The National Gallery has not always been housed in a neoclassical palace on Trafalgar Square. Two hundred years ago, the national collection first opened its doors to visitors with a fine if modest collection of 38 paintings from the private collection of John Julius Angerstein down the road in his townhouse at 100 Pall Mall. The current building, designed by the architect William Wilkins, opened in 1838 and today the National Gallery has about 2,400 paintings, spanning the history of Western European painting “from Giotto to Cézanne”, or from the mid-13th century to around 1900. The story of the shaping of the National Gallery’s collection—which marks its bicentenary this year—is, as Susanna Avery-Quash, lead curator at the gallery explains, one of opportunities opened up by the French Revolution, artist leaders, intransigent royals and inspiring women.

In the late 18th century, there was a vogue in Western European courts for establishing national art collections, which would be open to the public and serve as an opportunity for states to show off how suave and cultured they were. France, as ever, led the advanced guard. The revolutionaries opened the palace of the Louvre as a museum in 1793, with the majority of works on display from royal and confiscated church collections. The Dutch established the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam in 1808, and the Spanish the Prado in 1819. There was then no British equivalent. Around this time, though, in 1798, a mysterious organisation called the Bridgewater Syndicate emerged, led by the “canal duke”, Francis Egerton, Duke of Bridgewater, his nephew Lord Gower and the Earl of Carlisle. On to a good thing, the Syndicate bought the French and Italian works from the renowned collection of the Duke of Orléans, who needed the cash as the French Revolution had put him in dire straits.

While the syndicate kept some of the best paintings for themselves—such as Titian’s Diana and Actaeon (1556-9), which would ultimately find its way into the national collection in 2009—they showed the Orléans Collection to the public in several pioneering selling exhibitions, which encouraged public appreciation for Old Master paintings. There was a new feeling that the British need not be a nation of philistines after all, and could stage public art displays at least as well as the French, Spanish and Dutch.

With the successes of the syndicate in mind, some influential public servants believed that Britain would hamper its ascendant global standing without the soft power that came with a national collection (and, significantly, an impressive building to put it in). Many saw a national gallery as also essential for the development of competitive design education and the resurgence of a national school of painting in Britain. The radical MP John Wilkes, best known for introducing the first bill for parliamentary reform in the British Parliament, campaigned to have Sir Robert Walpole’s collection at Houghton in Norfolk as the basis of a national gallery at the British Museum. After some early enthusiasm, this idea was kicked into the long grass and the Houghton collection was sold to Empress Catherine the Great of Russia in 1779; the collection still graces the Hermitage today. It would be another half-century before Wilkes’s ambition for a national collection would be realised.

When the National Gallery was founded in 1824, and based at Angerstein’s townhouse on Pall Mall (first at number 100, between 1824-34, and then at number 105, from 1834-38), it was what might be called a “gentleman’s collection”. This meant that its specialisms were narrow but deep, and fashionably consistent with the tastes of the day, as promoted by leading international art academies. Those tastes were mainly 16th- and 17th-century historical, mythological or religious paintings, such as those by the Bolognese artists Annibale Carracci and Domenichino, and the French Baroque by Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin. The first painting in the collection’s original inventory—NG1—is Sebastiano del Piombo’s The Raising of Lazarus (1517-19), originally commissioned by the future Pope Clement VII.

Artist-led spirit

The UK’s National Gallery would not be formed based on a royal collection, which was the convention on the continent, despite the royal collection then including important works by Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael and Titian. The early lack of contributions from the royal family was the source of some resentment among the National Gallery’s early pioneers. Further, there was no regular state purchase grant for pictures when the gallery was established, and the institution thus relied heavily on gifts and bequests in its earliest decades. Luckily, the gallery received a patriotic bequest by the painter J.M.W. Turner, who died in 1851, and left everything in his studio, including the celebrated Dido Building Carthage (1815), to the nation.

