Chumbo

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His portraits of his Paris neighbourhood summed up its residents’ anger. Now his subversive installations straddle borders, float on boats and envelop favelas. We speak to the elusive artist

“I didn’t spend enough time in school for any of the teachers to remember me. The only role models I had were the guys in the neighbourhood doing graffiti,” reflects JR, on his journey from street-smart tagger to world-famous conceptual artist. “I guess what’s nice is now, at 38, I can tell my mother I am not a vandal but an artist.”

The career trajectory of the first-generation Frenchman, who refuses to publicly reveal his real name, has been fascinating to observe. With a mother from eastern Europe and a father from Tunisia, JR grew up on the wrong side of the Périphérique, a ring-road that acts as a barrier between the middle-class districts of central Paris and the concrete jungle of project buildings on the city’s outskirts that are home to a largely immigrant population. “It was tough, but there was always such a great sense of community,” he says from a plush art studio that’s only a few minutes away from the Parisian grave of Jim Morrison. “Doing graffiti meant that I had to have eyes in the back of my head. Even today, I am always naturally looking around [for the police].”

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Ibiza DJ suggests impromptu 1989 artwork should feature in new building – a care home

It all began one February night in 1989. César de Melero was DJing in the Ars Studio club in Barcelona when someone told him that the artist Keith Haring was outside but the doorman wouldn’t let him in.

“The place was packed, so I put on a record and pushed through the crowd,” De Melero told the Guardian. “And there he was with his saintly, innocent face and I told the doorman to let him in and I said to the boss: ‘Champagne for Keith Haring.’”

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None of the coalition leaders has any interest in resolving the Palestinian issue

It would be encouraging to think that the massive upheaval afoot in Israeli politics with the unseating of Benjamin Netanyahu also signals a seismic shift in political culture. Perhaps a turning point in its democratic decline, even a move towards ending its rule over millions of Palestinians.

Unfortunately, it signals none of these things. The burning desire to depose Israel’s longest serving leader is certainly the driving force behind the disparate eight-party coalition that hopes to replace him. But another factor also unites them – by default, if not by design: the consensus that in determining the future of the Jewish state, the conflict with the Palestinians can be managed in perpetuity.

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The Italian artist may have wanted to brush Beatrice Hastings out of his life, but artifical intelligence has thwarted him by enabling a re-creation of the work

No one wants to be reminded of a failed relationship by having the ex’s portrait hanging around. After Amedeo Modigliani and his lover, Beatrice Hastings, broke up, the Italian artist is thought to have obliterated her memory by painting another woman’s likeness over his portrait of her.

So he might not be too happy to learn that science has now brought back that “lost” portrait, using artificial intelligence, an X-ray and 3D-printing to re-create the painting, with full colour and textured brushstrokes.

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Heritage charity says many ‘renovated’ monuments are filled with cement, not water, so can’t quench thirst or help reduce plastic pollution

They were a much-loved feature of London life for over a century, ever since the first of hundreds of public drinking fountains opened in 1859 at St Sepulchre-without-Newgate church in the City.

At its peak, thousands of people a day were drinking from it and Charles Dickens observed that “300,000 people take advantage of the fountains on a summer’s day”, although some preferred to drink beer for fear of polluted water. But now, London’s few remaining historic fountains are under threat, with some local councils filling the fountain bowls with cement rather than water – ensuring that no one will ever be able to quench their thirst at their taps again.

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The Finnish artist’s work was hugely influenced by her love of the natural world – in particular the tiny island of Klovharun. A new exhibition explores her passion

In 1964, when she was in her 50s, the Moomin creator Tove Jansson settled on her dream island. Klovharun in the Finnish archipelago is tiny – some 6,000 sq metres – and isolated, “a rock in the middle of nowhere”, according to Jansson’s niece, Sophia. It has scarcely any foliage, no running water and no electricity. Yet for Jansson, it was an oasis. For 18 years she and her partner Tuulikki Pietilä spent long summers there, heading out from Helsinki as soon as the ice broke in April, leaving only in early October. The island meant “privacy, remoteness, intimacy, a rounded whole without bridges or fences”.

