Latest news with #modernart
Forbes
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Maxi Edmond De Rothschild Gitana 18 Trimaran Includes Fresh Art Work
Eight years ago in Paris I stopped into the Palais de Tokyo modern and contemporary art building to view new artwork revealed for the Gitana 17—the then latest Maxi Edmond de Rothschild racing trimaran. There, I spoke with Los Angeles based artist Cleon Paterson who had created striking imagery for the sail and hull. I later wrote about this art in a piece related to modern sailing. Design for Gitana 18 - the Maxi Edmond de Rothschild trimaran to be completed in September, 2025 Gitana S.A_1 Time has raced by. In September this year the Gitana 17 will be replaced with Gitana 18, also known as the Maxi Edmond de Rothschild, a next generation trimaran. This new craft will be emblazoned with fresh art work. The 105 feet (32 meter) long and over 75 feet (23 meter) wide trimaran includes vessel and sail surface area of 21,500 square feet (2,000 square meters). The artwork for Gitana 18 was created by brothers Florian and Michael Quistrebert, and will be implemented onto the craft and sails by Jean-Baptiste Epron. Images show five faces—representing Arianne de Rothschild and her four daughters, to whom Arianne dedicates this boat. The artwork uses black and white contrast, or chiaroscuro, as well as sfumato shading. As with Gitana 17, five arrows in the design represent the five branches of the Rothschild family. The Quistrebert brothers were born in Nantes and graduated from the Ecole des Beaux Arts in that city (Nantes is also birthplace to Jules Vernes, author of the fictional nautical exploration book Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea , and namesake of the renowned sailing race—Jules Verne Trophy). The brothers now live in Amsterdam and Paris and produce art that can be dazzlingly kaleidoscopic with clean, balanced geometrical tension; some is as compellingly detailed as works (and worlds) created by M.C. Escher. Their multi-media exhibits have in the past included paste on burlap, iridescent paint and illumination by LEDs. Inspirational images from the Quistrebert brothers for Gitana 18 Julien Champolion - polaRYSE - GITANA S.A Construction of Gitana 18 began with an announcement in 2023. CDK Technologies in Lorient, working with naval architect Guillaume Verdier, is crafting the latest maxi trimaran iteration since Gitana 17 was launched in July, 2017. According to Sail-World, eight full time staff are dedicated to this work that requires 50,000 hours of study—coordinated by design team leader Sébastien Sainson. That is more than 40% more study time than was required for Gitana 17. The craft is scheduled for completion by the end of September. Details are confidential, but the overall difference from previous models? This craft is designed to raise out of water and 'fly' through air even earlier than its predecessor, and should be capable of maintaining performance for longer distances over rough seas. Eight years ago sail racing was transforming from a naval to an essentially aerial sport. Today that change is complete. Sail racing has radically altered due to materials technology, a greater grasp of hydrodynamic subtleties and advances in digital design. The adoption of foils shoves the bulk of race craft from sea to sky, where aerial friction is puny compared to the friction of water. This allows boats to race far faster. That's because water is more than 800 times denser than air, and that density is literally a drag. Think of the slog of walking through water in a swimming pool compared to the breeze of sauntering across an adjacent deck. Other advances in technology in the past eight years include better understanding of carbon fiber and foam sandwich construction to reduce weight and improve hull strength, as well as better cockpit design and improvements to computational fluid dynamics. Technology is also advancing in the world of art, related to materials and exhibition capabilities. Fortunately, artistic inspiration and vision remain pleasingly unpredictable. Layout of the Gitana 18 trimaran - the newest Maxi Edmond de Rothschild Gitana S.A
The Guardian
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Humble peasants … or an odyssey of sex and death? The Millet masterpiece that electrified modern art
