individuals, and is now considered a widespread and easily accessible phenomenon. This new conception of creation, referred to as the new word "creativity", has taken on such importance that it has now invaded all sectors of human activity".

ArtDependence Magazine is based in Antwerp, Flanders, where a regional election is about to take place. We asked the key players in the election to share their views on art and culture and to tell us when they last visited a museum. We also asked what they would be doing for art and culture if they win the elections.

Archaeologists have discovered an ancient cemetery near Egypt's famous pyramids in the Giza plateau near Cairo, said the country's ministry of antiquities. Wooden tombs painted in various colours and limestone statues were among the treasures found in the 4,500-year-old burial ground.

I M Pei, the architect behind buildings including the glass pyramid outside the Louvre in Paris, has died aged 102. Tributes have been pouring in, remembering him for a lifetime of designing iconic structures worldwide. Pei's designs are renowned for their emphasis on precision geometry, plain surfaces and natural light. He carried on working well into old age, creating one of his most famous masterpieces - the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, Qatar - in his 80s.

Magnum photographer Susan Meiselas was announced as the 2019 winner of the prestigious £30,000 prize at a special award ceremony at The Photographers’ Gallery, London for her first European retrospective Mediations at Jeu de Paume, Paris 2018.

Working mainly in video installations and sculptures, artist Elias Cafmeyer creates site-specific installations. His work is often inspired by and placed in public spaces that show a context with the city that contains them. Cafmeyer sees the city landscape as a metaphor for social construction and focusses on the traces of urban development and the signs and symbols that orchestrate our mobility within those environments.

Announcement made in conjunction with discussion “Preserving the Future: Conserving Contemporary Art in the Digital Age” at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, held on the occasion of the vernissage of the 2019 Venice Biennale, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and F Trustee Vladimir Potanin.

The Van Gogh Museum has secured three new acquisitions for its collection: an Impressionist still life by Gustave Caillebotte, a landscape with a house by Gabriele Münter – the first painting by Münter to enter a Dutch museum – and a significant Vincent van Gogh letter, which he wrote to Albert Aurier in response to the art critic’s comprehensive review praising his work.

Multispectral scans, taken last week of a life-size canvas of the Last Supper, have revealed that Leonardo da Vinci very likely painted the beautiful face of the Apostle John. The scans, which were conducted at the Abbey of Tongerlo in Belgium where the painting has hung for more than 450 years, confirm the findings of a new book, The Da Vinci Legacy (Apollo Publishers, 2019), by art historians Jean-Pierre Isbouts and Christopher H. Brown.

Ukrainian authorities discovered an oil painting by the French Impressionist Paul Signac, valued at 1.5 million euros ($1.68 million), which was stolen last year from a museum in France. Police chief Sergiy Knyazev said the painting was discovered at the home of a Kiev man who was also wanted on suspicion of murdering a jeweller.

"If science can become instrumental in rediscovering the true values of our cultural heritage, and using widespread modern technologies attract the interest and curiosity of new generations, then I can see a new renaissance for the role of art in the future. Hopefully, in the decades to come people will still feel linked to their past if it will be identified as fundamental for the creation of their identity".

The mural popped up yesterday night when protestors gathered at Marble Arch to celebrate the end of the ten day long demonstrations. The image showed a child clutching an XR sign while crouching near a plant, with accompanying words: ‘From this moment despair ends and tactics begin’.

In the sixteenth century, so the story goes, Iran imported glass from Europe, but it would arrive fractured and broken after its long journey. Artisans began using the shards to decorate mosques, creating the intricate mosaics known as aineh-kari, in which mosques' domed ceilings and fretted walls are transformed into sparkling arrays. Years later, the Iranian artist Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, who died on Saturday in Tehran, used this technique as the inspiration for her distinctive sculptures and wall-hung works.

“How do you see this tree? said Gauguin at the Bois d’Amour: Is it really green? Use green, then, the most beautiful green on your palette. And that shadow, rather blue? Don't be afraid to paint it as blue as possible”.

Laura Focarazzo is a video artist and independent curator, based in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Her works include experimental films and videos. She uses the sounds as a 'script' for the construction of non-narrative pieces. She collaborates with local and international sound artists. She works with her own field recordings and abstract images as raw materials in the construction of her videos.

François-Henri Pinault — chairman and CEO of Kering, the French-based luxury group behind Gucci, Balenciaga, Yves Saint Laurent and other world-renowned brands — has pledged $113 million towards the rebuilding of the Notre Dame cathedral.

Laurent Ferri, a curator at the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections at Cornell University told Bloomberg the relics inside were “now likely reduced to ashes”. If some were lost, many more were saved. The city’s mayor, Anne Hidalgo, said most of the significant artwork and holy objects inside were recovered. France’s culture minister Franck Riester shared images of priceless artworks being loaded into trucks.

Notre Dame cathedral has caught fire, according to the Parisian fire service and eyewitnesses. Footage posted online shows a large fire engulfing the upper part of the cathedral, with the flames licking around its two bell towers.

A researcher says he has found where William Shakespeare lived in London and wrote some of his most popular works, including Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night's Dream. Evidence shows Shakespeare lived in lodgings overlooking the graveyard of St Helen's Church in the 1590s, theatre historian Geoffrey Marsh said.