News from the art world
A collective Turner victory
“The verdict is in for the most virtuous Turner Prize ever,” said Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. For this year’s prize, also the “most critically panned in its history”, the judges produced a shortlist made up entirely of collectives involved in protest art for righteous causes. The winner was Array Collective, a group of anti-sectarian, pro-diversity activists from Belfast. For the Turner exhibition in Coventry, they produced a “cosy, ramshackle installation” of a mock Irish pub adorned with banners advocating reproductive and LGBTQ rights. It was “nice enough”, but hardly great art. The collective’s work is both light-hearted and deeply serious, said David Sillito on BBC News. In a community where the texture of everyday life is “all too often layered in sectarian meanings, Array wants to create new events and symbols; and to subvert local mythology to cater to different identities beyond the familiar divide”. Their pub is “a place to talk and disagree that is open, welcoming and good humoured”.
Freud’s secret self-portrait
In 1997, a Swiss art collector bought a Lucian Freud painting, Standing Male Nude. Soon after, the collector (who wishes to remain anonymous) was contacted by the artist, who begged to buy it, says Dalya Alberge in The Observer – at one point offering to double the price paid. When the collector politely refused, Freud declared: “In that case, you will never sell it.” It wasn’t an idle threat. Freud denied authorship of the work, and the Freud estate refused to authenticate it, rendering it all but unsellable. But now three separate studies have established that the painting is almost certainly genuine. “Not only that, but the painting is also thought likely to be a self-portrait that Freud may have had good reason to want to hide.” According to the art detective Thierry Navarro, the picture once hung in a flat used by Freud’s friend Francis Bacon, and dates from an era in which Freud himself was known to have conducted homosexual affairs. It seems the painter saw it as a source of embarrassment.