It was Salvador Dalí who turned a small, intense rural scene called The Angelus, painted by Jean-François Millet in 1857-59 and hugely popular in its day, into a totem of modern art. In the original, a pious peasant couple have heard the Angelus bell from a distant church, the Catholic call to prayer, and paused their work digging potatoes to lower their heads and pray. But from Dalí's writings, we know he saw far more in the painting, from obscene sex to family tragedy. In one of his many versions of it, Atavism at Twilight, the couple sprout agricultural implements from their bodies. In his surreal drawings these good country people become mouldering, mummified husks, or are transformed into fossils by time and sadness. Now that the original painting is being lent by the Musée d'Orsay to the National Gallery as the star of its forthcoming show Millet: Life on the Land, we will all get a chance to obsess over this innocent-seeming artwork. The Angelus was an instant hit in the 1800s, widely reproduced, while the original passed through a string of private collections for record prices until the Louvre, which first tried to buy it for France in 1889, acquired it in 1910. In 1932 it received perhaps the ultimate fan homage: it was attacked – slashed several times with a penknife. After being repaired, it remained in the Louvre until the Orsay opened in 1986. Decades ahead of Dalí, Van Gogh also copied it in a fervent 1880 drawing that was one of his first artistic efforts – its untrained clumsiness makes the emotion even more touching. He revered The Angelus as his ideal model of all that art should be and do. In their fascination with Millet's masterpiece, both these modernist giants show how a work of art can turn into something else in the beholder's mind. Dalí deliberately induced a state akin to illness in his mind in order to hallucinate upon The Angelus. 'The only difference between me and a madman is that I am not mad,' he said. Van Gogh was of course less able to switch it on and off. Van Gogh was in London, working at the Covent Garden branch of the art dealer Goupil et Fils, when he wrote about its power in one of his earliest letters. 'That painting by Millet, L'angelus du soir,' he told his brother Theo in 1874, 'that's it, indeed – that's magnificent, that's poetry.' At the age of just 21, five years before he decided to become a painter, the Dutch pastor's son saw something uniquely poetic in The Angelus. Its creator, Jean-François Millet, was then near the end of his life. Like Bruegel centuries before him, Millet painted rural life so authentically that people thought he was a peasant sharing his world. This was not entirely groundless: he was born into a farming family from Grouchy, near the Channel coast in Normandy. Millet said The Angelus depicted a memory of this childhood: 'The idea came to me because I remembered that my grandmother, hearing the church bell ringing while we were working in the fields, always made us stop work to say the Angelus prayer for the poor departed.' Millet was not a naive artist. He trained in Paris with the history painter Paul Delaroche, famed for The Execution of Lady Jane Grey (1833). But things didn't go well and he retreated to Cherbourg. He seemed stuck in a career as a local portrait painter. Then, suddenly, he found himself. Millet started painting the hard life of the peasantry. It was a political decision. He had his first hit with The Winnower, a painting of a man shaking a basket of grain, throwing golden specks high in the air so when they fall the wheat will be separated from the chaff. Does that sound allegorical? It surely is, for Millet unveiled this image of a peasant weeding out corrupt bad seeds at the Paris Salon in 1848, the year revolutions convulsed Europe. The paintings that followed are monuments to backbreaking rural work: The Sower; The Gleaners. Millet doesn't paint the landscape as an idyll but a place where the poor are worked to death. Van Gogh saw Millet's compassion through a religious lens. Soon after that early letter to Theo he was sacked and, after a spell teaching, tried to become a preacher and missionary to the poor. His family thought he had a religious mania. His fervour included worshipping Millet. When he saw an exhibition of Millet's drawings, he raved, 'I felt like telling myself, take off your shoes, for the place where you are standing is holy ground.' Van Gogh's debt to Millet is obvious in his early work. In his 1885 drawing Peasant Woman Digging, he gives the digger massive, earthy presence – like Millet's folk. But his most blatant reference to The Angelus is The Potato Eaters. In Millet's Angelus, the peasants have taken a break from their arduous toil digging potatoes from the hard earth: we see spuds in their basket and in a bulging sack in their wheelbarrow. Van Gogh's The Potato Eaters feels like the next chapter. The peasants have gone home to share a humble meal with their family. Van Gogh stakes his claim here to succeed Millet as a peasant painter. But did Van Gogh respond so intensely to The Angelus for reasons that were harder to name than politics or religion? A surrealist would say yes. Dalí would see unnameable insinuations in The Angelus – and being Dalí, name them. For him, this