NEWS
Just Stop Oil activists jailed for throwing soup over Van Gogh’s Sunflowers
From The Guardian
Phoebe Plummer, 23, receives two-year prison term while Anna Holland, 22, given 20-month sentence over incident
Two Just Stop Oil activists have been jailed for throwing tomato soup over Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers after one of them told a judge she would “accept whatever sentences I receive with a smile”.
Phoebe Plummer, 23, was sentenced to two years in prison for causing an estimated £10,000-worth of damage to the artwork’s frame at the National Gallery in London in 2022.
Her co-defendant, Anna Holland, 22, received 20 months for the same offence, but will serve only half in custody.
Passing sentence at Southwark crown court on Friday, the judge, Christopher Hehir, told them: “You two simply had no right to do what you did to Sunflowers, and your arrogance in thinking otherwise deserves the strongest condemnation.
“The pair of you came within the thickness of a pane of glass of irreparably damaging or even destroying this priceless treasure, and that must be reflected in the sentences I pass.”
The defendants embraced and blew kisses to the public gallery from the dock before they were led down to the cells.
Just Stop Oil activists throw soup at Van Gogh’s Sunflowers after fellow protesters jailed
From The Guardian
Three individuals targeted National Gallery paintings an hour after Phoebe Plummer and Anna Holland were jailed for similar attack in 2022
Climate activists have thrown tomato soup over two Sunflowers paintings by Vincent van Gogh, just an hour after two others were jailed for a similar protest action in 2022.
Three supporters of Just Stop Oil walked into the National Gallery in London, where an exhibition of Van Gogh’s collected works is on display, at 2.30pm on Friday afternoon, and threw Heinz soup over Sunflowers 1889 and Sunflowers 1888.
The latter was the same work targeted by Phoebe Plummer and Anna Holland in 2022. That pair are now among 25 supporters of Just Stop Oil in jail for climate protests.
“Future generations will regard these prisoners of conscience to be on the right side of history,” Phil Green, one of those taking part in Friday’s action, told visitors to the gallery.
The Guardian view on the Turner prize at 40: not over yet
From The Guardian
The award that helped shoot young British artists to stardom is reaching middle age, but it still counts
Turning 40 was always going to be tricky for the Turner prize. Set up in 1984 to showcase the best in contemporary British art, the prize will for ever be remembered for Damien Hirst’s dead shark, Tracey Emin’s unmade bed and Martin Creed’s empty room with the lights going on and off. Riding the crest of Cool Britannia in the mid-to-late 90s, the Turner prize – and those headline-grabbing Young British Artists – helped make London an international cultural powerhouse. And it wasn’t just animal carcasses. Winners included luminaries such as Antony Gormley, Steve McQueen and Grayson Perry.
By 2001 it was so starry that Madonna presented the award. While the Turner remains the best-known art prize in the world, it is unlikely Taylor Swift would make space in her diary today. Can this one-time enfant terrible grow old gracefully without losing its vigour and urgency? Is it still a reliable index of the most exciting work on the British arts scene?
Monet in London, Matisse in Basel, Frankenthaler in Florence
From The Week in Art
This week, three major international shows: Claude Monet’s Thames views in London, the Henri Matisse retrospective in Basel and Helen Frankenthaler in Florence.
An exhibition that Claude Monet hoped to see in his lifetime but which never happened has at last become a reality. A gathering of Monet’s views of the Thames—looking from his hotel room at the Savoy and from across the river on a private terrace of St Thomas’s hospital—has just opened at the Courtauld Gallery in London. Monet had hoped to stage such an event in London soon after the paintings were exhibited to acclaim in Paris in 1904, but so quickly had they dispersed, he was unable to do so. Ben Luke spoke to the curator of the show, Karen Serres, first in the very room at the Savoy Hotel where he made many of the paintings, and then in the exhibition itself.
Meanwhile, a rare European retrospective of Henri Matisse’s work has opened at the Beyeler Foundation in Basel. Matisse: Invitation to the Voyage focuses on the artist’s travels, in the world and also in his imagination, through paintings, sculptures and cut-outs made over more than 50 years.
Ben Luke went to Basel and spoke to Raphaël Bouvier, the curator. And this episode’s Work of the Week is Mediterranean Thoughts (1960) one of the paintings in Helen Frankenthaler: Painting without Rules, a new exhibition at the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence.
Journalists Walk Out of Johnny Depp’s Modigliani Biopic Junket in Protest
From Artnet
Depp was promoting 'Modi' at the San Sebastian Film Festival, where journalists decried a lack of access.
A group of journalists who were set to interview Johnny Depp at the San Sebastian Film Festival have cancelled their coverage of the actor’s latest film, on Italian Modern artist Amedeo Modigliani, to protest the limited access they were offered by publicists.
Depp is promoting Modi: Three Days on the Wings of Madness, his second full-length feature film as director—the first was The Brave, a 1997 neo-Western—and was due to sit for interviews alongside actors Riccardo Scamarcio and Antonia Desplat on September 24. When publicists changed the arrangement of the interview, instead offering a single brief roundtable, the journalists refused.
Pace Gallery will represent Li Hei Di, now the youngest artist on its roster.
From Artsy
Pace Gallery has announced its representation of Li Hei Di, a young artist whose paintings combine figuration and abstraction to explore themes of embodiment, intimacy, and displacement. Li, who was born in 1997, will now be the youngest artist on the mega-gallery’s roster. They will be represented jointly by Pace, Michael Kohn Gallery, and Pippy Houldsworth Gallery.
ART MATERIAL
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