Indeed, living artists have played a central role in the National Gallery’s mission from the beginning. For some 30 years between 1838 and 1869, the eastern half of Wilkins’s National Gallery housed the Royal Academy, consistent with the architect’s desire for a “temple of the arts, nurturing contemporary art through historical example”. Two days a week, the gallery would close to the public and only card-carrying artists could wander the corridors for their edification and inspiration.

This artist-led spirit has endured, and there is a rich tradition of artists engaging with, and making new works inspired by, the collection. Between 1977 and 1990 the National Gallery hosted a programme of ten inventive exhibitions, The Artist’s Eye, in which an artist was invited to curate paintings from the permanent collection in whatever way they wished, with interventions by, among others, Anthony Caro, Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon and David Hockney. This August, as part of the bicentennial celebrations, the Yorkshire-born artist returns with Hockney and Piero: A Longer Look, promising to be a fascinating display documenting Hockney’s love of Piero della Francesca’s works, especially The Baptism of Christ, which he describes as “wonderful pictures that are marvellous and exciting to look at, that delight you”.

In 1853, a radically minded select committee accused the gallery of having no clear plan to develop the collection, and produced a 1,000-page report, which condensed the evidence offered by hundreds of witnesses, recommending a new management structure. There would now be an all-powerful position of director, rather than a keeper, and the first to hold this post in 1855 was Sir Charles Eastlake (affectionately “Sir Chas”). Avery-Quash told me that “the National Gallery we have today is largely due to Sir Chas’s vision” and is fond of an insightful character assessment by his friend, the architect and writer Charles Robert Cockerell RA, who said that “Eastlake is always admirable, through good and evil report. His Presidency [of the Royal Academy from 1850] is invaluable—earnest, steady, most judicious, business-like, kind, full of tact, consideration and even policy—but of an honest and wholly unselfish policy, and when need be, bold, as backed by honesty.”

Eastlake, who likewise displayed these attributes as the first director of the National Gallery, and together with his wife Elizabeth Rigby, art historian and translator of important German art historical texts, became the leading light of the London art world; indeed one contemporary described him as the “Alpha and Omega” of the Victorian cultural scene. During his decade in office, Eastlake purchased over 150 paintings, expanding the original gentleman’s art collection into a collection able to tell visually the story of Western European painting from its origins in mid-13th century Italy. Many of Eastlake’s early Italian and Netherlandish picture acquisitions were considered at the time “unsightly” and not the best teaching models for aspiring artists to follow—and as president of the Royal Academy, Eastlake doubtless agreed—but wearing his other cap of office, as director of the National Gallery, he explained that such pictures were critical as milestones in the history he was attempting to narrate, particularly the “rude beginnings” through which Italian art “developed” over the centuries, reaching its perceived apogee in the era of Raphael and his contemporaries.

As the 19th century became the 20th, the historical ambition of the directors, benefactors, and curators at the gallery meant that the collection was on solid ground. The National Gallery was now the custodian of a world-respected repository of Old Masters, as well as special paintings from both before and after Raphael. But the thing about art collections, whether public or private, is that even an impressive one may begin to look rather staid if it doesn’t keep up with contemporary fashions in taste and collecting. At certain later points in its history, the gallery has not been as advanced in its collecting as Eastlake had been when he pioneered the public purchase of early Italian art. A good example of the gallery falling behind the collecting curve came during the early 20th century, when some of its more conservative-minded trustees were slow to appreciate the merits of modern French art and could not conceive of them adorning the gallery’s “hallowed precincts”. To push their thinking forwards, Samuel Courtauld, a textile industrialist, Francophile and man about town, gave a large sum of money towards the purchase specifically of exciting French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painting for the national collection. His £50,000 gift brought important paintings into the gallery by Edouard Manet, Paul Cézanne, Georges Seurat and Vincent van Gogh, including the joyous Sunflowers (1888), bought in 1924, the gallery’s centenary year.