Klovharun encapsulates something of Jansson’s originality as an artist and writer – and her human presence. Her illustrated Moomin books, which began to be published just after the second world war, brought her phenomenal acclaim and devotion. The tales of amiable troll creatures have been taken to generations of hippy hearts; their pear-shaped faces have adorned a million ties. Their marketing triumph – in which Jansson enthusiastically participated – has overshadowed her other achievements as a painter, novelist, short-story writer, anti-Nazi cartoonist, and designer of magazine covers. Success may also have obscured how ambivalent she was, how often on the cusp of identities. She was brought up in Finland speaking Swedish, had male and female lovers, told her stories in pictures and in prose, lived on water as well as land. More and more she appears as a pioneer. Not least in her crystalline descriptions of the natural world.

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Emily Blunt is back as the mother silently protecting her kids from aliens in John Krasinski’s skilful if unsatisfying thriller

John Krasinski’s slick, skilful follow-up to his 2018 post-apocalyptic thriller works well as a genre exercise; with patriarch Lee (Krasinski) sacrificed to the first film, Evelyn (Emily Blunt, Krasinski’s real-life partner) and her three children must once again outwit an army of aliens with exceptional hearing. The brains behind the operation is the hearing-impaired Regan (Millicent Simmonds), who is teamed up with reluctant protector Emmett (Cillian Murphy) while Noah Jupe’s nervy little brother tends to the family’s newborn. To suggest Krasinski is only interested in surface thrills feels at odds with the seriousness of his craft. Judicious pacing, clever cross-cutting and visceral sound design build tension, but there’s an absence of soul, and no satisfying sense of what the monsters might be a metaphor for.

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When photographer Polly Braden became a single mother, she set out to capture the unique joys and frustrations faced by other lone parents in the UK

On 14 February 2012, Fran took her two children, both aged under five, and left her partner of 10 years. Their relationship had broken down. “He went to work. By the time he came back, we’d gone. We took no clothes, nothing. We just walked. I went into a photo booth and took a photograph of the three of us: I call it my liberation photo. I never looked back.”

She had to give up a job she loved to look after the children. “I worked for the ambulance service and there was no one to look after the children when I was on nights,” she says. Like many single parents, she then struggled to find a place to live, because those on housing benefits are affected by discriminatory, blanket “no benefits” bans. “I couldn’t tell the landlord I was on benefits. He lived next door, and kept asking, ‘Are you working?’ I had to hold it together for six months before my new job started. I’d take a packed lunch and go out all day, to make him think I was going to work.”

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Flattening the majestic Murghal-inspired buildings is the latest stage in a hateful, vanity-fuelled campaign to de-Islamify India

At the heart of New Delhi, the capital of India, sits a Mughal-inspired monument that houses the seat of the Indian parliament. Built by the British architect Edwin Lutyens between 1911 and 1931, the parliament buildings and their grand roadways and water channels follow the form established by the Islamic rulers of Iran and elaborated by the Islamic sultanate of Samarkand and the Mughal rulers of India.

Lutyens designed perhaps the most important Islamic-inspired edifice of modern times. The buildings quote architectural emblems from Hindu temples and palaces, but the grand plan follows the design of Mughal-Islamic landscape with a light nod to Roman triumphalism. It is, in my view, the greatest set of government buildings anywhere in the world.

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As heroic statues fall out of vogue, communities have turned to experimental structures – from flourishing gardens to abstract sculptures – as monuments to loss on a vast scale

Maya Lin was a 21-year-old architecture student at Yale University when, in 1981, lacking professional experience, she submitted a class project to a design competition for a memorial for Vietnam war veterans on the National Mall in Washington DC. Her winning design, influenced by the minimalist sculpture and earth art of the New York art scene of the 1960s and 1970s, marked a transformation in how communities acknowledge loss and remember the dead.

Two large curved surfaces of gleaming, polished black granite emerge from the ground, like a wound in the earth, and meet at a point. The names of all 57,000 missing or killed veterans are engraved on the stone. Yet although memorials around the world continue to pay their respects to Lin’s work, the backlash was immediate and a battle emerged between conservatives and modernists. Politicians deemed the work nihilistic, a “black gash of shame”. As a compromise, the traditionalist sculptor Frederick Hart was commissioned to create a bronze statue of three soldiers, placed to one side of Lin’s memorial.

