In this cynical and individualistic world we live in, acts of generosity always cause surprise. The gift in question is worth 6 million euros according to insurers. It came into existence last year when the Potanin Foundation, belonging to Russian oligarch Vladimir...
At the turn of the 20th century, with Europe about to be shaken by a world war and a revolution, the world of painting was also in a state of extreme turmoil. The objective was to destroy the old order. In Paris, then global epicentre of the avant-garde, but also...
What does it mean to be a political artist in this day and age? I can already see readers deliberating whether to close their screens… But don’t go anywhere, this won’t be boring. The most high profile political artist working today is Ai Weiwei. He posts, tweets, and...
Diane Arbus (1923-1971) is one of the most revered photographers of the modern age. Her appeal stems in large part from her rare ability to capture the uniqueness and even the pain in her  subjects. A tense child gripping a toy grenade; a monstrous giant in the...
The streets are completely empty. A few forsaken pedestrians pass at irregular intervals along the pavement. Here we are in Arlington Heights, the low-rent neighbourhood in Central Los Angeles. There’s nothing much to report aside from the slight reigning melancholy...
The first time the Guggenheim New York honoured a Chinese artist with an exhibition the year was 2008 and the artist in question was Cai Guo Qiang. Even if his name is almost impossible to pronounce for western people, his artworks (born in 1957 in Quanzhou City,...
This is the story of a man who in 1969 opened a store selling jeans and ended up with a ready-to-wear empire spanning 3,100 outlets across the globe. It’s also the story of the simple son of a cabinet-maker from San Francisco who accumulated a collection of...
Art by authors is the big thing right now. The Palais de Tokyo in Paris is placing Michel Houellebecq's uneven photography in the spotlight. Galerie du Passage is exhibiting  the french writer Francoise Sagan's deliberately out-of-focus photographs, albeit poorly...
The Rencontres d'Arles photography festival stages forty  exhibitions dotted around the small Provençal city best known as the place where Vincent Van Gogh cut off a small piece of his ear. But let’s leave Van Gogh to one side today, even if the brand new foundation...
He’s an arch-narcissist, his teeth are falling out, he’s unattractive, provocative, intelligent, cynical, disabused and expresses himself spiritedly with his lapidary pronouncements. Michel Houellebecq, the runaway success of the French publishing world, a writer who...
There once was a Swiss businessman who became the world’s biggest collector of Chinese art before giving almost all of it away to a Hong Kong museum... This is the remarkable story of Uli Sigg, the famous art world personality, as told in a new documentary by German...
On paper it was the best news from the European art world this season. Tate Modern, the epicentre of modern and contemporary art in Britain, is tightening its grip by adding 60% more exhibition space in a new extension designed – like the original gallery, which...