Later in the century, extremely wealthy philanthropists bolstered the collection further. Most significantly, in 1986, Sir Paul Getty established an endowment fund in his name to the tune of £50m, which enabled the gallery to purchase, amongst other treasures, Caravaggio’s Baroque masterpiece Boy bitten by a Lizard (1594-95). This painting is one of two versions that Caravaggio made on this subject (the other now held by Fondazione Roberto Longhi in Florence), which some scholars believe to depict either the artist’s ruffle-haired lover and model Mario Minniti, or else a stylised self-portrait with fingers splayed like an artist holding a palette while painting. Boy bitten by a Lizard is now one of the major paintings by the leading late 16th-century artist in a public collection outside Italy.

As the purse-strings that controlled expenditure in the arts were tightened under the premiership of Margaret Thatcher, the gallery thought creatively about new ways to secure great paintings and started to complete joint purchases to share costs. In 1988, Nicolas Poussin’s The Finding of Moses (1651)—which utilised a Nativity scene format to draw links between Moses and Christ, and found extraordinary contrasts between deep pockets of dramatic darkness and fiercely coloured dresses in reds, blues and yellows—as jointly bought by the gallery and its sister institution in Cardiff, Amgueddfa Cymru—National Museum Wales.

From the mid-1990s, grants from the newly established Heritage Lottery Fund added an important source of acquisition funding for the gallery. In 1995, Georges Seurat’s The Channel of Gravelines, Grand Fort-Philippe (1890) was acquired for £16m, with £8m coming from a Heritage Lottery Fund grant. In 1997, George Stubbs’s Whistlejacket (around 1762) was acquired for £11m with nearly £8.3m coming from the fund.

In 2014, funds from the Sir Paul Getty endowment were bolstered by a grant from The American Friends of the National Gallery to acquire George Bellows’s Men of the Docks (1912), a soberingly realist rendering of a group of day labourers, wearing overcoats smeared in filth, standing at a dock in Brooklyn together with some draft horses, for some $25.5m. For the first time, a work by an artist who made their mark across the Atlantic was included in the collection. At this point the collection changed its strapline to say that the National Gallery was a collection of paintings reflecting the “Western European tradition”, rather than being Western European pictures per se.

More works by women

Each of these keystone acquisitions are of work by male artists: perhaps gentleman’s collections, like some gentleman’s clubs, can take a couple of hundred years to welcome women wholeheartedly. But there are some landmark works in the collection by women artists, including the French Impressionist painter Berthe Morisot’s popular and idyllic Summer’s Day (around 1879), acquired through the Sir Hugh Lane Bequest in 1917. In 2018, Artemisia Gentileschi’s now much-loved Self-Portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria (1615-17) made its way to Trafalgar Square, and was sent on a ground-breaking tour to unusual locations round the UK, including a public library, a girls’ school and a female prison.

Most recently, and especially during this bicentennial year, the gallery has made loud noises on the diversification of its collection as it seeks to include more works by women artists. Eva Gonzalès’s The Full-length Mirror (1869-70), an atmospheric depiction of the artist’s sister Jeanne facing her reflection, which was made just after Gonzalès became Edouard Manet’s only formal pupil (the gallery, by the way, has a portrait by the master of his pupil), was brought into the collection earlier this year in part by the generosity of three women patrons.

Britain’s cultural sector is in a critical condition, with levels of investment and development far lower than in many other European countries, says a major arts report to be unveiled on Monday evening.

Analysis shared exclusively with the Observer shows that while Britain has cut back its total culture budget by 6% since 2010, Germany, France and Finland have each increased their spending by up to 70%.

The findings of the academic “crisis” report, produced from research conducted by the University of Warwick and the Campaign for the Arts pressure group, will be announced in the House of Lords to a group of arts leaders and politicians, including the new minister for culture, media and sport (DCMS), Chris Bryant, with the support of Melvyn Bragg and musician and lecturer Kadiatu Kanneh-Mason.

By looking at support and investment levels between two comparative periods of recent history, 2009-10 and 2022-23, the State of the Arts report has uncovered big drops in spending per person in real terms.