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Sculpture of slave trader that was defaced in BLM protests last year forms part of exhibition

A statue of the slave trader Edward Colston that was toppled during a Black Lives Matter protest is to go on public display.

The bronze memorial to the 17th-century merchant had stood in the city since 1895, but was pulled from its plinth during the demonstration on 7 June last year.

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The French Algerian artist uses photography, rap music and the frequencies of trees in his quest to shine a light on marginalised communities. Now he’s preparing for his first solo UK show

In early 2020, when Dave was making British history by triumphing at both the Brits and Mercury music prizes, the equivalent awards in France were making headlines for all the wrong reasons. That year’s Victoires de la Musique featured no headline prizes for a black or Arab rapper. “Domestic rap has become the soundtrack to a national identity crisis,” claimed one critic in this newspaper. Where the UK rapper was crowned for his celebration of black Britishness, French hip-hop was still fighting for the right to be seen as French at all.

It is a crisis that rising contemporary art star Mohamed Bourouissa knows from the inside. As he drily puts it: “France has got some catching up to do.”

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Frank Laws’s Hopperesque watercolours depict the individual character of east London’s most impressive – and everyday – buildings, as gentrification threatens their very existence

From Mike Leigh’s film Meantime to the TV show Top Boy, the social housing estates of east London have provided rich subject matter for writers and artists exploring the human stories intertwining in their communities. In the paintings of east Londoner Frank Laws, however, there isn’t a person in sight. The only signs of life are curtains flapping at open windows and the luminescent glow emanating from inside a home. Blocks of flats that teem with life in, say, Plan B’s film and album Ill Manors, stand eerily quiet and vacant in Laws’s images.

Laws was born in a village in Norfolk but hated the rural quiet. “I was always scared of the dark in the countryside,” says the 37-year-old. “I’m still scared of it.” It’s this fear, and Laws’ love of film noir, that informs the dramatic, Edward Hopperesque lighting in Laws’ meticulously detailed watercolour and acrylic paintings.

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Photographer Valeria Luongo’s long-term project explores the daily life of nuns at the Holy Hearts of Jesus and Mary convent in Rome. It was born out of a fascination with the women who choose to eschew conventional modes of living. What exactly does a nun’s life entail, and what happens in their tight-knit community?

A nun during a quiet moment of prayer

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Magnum photographer David Alan Harvey pays homage to Cartier-Bresson’s ‘decisive moment’

David Alan Harvey’s photograph of a boy with balloons on a street in Santiago, Chile, was taken in 1997. It is included in Streetwise, a new collection of pictures from the archives of the Magnum agency. The Magnum name became synonymous with street photography in the 1950s and 1960s under the guiding influence of co-founder Henri Cartier-Bresson. The current volume pays homage to Cartier-Bresson’s black-and-white “decisive moments” and examines the way that that spirit has been taken forward, particularly after advances in digital photography and printing enabled a revolution in colour in the 1980s.

Harvey was elected into the agency – there is a voting process among the membership – in the year that this picture was taken. By then, as a staff photographer for National Geographic, he had been taking pictures for more than three decades. A principle subject was the Hispanic diaspora on both sides of the Atlantic – the “divided soul”, as he terms it, of Latin culture.

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Iron figures would extend four miles out to sea to celebrate shared Celtic and neolithic heritage of UK and Brittany

Stark on a hill over Gateshead, Sir Antony Gormley’s Angel of the North stands as a symbol of Britain’s northern identity. And across the country, on the Mersey estuary, the sculptor’s group of imposing solo figures at Crosby beach has become part of the landscape.

Now, on the eve of Britain’s potential departure from Europe, Gormley is planning a new and dramatic intervention on the beaches of northern France. He wants to erect a group of seven huge sculptures, made from iron slabs, on the coast of Brittany. They will look towards Britain, the lost island of Europe.

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Famous for her engaging portraits, Soames’ work is held in collections around the world

The newspaper photographer Sally Soames has died at the age of 82. Speaking on Saturday to the Observer, the newspaper that gave Soames her first assignment, her only child, Trevor, said she had died that morning at her home in north London, surrounded by her family and after a long period of illness.

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