painting was 'the most troubling, the most enigmatic, the densest, the richest in unconscious thoughts that has ever been.' Seen through his eyes, The Angelus is less a slice of rustic life, more a kitsch surrealist dreamwork. Sign up to Art Weekly Your weekly art world round-up, sketching out all the biggest stories, scandals and exhibitions after newsletter promotion Take a look at Millet's scene. The brown lumps of potatoes in the basket look turd-like while the shapeless sack might contain part of a body. The three prongs of the huge fork have been driven into the ground with unwonted violence. If that doesn't seem phallic enough, the two thick hafts of the wheelbarrow poke from the woman's skirts. Do these Freudian intimations point to something unspeakable in the figures' relationship? In Dalí's Atavism at Twilight, the fork is stuck in the woman's back: the man dreams of sodomising her. She's his mum, according to Dalí. Alternatively, he suggested, they are the parents of a dead child. Dalí believed that Millet had originally painted a grave in the foreground. You can sort of see it. He persuaded the Louvre to X-ray it and claimed the results confirmed his theory. It haunts his eerie 1965 painting The Perpignan Station, in which the grave becomes a railway track dividing the Angelus couple. Perpignan, the first station in France coming from Spain, and where papers were checked, becomes here a liminal place between life and death. Dalí had enough ideas about The Angelus to fill a book, and they did. He penned The Tragic Myth of Millet's Angelus in the 1930s, and published it three decades later. It has been hailed as the most ambitious theorisation of what he called his 'paranoiac-critical method' in which you hallucinate layers and metamorphoses of an object or image. Did he mean a word of it? Was he really obsessed with The Angelus or did he just enjoy the idea that he was? One piece of evidence his delirium was authentic is the 1929 film he created with Luis Buñuel, Un Chien Andalou, in which a couple stand like the peasants in The Angelus (but with male and female positions reversed) until their love petrifies and they are buried in sand. This film, Dalí's most spontaneous work of dream art, was made before he went public with his Millet obsession. So The Angelus really was lodged in his psyche. He soon repainted it in his 1933 work Archaeological Reminiscence of Millet's Angelus, in which the couple become colossal, slowly eroding monuments towering over a desert. Dalí's lifelong attempts to understand why The Angelus hooked him became a surreal odyssey of sex and death that is a good guide to enjoying a work of art. We should all be a bit paranoiac-critical when we visit an art gallery and let a work of art suggest as many things as come into our minds. I can relate to it because I'm strangely thrilled that Millet's painting of two French peasants in a flat, bleak landscape with a church spire on the gold and bronze skyline is coming to the National Gallery. The first time I saw it was nowhere near a museum but in a hypermarket in rural France on a camping trip when I was a teenager. There it was, as a cheap print on canvas, this glowing, frozen scene. I had to buy it. Why does art capture us? Sometimes a particular painting just seems to say more than you can express, and stays inside you. This is the mystery of art, and the mystery of The Angelus. I'm not saying what I see in it – I am not sure I want to know, let alone confess it. But it calls me like a bell at twilight. Millet: Life on the Land is at the National Gallery, London, from 7 August to 19 October
The Guardian
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Humble peasants … or an odyssey of sex and death? The Millet masterpiece that electrified modern art
It was Salvador Dalí who turned a small, intense rural scene called The Angelus, painted by Jean-François Millet in 1857-59 and hugely popular in its day, into a totem of modern art. In the original, a pious peasant couple have heard the Angelus bell from a distant church, the Catholic call to prayer, and paused their work digging potatoes to lower their heads and pray. But from Dalí's writings, we know he saw far more in the painting, from obscene sex to family tragedy. In one of his many versions of it, Atavism at Twilight, the couple sprout agricultural implements from their bodies. In his surreal drawings these good country people become mouldering, mummified husks, or are transformed into fossils by time and sadness. Now that the original painting is being lent by the Musée d'Orsay to the National Gallery as the star of its forthcoming show Millet: Life on the Land, we will all get a chance to obsess over this innocent-seeming artwork. The Angelus was an instant hit in the 1800s, widely reproduced, while