David D'Arcy

Documentary offers a close-up on the foul-mouthed Frida Kahlo

New film about the Mexican artist quotes extensively from her unguarded, strident diaries and notebooks

Booksreview

Graphic memoir charts an ominous journey from Fidel Castro’s Cuba to Donald Trump’s America

Cuban American artist Edel Rodriguez, labelled a “worm” for fleeing Cold War Cuba in 1980, tells story of his progress from impoverished boyhood to creating alarming covers for Time magazine

Film review

Was Rauschenberg’s grand prize win at the 1964 Venice Biennale a US plot, or just good PR?

A new documentary delves into the machinations that led to the upstart American artist’s stunning triumph at the art world’s Olympics

A film-maker shares affliction and inspiration with Paul Klee

In his new documentary “Angel Applicant”, Ken August Meyer finds solace in the late works of Klee, who likewise suffered from scleroderma

Booksreview

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s ‘heretical’ writings on painting are spirited and contrarian

The Italian filmmaker—and occasional painter—was scathing about Picasso but delighted in Caravaggio

Chrysler Museum of Art will return disputed sculpture of Indigenous man

The museum has agreed to return the life-size marble statue “Wounded Indian” to the Boston-based Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association

Denver Art Museum cut ties with a disgraced donor—but critics say that’s not enough

Benefactor Emma Bunker worked closely with antiquities smuggler Douglas Latchford

Bitter row rages over ownership of marble sculpture of Indigenous man

Restitution dispute between Chrysler Museum of Art in Virginia and Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association came close to a deal in 2020

Booksreview

Paul Goesch, the Gläserne Kette member murdered by the Nazis, reappraised in new book

The visionary but misunderstood German architect was a proto post-Modernist

Mediareview

Artists who stayed in Ukraine navigate cultural war and actual warfare in new documentary

“Rule of Two Walls”, showing at the Tribeca Film Festival, follows artists in Ukraine after the launch of Russia’s invasion

A new documentary tracks David Hammons, the art world's invisible man

A new documentary surveying the revered but elusive artist is playing at New York's Film Forum

Antiquities trafficking investigator appointed president of Harvard Law Review—a position once held by Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Barack Obama

Apsara Iyer says looting of Indian temples was a "wake-up call" to understanding how cultural heritage and crime intersect

Filmsreview

Art heist film Inside starring Willem Dafoe is no masterpiece

Actor’s tortured solo performance as a thief fails to steal the show

Booksreview

Book review | The tale of a magnificent boat with a violent colonial history

This account of the theft of a South Seas cultural treasure by German colonists in the late 1800s reveals a series of atrocities

Art from persecuted Jewish dealer draws scrutiny at National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC

Findings about the provenance of two Old Master drawings in the museum’s collection may test the pro-restitution stance recently adopted at US national institutions

Nam June Paik the prophet: documentary creates chronological collage of pioneering video artist's life

Director Amanda Kim’s "Moon Is the Oldest TV" supplements a timeline of the artist’s life with archival footage of his work

Lootnews

Revelations in Cambodia looting scandal name ‘scholar’ at Denver Art Museum as accomplice to disgraced dealer Douglas Latchford

Researcher Emma Bunker aided the notorious looter in sourcing and selling Southeast Asian antiquities

Venezuelan artists make a comeback in Miami

Art from the beleaguered country is on show at the Pinta fair, from Modern abstraction to textile works by Indigenous people

Life of elusive artist David Hammons—who once sold snowball sculptures on the streets of Manhattan—emerges in new documentary

The Melt Goes on Forever tracks the revered US artist’s career, without his direct participation, to illuminating effect

Multiple William Kentridges dramatise the philosophy of art-making in new television series

Three parts of the nine-part work premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival this month

Obituariesfeature

Remembering Claes Oldenburg: reluctant Pop Art pioneer and maker of outsize sculptures

The artist denied that his huge sculptures of everyday objects were Pop Art, insisting he was not trying to make a comment consumerism or capitalism with them

Photographyinterview

Life inside Nazi death camps, as captured in prisoners’ clandestine photographs

Christophe Cognet on his new documentary, From Where They Stood, which focuses on extermination camp prisoners’ photographic acts of resistance

Skulls and sequins: book celebrates the art of the Haitian streets 

Recently published catalogue of a touring show from 2018 shows the work of artists who draw inspiration from the urban landscape of the Caribbean nation

Booksreview

Non-conformers? Encyclopaedic guidebook attempts to redefine Outsider art

Lisa Slominski's book expands the canon of "self-taught" and "folk" artists to include Hilma af Klint and the Mexican Muralists

Glass art about animals in the Chornobyl exclusion zone takes on new edge

Sibylle Peretti’s glass sculptures, on view in New York and Washington, focus on the wildlife around the Ukrainian nuclear plant that has been taken over by the Russian military

Filmsreview

At Sundance, new films tackle painful legacies through archaeology, urban design and more

Also featured is a visually stunning documentary about bird rescuers in Delhi and a cinematic essay about the sexual power dynamics of cinema

Mondrian at the Philadelphia Museum of Art is Nazi loot, heirs allege

In 1937 the work, which had belonged to art historian Sophie Küppers, was seized by Nazi authorities and eventually sold to New York collector A. E. Gallatin

Haitian artists show in Miami but worry about home

As order collapses, the country's residents lack food, water and power—but cultural life survives amid the chaos

The top four art documentaries at DOC NYC

The documentary festival includes films about Jesse Krimes, Eadweard Muybridge and the fraught power dynamics of making money from art