Local government revenue funding of culture and related services has decreased by 39% in Scotland, 40% in Wales and 48% in England, partly due to the rising costs and demand for statutory services like social care. Core funding for the DCMS’s support of cultural organisations has decreased by 18% to only 0.17% of total public spending per person. And the core funding going out from arts councils has decreased by 18% in England, 22% in Scotland, 25% in Wales and 66% in Northern Ireland.

The research also identifies a big problem for arts education, with “reduced funding and a marginalisation of the arts in English state schools”, producing what the report describes as “catastrophic declines in participation and enrolment”. The report highlights a slump in arts education and employment, with GCSE and A-level entries in arts subjects plummeting by 47% and 29% respectively since 2010.

In a summary of this growing academic deficit, the report claims: “Arts education faces critical challenges, from unequal opportunities in early years to course closures in universities nationwide.”

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Heidi Ashton, lead researcher at the University of Warwick, told the Observer: “The decade-long declines presented in the report represent a lack of support in all areas, from funding to education to employment, so what is required is a fundamental shift in our thinking about the role of the arts in society. This report has provided a benchmark and information to inform decisions for a more equitable future.”

The report also investigated the earnings of arts professionals in the cultural sector and found them to be consistently below the UK median, with clear regional and gender pay gaps. These were most evident when it comes to craft skills, where men earn 70% more than women.

Speaking ahead of the report’s release Jack Gamble, director of Campaign for the Arts, said: “It’s no secret that it’s been a tough few years for the arts, but the State of the Arts report reveals that things are even worse than we feared. The UK now has one of the lowest levels of public funding for the arts and culture among European nations. Local government investment and arts subject entries at GCSE have both almost halved since 2010. Our new government inherits a huge challenge to turn this around and break down barriers to opportunity in the arts.”

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Looking at Salvador Dalí’s bizarre, inscrutable canvases, it’s hard to imagine his inspirations as anything earth-bound. Like any self-respecting Surrealist, the artist drew ideas from dreams, translating those visions into strange symbols and motifs. Or maybe he didn’t need the creative prompts at all: “A true artist is not one who is inspired,” he once declared, “but one who inspires others.”

But a major exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston is making the case that Dalí, while mining his dream reality, was also looking to tradition. “Dalí: Disruption and Devotion,” the first-ever show of the Spanish painter’s works at the museum, uncovers how the artist subtly and directly engaged with European art and artists including El Greco, Johannes Vermeer, Artemisia Gentileschi, and Albrecht Dürer.

Nearly 30 Dalí artworks, on loan from the Dalí Museum in Florida, are on view alongside pieces from the MFA Boston’s European holdings. They are variously paired or grouped by theme and subject matter to newly illuminate the work of the celebrated Surrealist.

For instance, Francisco Goya’s “Los Caprichos,” his 1799 series of prints detailing the dark side of civilized society, are arrayed with Dalí’s reinterpretations, which put a playful spin on Goya’s subversive etchings. Meanwhile, Dalí’s Sainte Hélène à Port Lligat (1956), in which he depicted his wife Gala as Saint Helena, is matched with El Greco’s Saint Dominic in Prayer (ca. 1605) to highlight their shared meditation on solitude and supplication.

The exhibition will also uncover how European art history runs through Dalí’s own works. In Morphological Echo (1936) and Nature Morte Vivante (Still Life-Fast Moving) (1956), viewers might see hints of 17th-century Dutch still lifes filtered through a Dalí-esque lens. The Ecumenical Council (1960), the painter’s towering ode to spirituality, is riven throughout with Renaissance references, notably to Michelangelo’s The Last Judgement in its portrayal of God.

Surprisingly, Dalí also painted himself into Ecumenical Council. In the work’s bottom-left corner, he is depicted by an easel, his brush held aloft, and his gaze fixed on the viewer—a pose recalling Diego Velázquez’s own self-portrait in his celebrated masterpiece Las Meninas (1656), complete with upturned mustache.

Dalí famously revered Velázquez. He echoed the Spanish master’s technique and mastery of light in works such as The Image Disappears (1938), and paid homage in Velázquez Painting the Infanta Margarita with the Lights and Shadows of His Own Glory (1958). A reproduction of Las Meninas also hung in his studio. Writing in 1976, Dalí mused: “Since Impressionism, the entire history of modern art has revolved around a single goal: reality. And this leads us to ask: what’s new, Velázquez?”