the original passed through a string of private collections for record prices until the Louvre, which first tried to buy it for France in 1889, acquired it in 1910. In 1932 it received perhaps the ultimate fan homage: it was attacked – slashed several times with a penknife. After being repaired, it remained in the Louvre until the Orsay opened in 1986. Decades ahead of Dalí, Van Gogh also copied it in a fervent 1880 drawing that was one of his first artistic efforts – its untrained clumsiness makes the emotion even more touching. He revered The Angelus as his ideal model of all that art should be and do. In their fascination with Millet's masterpiece, both these modernist giants show how a work of art can turn into something else in the beholder's mind. Dalí deliberately induced a state akin to illness in his mind in order to hallucinate upon The Angelus. 'The only difference between me and a madman is that I am not mad,' he said. Van Gogh was of course less able to switch it on and off. Van Gogh was in London, working at the Covent Garden branch of the art dealer Goupil et Fils, when he wrote about its power in one of his earliest letters. 'That painting by Millet, L'angelus du soir,' he told his brother Theo in 1874, 'that's it, indeed – that's magnificent, that's poetry.' At the age of just 21, five years before he decided to become a painter, the Dutch pastor's son saw something uniquely poetic in The Angelus. Its creator, Jean-François Millet, was then near the end of his life. Like Bruegel centuries before him, Millet painted rural life so authentically that people thought he was a peasant sharing his world. This was not entirely groundless: he was born into a farming family from Grouchy, near the Channel coast in Normandy. Millet said The Angelus depicted a memory of this childhood: 'The idea came to me because I remembered that my grandmother, hearing the church bell ringing while we were working in the fields, always made us stop work to say the Angelus prayer for the poor departed.' Millet was not a naive artist. He trained in Paris with the history painter Paul Delaroche, famed for The Execution of Lady Jane Grey (1833). But things didn't go well and he retreated to Cherbourg. He seemed stuck in a career as a local portrait painter. Then, suddenly, he found himself. Millet started painting the hard life of the peasantry. It was a political decision. He had his first hit with The Winnower, a painting of a man shaking a basket of grain, throwing golden specks high in the air so when they fall the wheat will be separated from the chaff. Does that sound allegorical? It surely is, for Millet unveiled this image of a peasant weeding out corrupt bad seeds at the Paris Salon in 1848, the year revolutions convulsed Europe. The paintings that followed are monuments to backbreaking rural work: The Sower; The Gleaners. Millet doesn't paint the landscape as an idyll but a place where the poor are worked to death. Van Gogh saw Millet's compassion through a religious lens. Soon after that early letter to Theo he was sacked and, after a spell teaching, tried to become a preacher and missionary to the poor. His family thought he had a religious mania. His fervour included worshipping Millet. When he saw an exhibition of Millet's drawings, he raved, 'I felt like telling myself, take off your shoes, for the place where you are standing is holy ground.' Van Gogh's debt to Millet is obvious in his early work. In his 1885 drawing Peasant Woman Digging, he gives the digger massive, earthy presence – like Millet's folk. But his most blatant reference to The Angelus is The Potato Eaters. In Millet's Angelus, the peasants have taken a break from their arduous toil digging potatoes from the hard earth: we see spuds in their basket and in a bulging sack in their wheelbarrow. Van Gogh's The Potato Eaters feels like the next chapter. The peasants have gone home to share a humble meal with their family. Van Gogh stakes his claim here to succeed Millet as a peasant painter. But did Van Gogh respond so intensely to The Angelus for reasons that were harder to name than politics or religion? A surrealist would say yes. Dalí would see unnameable insinuations in The Angelus – and being Dalí, name them. For him, this painting was 'the most troubling, the most enigmatic, the densest, the richest in unconscious thoughts that has ever been.' Seen through his eyes, The Angelus is less a slice of rustic life, more a kitsch surrealist dreamwork. Sign up to Art Weekly Your weekly art world round-up, sketching out all the biggest stories, scandals and exhibitions after newsletter promotion Take a look at Millet's scene. The brown lumps of potatoes in the basket look turd-like while the shapeless sack might contain part of a body. The three prongs of the huge fork have been