http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art-and-architecture/features/?service=Rss http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art-and-architecture/features/was-wyndham-lewis-the-greatest-portraitist-of-his-time-861134.html http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art-and-architecture/features/was-wyndham-lewis-the-greatest-portraitist-of-his-time-861134.html <p>"The greatest portraitist of this or any other time", Walter Sickert once called Wyndham Lewis. Blimey. It's a rare artist-to-artist compliment, and the National Portrait Gallery makes much of it at the entrance to "Wyndham Lewis: Portraits". Not entirely wrong, though. He's certainly one of the the greatest. </p> Features Mon, 07 Jul 2008 00:00:01 +0100 http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art-and-architecture/features/theres-never-been-a-great-woman-artist-860865.html http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art-and-architecture/features/theres-never-been-a-great-woman-artist-860865.html <p>Women artists face prejudice and discrimination, with their works selling for a fraction of the price of their male counterparts, one of the world's leading art dealers claimed yesterday.</p> Features Sun, 06 Jul 2008 00:00:01 +0100 http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art-and-architecture/features/yinka-shonibare-the-battle-of-trafalgar-853268.html http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art-and-architecture/features/yinka-shonibare-the-battle-of-trafalgar-853268.html <p> When Yinka Shonibare accepted his MBE from the Prince of Wales in 2005, there was a certain irony to the situation. Shonibare's work explores British history &ndash; and colonialism in particular. Born in Britain to Nigerian parents, he uses traditional African fabrics in his work, which express the entangled relationship between Africa and Europe. The cloth is used as critique of the history of Empire, yet an MBE brought Shonibare to the heart of the Establishment. He wasn't mocking the award by accepting it &ndash; he is genuinely proud of it &ndash; although he feels there is a critical element to his attitude. </p> Features Wed, 25 Jun 2008 00:00:24 +0100 http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art-and-architecture/features/how-did-richard-prince-produce-the-most-expensive-photograph-ever-850589.html http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art-and-architecture/features/how-did-richard-prince-produce-the-most-expensive-photograph-ever-850589.html <p> As you'd expect of a compulsive collector, Richard Prince's study is full of stuff: you know the kind of thing &ndash; a Warhol Car Crash, a custom-bound first edition of Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho, an original copy of Sylvia Plath's verse with handwritten notes by Ted Hughes. Prince isn't gesturing at these, though, but at an issue of French Vogue with a cheesy-looking model on the cover &ndash; a pseudo Bad Girl, faux-sneering from the seat of a Harley. "It's a 'Girlfriend'!" Prince yelps, his voice breaking with indignation. "They stole this from me! Well, I'm going to steal it right back." </p> Features Sun, 22 Jun 2008 00:00:01 +0100 http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art-and-architecture/features/over-exposed-is-annie-leibovitz-worthy-of-a-retrospective-at-the-national-portrait-gallery-849918.html http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art-and-architecture/features/over-exposed-is-annie-leibovitz-worthy-of-a-retrospective-at-the-national-portrait-gallery-849918.html <p> In the announcement of the National Portrait Gallery's forthcoming retrospective of work by the celebrated New York-based portrait photographer Annie Leibovitz, one of the sponsors of the show lets us know how proud he is to be working with Annie (note the personal touch) again. Words such as trust, respect, service are bandied about. These are words that are at odds with what many of us think photographers are up to quite a lot of the time. But surely Leibovitz is not one of these? Surely Leibovitz, photographer of an entire, all-too-well-known world of stars and starlets, is not quite like this? </p> Features Thu, 19 Jun 2008 00:00:01 +0100 http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art-and-architecture/features/art-of-darkness-dave-brownrsquos-merciless-satire-849084.html http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art-and-architecture/features/art-of-darkness-dave-brownrsquos-merciless-satire-849084.html <p>I'm a visual journalist. I provide a personal view of a news story, just like the other writers on The Independent's comment pages. But, whereas an 800-word article is easy to put to one side and think, "Maybe I'll read that later," the thing about a cartoon is that you can read it in seconds. That's the cartoonist's strength &ndash; I can make a point very rapidly. Hopefully, of course, you can go back and get a bit more from the cartoon later as well (perhaps once you've finished reading the rest of the day's paper).