At the MFA Boston, Dalí’s Velázquez Painting is paired with Velázquez’s Infanta Maria Theresa (1653), a late portrait by the 17th-century artist, its colors and brushstrokes still fresh.

“Dalí: Disruption and Devotion” opens as Surrealism celebrates its centennial this year. Marking the moment are exhibitions from the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium’s blockbuster “Imagine! 100 Years of International Surrealism” to spotlights on artists Remedios Varo and Dora Maar, which, like MFA Boston’s Dalí outing, are shedding new light on the movement’s legacy.

“The Surrealist movement, announced by André Breton in 1924, is 100 years old,” said Frederick Ilchman, the museum’s curator of paintings, in a statement. “The MFA’s exhibition, using superb loans from the Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, offers a timely opportunity to reconsider the most famous Surrealist in terms of the historical artists he deeply admired.”

“Dalí: Disruption and Devotion” is on view at MFA Boston, 465 Huntington Ave, Boston, Massachusetts, through December 1.

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Exhibition Showcases Astonishing, Rare
Artworks by European Artists in Delhi

Delhi, 21 Jul (ONA) — A new
exhibition in Delhi showcasing rare artworks by European artists gives insights
into how the British ruled the country.

Called Destination India: Foreign
Artists in India, 1857-1947, the show focuses on artists who travelled to
colonial India from around the world.

The representation of India through
the European and British artists has “long been a subject of intrigue and exploration”,
writes Indian MP and author Shashi Tharoor, in an introduction to the show, BBC
news reported.

He writes this eye-catching phrase, “The
fascination with India’s unique landscapes, grand monuments, vibrant traditions
and rich history has drawn many to its shores, seeking to capture the essence
of this multifaceted nation.”

Tharoor notes that the show is
“refreshing and essential” as it explores the less-explored, yet a compelling
period of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, rather than just the early
pioneers.

The exhibition showcases artworks,
including from British artist William Carpenter, that give glimpses into not
only the royal courts, but also daily life in the Empire.

Many interesting artists visited
India from England and other European countries in the late 19th and early 20th
centuries. They were mainly conventional artists working in oil and watercolour
and various print media.

“They were attracted to the people,
and not just to the grandees, but to ordinary people in the streets. If there
was still an element of the picturesque, it was a more intimate and animated
version of that aesthetic,” says Ashish Anand, managing director of DAG, a
leading art firm which has put together the show.

“In their works we find an India –
if we can put it this way – that we do not just see, but that we can hear and
smell.”

Mainly a war artist, Simpson was
sent to India in 1859 by a publishing company to illustrate the aftermath of
the violent uprising two years earlier. Indian soldiers, known as sepoys, had
in 1857 set off a rebellion against the British rule, often referred to as the
first war of independence.

Simpson’s project halted when the
publishing company went bankrupt. He called it the “biggest disaster of my
life”. Nonetheless, he continued travelling and sketching his expeditions
across the sub-continent.

A significant European artist, Olinto
Ghilardi shaped modern Indian art in the early 20th Century.

He mentored Abanindranath Tagore -
nephew of Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore and founder of the Bengal School
of Art, which shaped modern Indian painting. Ghilardi encouraged him to
experiment with watercolours, gouache, and pastels, which he extensively used
later in his work.

Ghilardi also served as the vice principal
of the Government School of Art in Calcutta (now Kolkata).

Not much is known about the life of
the Italian painter before he arrived in Kolkata. His association with Tagore
indicates his acceptance as an artist among Kolkata’s Bengali elite.

Much later, in 1911, Ghilardi became
a prominent member of an avant-garde group of Italian artists.

British artist Carlton Alfred Smith lived
in India between 1916 and 1923. He often painted landscapes along with
portraits of people.

A painter of the late Victorian
period from Camden Town in London, Smith began as a lithographer before
switching to painting. A member of the Royal Academy of Art, he’s known for
drawing interiors of cottages and the English countryside.