driven into the ground with unwonted violence. If that doesn't seem phallic enough, the two thick hafts of the wheelbarrow poke from the woman's skirts. Do these Freudian intimations point to something unspeakable in the figures' relationship? In Dalí's Atavism at Twilight, the fork is stuck in the woman's back: the man dreams of sodomising her. She's his mum, according to Dalí. Alternatively, he suggested, they are the parents of a dead child. Dalí believed that Millet had originally painted a grave in the foreground. You can sort of see it. He persuaded the Louvre to X-ray it and claimed the results confirmed his theory. It haunts his eerie 1965 painting The Perpignan Station, in which the grave becomes a railway track dividing the Angelus couple. Perpignan, the first station in France coming from Spain, and where papers were checked, becomes here a liminal place between life and death. Dalí had enough ideas about The Angelus to fill a book, and they did. He penned The Tragic Myth of Millet's Angelus in the 1930s, and published it three decades later. It has been hailed as the most ambitious theorisation of what he called his 'paranoiac-critical method' in which you hallucinate layers and metamorphoses of an object or image. Did he mean a word of it? Was he really obsessed with The Angelus or did he just enjoy the idea that he was? One piece of evidence his delirium was authentic is the 1929 film he created with Luis Buñuel, Un Chien Andalou, in which a couple stand like the peasants in The Angelus (but with male and female positions reversed) until their love petrifies and they are buried in sand. This film, Dalí's most spontaneous work of dream art, was made before he went public with his Millet obsession. So The Angelus really was lodged in his psyche. He soon repainted it in his 1933 work Archaeological Reminiscence of Millet's Angelus, in which the couple become colossal, slowly eroding monuments towering over a desert. Dalí's lifelong attempts to understand why The Angelus hooked him became a surreal odyssey of sex and death that is a good guide to enjoying a work of art. We should all be a bit paranoiac-critical when we visit an art gallery and let a work of art suggest as many things as come into our minds. I can relate to it because I'm strangely thrilled that Millet's painting of two French peasants in a flat, bleak landscape with a church spire on the gold and bronze skyline is coming to the National Gallery. The first time I saw it was nowhere near a museum but in a hypermarket in rural France on a camping trip when I was a teenager. There it was, as a cheap print on canvas, this glowing, frozen scene. I had to buy it. Why does art capture us? Sometimes a particular painting just seems to say more than you can express, and stays inside you. This is the mystery of art, and the mystery of The Angelus. I'm not saying what I see in it – I am not sure I want to know, let alone confess it. But it calls me like a bell at twilight. Millet: Life on the Land is at the National Gallery, London, from 7 August to 19 October
Yahoo
08-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Sir Brian Clarke, stained-glass artist whose punk ‘crazy days' livened up 1970s London
Sir Brian Clarke, who has died the day before his 72nd birthday, was once described in The Daily Telegraph as the 'rock star of stained glass', a tribute to his role as a leading light of the modern reinvention of the centuries-old art as well as a reference to what he called his 'crazy days' of the late 1970s, when he was ubiquitous on the London party scene and a darling of the gossips. At that time he was a member of the Uncommitted, a 'punk' band which advertised gigs but never actually played a note of music, although, according to Clarke's website, they 'did discuss the possibility from time to time in 1977'. And just as he could never be described as a musician, Clarke, who was also active in painting, sculpture, mosaics, tapestry and even stage design (he did the sets for Sir Paul McCartney on two world tours), resisted being pigeon-holed as a stained-glass artist. Yet by pushing the boundaries of the medium, both in terms of technology and its artistic potential, and collaborating with prominent architects on hundreds of projects around the world, he became a global star. Clarke's shimmering windows, featuring figurative and abstract designs – or combinations of both – can be found in churches across Europe. But he was determined to go beyond the traditional. 'When I started working in stained glass, it was a dying art,' he told The Independent in 2010. 