</p> Features Wed, 18 Jun 2008 00:00:01 +0100 http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art-and-architecture/features/milehigh-tower-wars-how-tall-is-too-tall-849088.html http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art-and-architecture/features/milehigh-tower-wars-how-tall-is-too-tall-849088.html <p>Prince Charles famously doesn't care for skyscrapers. He sees them as a vain attempt to assert masculinity, like a rock star with a cucumber down his trousers &ndash; or, as he puts it: "Trying to make them ever taller than the other person's building is surely taking the commercial macho into the realms of adolescent lunacy".</p> Features Wed, 18 Jun 2008 00:00:01 +0100 http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art-and-architecture/features/bridge-over-troubled-water-zaha-hadids-latest-architectural-creation-848323.html http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art-and-architecture/features/bridge-over-troubled-water-zaha-hadids-latest-architectural-creation-848323.html <p> Zaha Hadid's latest architectural creation, the 270m-long Bridge Pavilion across the Ebro river in Zaragoza, Spain, has brought the ghost of the legendary 1920s Russian artist Kazimir Malevich to a conservative city that once garrisoned Franco's troops and was marched on by the 2,000 anarchists of the legendary Durruti Column during the civil war. So is the bridge's architecture revolutionary, or anarchic, or something else entirely? </p> Features Tue, 17 Jun 2008 00:00:01 +0100 http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art-and-architecture/features/the-5minute-interview-cornelia-parker-artist-846941.html http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art-and-architecture/features/the-5minute-interview-cornelia-parker-artist-846941.html <p><b>Shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1997, Parker, 51, has works in the Tate Collection and all over the world. She will be in conversation with Ron Arad as part of a series of talks at the Jerwood Space, in London, on 16 June.</b></p> Features Sat, 14 Jun 2008 00:00:01 +0100 http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art-and-architecture/features/ahead-of-the-herd-norman-foster-redesigns-the-elephant-house-at-a-denmark-zoo-845087.html http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art-and-architecture/features/ahead-of-the-herd-norman-foster-redesigns-the-elephant-house-at-a-denmark-zoo-845087.html <p> Norman Foster, the world's most celebrated hi-tech architect &ndash; the Sultan of Seamlessness, so to speak &ndash; has just completed an elephant house at Copenhagen Zoo that is not just low-tech but, to an almost shocking degree, earthy in its materiality. If this building had been designed by masters of architectural texture and surface such as Herzog and de Meuron, or Peter Zumthor, that quality would have been a given. The fact that Foster + Partners created this tough and strangely pre-eroded domain is a bolt from the blue. In its way, the elephant house may be as seminal for the practice as the black glass amoeba in Ipswich, known as the Willis Faber building, was in 1974.</p> Features Thu, 12 Jun 2008 00:00:01 +0100 http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art-and-architecture/features/win-a-signed-bob-dylan-print-843310.html http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art-and-architecture/features/win-a-signed-bob-dylan-print-843310.html <p> The Independent has teamed up with the UK&rsquo;s leading fine art publishers, Washington Green, to give away a limited-edition graphic of Bob Dylan&rsquo;s Sunday Afternoon, signed by Dylan himself and worth &pound;1,000. To be in with a chance of winning, email your answer to the following question to <b><a href="mailto:competitions@independent.co.uk">competitions@independent.co.uk</a></b> : </p> Features Tue, 10 Jun 2008 00:00:47 +0100 http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art-and-architecture/features/another-side-of-bob-dylan-843402.html http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art-and-architecture/features/another-side-of-bob-dylan-843402.html <p> When you spend so much of your time on the road, there are so many spaces between the spaces. So, some time between about 1989 and 1992, Bob Dylan took up drawing again. He'd drawn in the past, a great deal in the 1960s. In fact, after that mysterious motorcycle accident of his, he even spent some time in the bowels of Carnegie Hall being tutored in art by a Russian professor of painting. We'd seen his artwork on the sleeves of his albums, too &ndash; that strange, startled moon face that stares out at us from Self Portrait, for example, or that bristling sheaf of stark faces on the cover of Planet Waves. </p> Features Tue, 10 Jun 2008 00:00:01 +0100 http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art-and-architecture/features/shadows-on-the-land-a-new-exhibition-reveals-a-darker-side-of-the-rainbow-nation-842648.html http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art-and-architecture/features/shadows-on-the-land-a-new-exhibition-reveals-a-darker-side-of-the-rainbow-nation-842648.html <p> The American poet Ezra Pound once wrote, with pardonable exaggeration, that artists were the antennae of the race. At their best, he was arguing, they can cut to the quick of a situation &ndash; not only define a historical moment, but also see far &ndash; with a kind of fearful and fearless clarity. </p> Features Mon, 09 Jun 2008 00:00:01 +0100