4 h. ago Louvre jewellery heist saw 'criminal gang pose as workmen' in seven

The audacious daylight raid took place just as the world-famous Paris art museum was preparing to open at around 9.30am on Sunday morning.

Events

8 h. ago The most famous art heists in history, from the Mona Lisa to a golden toilet

The Louvre, where jewellery was stolen on Sunday, has a long history of thefts

Politics

38 h. ago ‘Dad taught me not just to look at the world but to really see it’: Ariel Meyerowitz’s best phone picture

The art adviser captured a portrait of her famous father – the photographer Joel Meyerowitz – as he pointed his camera at her during a visit to an exhibitionAs a child, Ariel Meyerowitz would follow her famous father around with a little Olympus XA camera and mimic his work as a photographer. Once home, he’d edit the images on a slide projector, inviting his daughter to sit alongside him. “He loved having a little shadow,” Meyerowitz recalls. “Watching him click through the slides, I learned not just to look at the world but to really see it, to notice the relationship between people and place, the colour of everything, and the humour or poignancy of it all.”To the wider world, that “perpetually creative, present and loving” father is Joel Meyerowitz, the renowned American photographer. He is also the man in this photo, photographing his daughter who is in turn photographing both him and a sculpture on display at Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone’s show The Rainbow Body. Continue reading...

Politics

4 d. ago A notorious nude and pages from the Guardian? Claire Fontaine’s dazzling show has got the lot!

The duo behind Claire Fontaine discuss their new exhibition, which explores everything from prison atrocities to neon profanities – and even pairs this newspaper with a Courbet masterpieceThe work of Claire Fontaine is filled with rich and complex objects and images whose status and meaning is constantly in flux. There are jokes. There is a handwritten text in watercolour, copied out again and again, freeing the writer from the injustices of their ancestors (I AM FREE, it concludes). There is work riffing on Marcel Duchamp’s moustachioed and goateed Mona Lisa, swapping his ribald but puzzling 1919 caption LHOOQ with LGBTQ+. There are book jackets about Palestine’s wrecked ecology and visual activism in Palestine post 7 October, each wrapped around blocks of stone, like messages to be sent crashing through somebody’s window.At the 2024 Venice Biennale, Claire Fontaine’s neon signs reading Foreigners Everywhere appeared and reappeared, written in dozens of languages, around the Giardi...

Politics

1 week ago That’s me in the £45m Hockney! The man in the masterpiece relives sitting for David back in the heady LA party days

It was a landmark moment in queer art, painted when homosexuality was illegal in California. As this famous painting of Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy goes under the hammer, the surviving sitter looks back‘Heh, heh, heh, heh, heh!” Laughter explodes down the line from California. “It was a very long time ago!” says the painter Don Bachardy. His voice is high and rasping. Listening to him, you could be forgiven for thinking that the late Truman Capote was still with us. As for what happened “a very long time ago”, Bachardy is referring to the parties he threw with his partner, the British novelist Christopher Isherwood. Their home in Adelaide Drive, Santa Monica, was a salon thronged by movie stars and writers as well as Bachardy’s fellow artists.“Yes, we had a good time back then, but you can’t expect me to remember exactly who was here!” he says. It’s a fair point. Isherwood has been dead for almost 40 years and Bachardy, who is 91, suffers from some of the conditions that ...

Society

2 w. ago PBS 'Masterpiece' series ‘The Gold’ explores Britain’s biggest heist in history

PBS's “Masterpiece” series “The Gold” explores Britain's biggest robbery, the 1983 Brinks-Mat heist

Culture

2 w. ago At Vuitton, the Louvre is a stage for stars, spectacle and Paris Fashion Week's moving masterpiece

Fans have jammed the gates of the Louvre for the Louis Vuitton show at Paris Fashion Week

Politics

2 w. ago Pittsburgh: I found an unexpected farm to fork oasis in this industrial US city famous for sports and pop art

“Monster or Atomic?” is the first question I’m asked as I crawl into Sunseri’s, red-eyed after my hop across the Atlantic.

Politics

3 w. ago I was falling hard for Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 – then it betrayed me at the final hour | Dominik Diamond

I tried my hand at this year’s French arthouse gaming hit, but after an intense initial infatuation, the relationship hit the rocksWe don’t just observe art; we have a relationship with it. Whether it’s music, paintings or movies, the artist does their bit – but it’s the involvement of our own psyche that completes the circle. This is even more true for games, because we don’t sit for 100 hours in front of the Mona Lisa.Relationships with art change over time. I appreciated animation more when I was a younger man. I appreciate jazz much more today. I find the Mona Lisa alluring or boring depending on what mood I am in. Continue reading...

Politics

3 w. ago David Bowie’s Aladdin Sane artwork could fetch record sum at auction

Image described as the ‘Mona Lisa of Pop’ will be auctioned along with a number of other Bowie-related items next month

Economics