'I knew from a very early age that the future of the medium would only be assured if it had an application in public buildings and was not limited to ecclesiastical architecture.' Clarke became famous for spectacular projects, including the Pyramid of Peace in Kazakhstan, the Pfizer building in New York, the Holocaust Memorial Synagogue in Darmstadt (unveiled on the 50th anniversary of Kristallnacht in 1988), the royal mosque at King Khaled International Airport in Riyadh, incorporating 360 windows, and Concordia, a colossal work 34 metres wide and 17 metres high, that was unveiled at Bahrain International Airport by Prince Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa in April this year. Clarke was always on the hunt for new ways to develop his medium. For the Pfizer building he pioneered a way to reproduce watercolour designs depicting medical and scientific imagery in molten glass. And he developed a technique involving the bonding of glazed colours to architectural 'float glass', often in multiple layers, to allow colour to be applied to large areas of glass without the traditional dividing lead-work. Wherever he worked, Clarke was sensitive to site and historical context. When working on the refurbished Queen Victoria Street Arcade in Leeds he nodded to local traditions in tiling and glass. For the cladding of the Hotel du département des Bouches-du-Rhône in Marseille, he selected deep Mediterranean ultramarine tones. At the 13th-century Linköping Cathedral in Sweden he incorporated photographs reinterpreting Christian iconography, but adapted them to fit the cathedral's diamond-patterned 1850s windows. 'What could be more modern than a medium that has a celluloid quality,'' Clarke asked, 'a cinematic drama that changes constantly?' Brian Clarke was born on July 2 1953 in Oldham, Lancashire, to Edward Clarke, a miner, and Lilian, née Whitehead, a cotton-mill worker. His maternal grandmother, who lived with the family, made a living as a medium, helping local people communicate with the dead. 'We had to get used to her chatting away to spirits and passing messages on to the neighbours,' Clarke recalled. As a child Brian himself was reportedly considered a 'sensitive'. But he felt a very different calling when, aged 12, he was taken on a school trip to York Minster: 'I remember seeing not the glass itself, but the illuminated pool of colour on that remarkable warm stone so characteristic of northern Gothic architecture. And that, combined with the music of a rehearsing choir, had such a powerful impact on me that I thought it was kind of a vocation. I thought I must have a calling to be a priest, to be a monk – and later on, I just found out it was art.' The same year he won a scholarship to Oldham School of Arts and Crafts, from which he moved to Burnley School of Art and North Devon College of Art and Design. A Churchill Memorial Trust Fellowship in 1974 allowed him to visit important stained-glass sites in France, Germany and Italy. Clarke made his first stained glass, a heraldic eagle design, at 16, and won his first commission aged 17 for stained glass windows in a Grade II-listed property. Before long he found himself in demand for church work, in which he was influenced by the artist John Piper and inspired by his wife Liz's father, a Lancashire vicar. This was his real beginning: he recalled transporting the glass for one church on his bike. By his early 20s he had been the subject of a BBC arts documentary, was living in an old vicarage in Derbyshire and had developed a reputation as both a painter and stained-glass designer – though he preferred the term artist as 'I'm interested in rendering the commonplace sublime.' In the late 1970s he moved to London, feeling that he could never fully realise his ambitions for stained glass in the provinces. On his arrival he threw himself into the punk movement, becoming friends with Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren and producing a series of slashed punk paintings called Dangerous Visions (1977), fixed with large safety pins. John McEwen, writing in The Spectator, described Clarke as ''the most Sixties character to have emerged in the London art scene since the Sixties'. David Bailey became a friend, as did Mick Jagger, Andy Warhol and the McCartneys, Paul and Linda. Clarke became a familiar figure at Langan's and in loucher establishments in Soho, his drinking companions including Francis Bacon, Bacon's companion John Edwards, and Robert Fraser, the Old Etonian aesthete and gallerist known to his friends as 'Groovy Bob', to whom Clarke was introduced by McLaren. 'Everywhere I went it was 'pop', I'm in the gossip columns again,' he recalled. His friendship with Bacon survived an occasion when Clarke asked the artist whether he had ever thought of doing something in stained glass, to which Bacon replied, 'No, dear. And I've never thought of doing something in macramé either.' Clarke agreed to be an executor of Bacon's estate (he later became sole executor acting on behalf of John Edwards), a role which meant that 'a lot of people in the art world are very, very keen to be my friend,' but also embroiled him, after Bacon's death, in a long and bruising legal battle with Bacon's old gallery, the Marlborough, which was only settled in 2002. Meanwhile, Fraser became Clarke's art dealer and in 1983, when Fraser opened a new gallery in Cork Street, Clarke was the first artist he showed. According to a 1988 report in The Times, in the early 1980s, in an effort to get Clarke to concentrate on his work, Fraser had dispatched him to Rome, then New York, though his efforts as a reformer were half-hearted at best. Clarke, who eventually went teetotal though he continued to enjoy the occasional spliff, recalled that the first time he attended Alcoholics Anonymous, Fraser 'was waiting outside in a taxi to meet me – with a bottle of wine and plastic cups'. Yet throughout his 'crazy years' Clarke retained an earnest commitment to his art. In 1978, with John Piper and Marc Chagall, he co-curated Glass/Light, a seminal exhibition exploring the history and possibilities of stained glass. The following year he published Architectural Stained Glass, a polemic which called for the integration of art and architecture. He also established a close friendship with the architect Norman Foster, with whom he would work extensively in later years. 'There is a thousand-year precedent for what I do,'' he told The New York Times in 1990. 'What's new is that I've nailed my colours to the post by working openly in an architectural context.' Clarke collaborated with Linda McCartney on her stained-glass photography projects, and after her death he created The Glass Wall, a mammoth eight-panel work dedicated to her memory. His set design for Paul McCartney's 1992 world tour, Let It Be, consisted of a projected collage of historical stained-glass pictures, including Matisse's windows from St Paul de Vence. He also designed the stained-glass stage sets for The Ruins of Time, a ballet by Wayne Eagling in tribute to Rudolf Nureyev. British projects included a stained-glass window for the papal chapel at the Apostolic Nunciature in Wimbledon, which was blessed by Pope Benedict XVI on his state visit to the UK in 2010, and a series of large-scale stained-glass windows for the Brian Clarke Church of England Academy, a co-educational secondary school in Oldham which is named after him. Much of Clarke's glass was made in a studio in Wiesbaden, West Germany, and it was there in the mid-1980s that a delegation from Darmstadt came to ask him to do the stained glass for the city's new Holocaust Memorial Synagogue, designed by Alfred Jacoby. They wanted a non-Jewish non-German to interpret both the past and the future, and after considering about a dozen artists, had lighted on Clarke. At first he demurred, but as he recalled, 'When they explained to me what it meant to them, and that this was a symbol for Jewry the world over, paid for by Germans, built on the site of Gestapo headquarters and opening on the 50th anniversary of Kristallnacht, I was so moved… that when they left I wanted that commission at any price.' He regarded his Darmstadt windows, with a red-themed side symbolising destruction, and opposite a blue-themed side signalling hope, as the most important commission of his career. Clarke, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, was knighted in 2024. In 1972 he married Liz Finch, with whom he had a son. The marriage was dissolved in 1996 but they remarried in 2013. Sir Brian Clarke, born July 2 1953, died July 1 2025 Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
South China Morning Post
07-07-2025
- Business
- South China Morning Post
Japanese firm pays US$7 to scan and capture people's brainwaves, turn them into art
A Japanese company is inviting people to 'sell their brainwaves' so they can be turned into art. Advertisement The firm has attracted significant online attention by offering to transform the inner thoughts and emotions of people into works of modern art. Once this is done, BWTC Metaverse Store in Tokyo's Chiyoda district sells the brainwave artwork. The company says the brain wave scanning process takes just 100 seconds. Photo: handout Its 'Buying Brainwaves' slogan is prominently displayed at the shop front and immediately draws curious onlookers. The firm aims to challenge conventional ideas of artistic creation by showing that brainwave data can go beyond scientific graphs to become distinctive visual masterpieces. For just 100 seconds of brainwave scanning, participants can earn 1,000 Japanese yen (US$7). Advertisement The process is simple. Go to the shop, put on a special brainwave-scanning device and relax. Your brain's unique activity is captured and instantly transformed into a personalised piece of art.