A gifted student from Surrey, George
Strahan, a British army engineer and artist. He joined the army and arrived in
India in 1860, working in towns of Roorkee and Haridwar.

Two years later, he joined the
Topographical Survey of India and started mapping central India, Rajasthan and
the Himalayas.

In 1888, he became superintendent of
the Great Trigonometrical Survey, which mapped the Indian subcontinent.

At the Survey, Strahan drew relief
maps before colour printing was introduced.

After retirement, he lived in the
hills of Dehradun and travelled to Kashmir every summer.

A historical painter and
illustrator, German artist Woldemar Friedrich spent much of his career teaching
at prestigious German art academies. In the late 1880s, he travelled to India
and created a series of landscapes and illustrations, published in the 1893
book “Six Months in India”.

Trained at the Royal Academy Schools
in London, Carpenter became a renowned 19th-Century portrait and landscape
painter.

Arriving in India in 1850, he
travelled extensively, painting rulers, street scenes, landscapes, and locals
across Bombay (now Mumbai), Rajasthan, Delhi, Punjab, Kashmir, Lahore, Ceylon
(Sri Lanka), and Afghanistan.

English artist Charles William
Bartlett, Dover-born Bartlett was one of the world’s leading Japanese woodblock
painters, and later switched to fine art.

In 1913, he travelled to India,
Indonesia and China. He designed 38 woodblock prints for his Japanese publisher
from 1916 to 1925, including many scenes from his travels in South Asia.

American artist Edwin Lord Weeks
painted colourful oil on canvas of a bullock-cart in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, in
1882.

Born in Boston to a wealthy family,
Weeks was among the first American artists to visit India. His business family
supported his artistic endeavours.

Weeks first travelled to India
between 1882 and 1883, painting places mainly in Rajasthan. He returned in
1886, when he visited at least seven cities. Known for his realist style and
attention to detail, Weeks also wrote a travel account of his journeys through
Persia (present day Iran) and India in 1896.

— Ends/Khalid

Rolling Loud Europe Day 1: Nicki Minaj, Gunna, Ken Carson And More

Rolling Loud Europe Day 1 brought highly anticipated performances this summer presenting all the best artists in global rap music. Thousands of fans across Europe were able to come to the festival to enjoy their favorite artists. Bringing them specifically to the Austrian countryside to celebrate the ten year anniversary of Rolling Loud. Ever since the very first festival in Miami, Rolling Loud has grown to be a major force in hip-hop. Not only providing a huge stage for rap’s biggest names but giving early exposure to future superstars in the music industry. To help further ignite the exciting celebration some of the most popular music artists today were able to showcase an unforgettable night of performances. Including Nicki Minaj, Gunna, Ken Carson, Ski Mask the Slump God, Anycia, and SadBoi. Even some European artists like Shirin David and Money Boy. It all began on Friday July 5, when the party started in Austria.

Nicki Minaj

The one and only queen of rap, Nicki Minaj has reigned the Rolling Loud Europe 2024 stage. Her highly anticipated performance left fans hoping she will come back to the festival again in the future. Nicki’s “Pink Friday” set drew a huge crowd of loyal fans which she refers to as the “Barbz”. Her setlist including her newest songs such as “FTCU”, “Feeling Myself”, “Red Ruby Da Sleaze” and “Barbie World”. But Minaj made sure she gave the crowd what they wanted, singing some throwbacks like “Starships”, “Moment 4 Life”, and “High School“. The famous rapper closed the night with a strikingly, fierce performance. Entertaining the audience with her career-defining classics with top tier production value and showmanship. No wonder why Nicki Minaj remains the “queen of rap”!

Gunna

The rapper, Gunna took over the stage at the music festival with a powerful set. This performance being one of the rapper’s first European festivals after a few years. So he made sure the to hype up the crowd for the rest of the day. His setlist included his music hits like “one of wun”, “prada dem”, “DOLLAZ ON MY HEAD”, “MET GALA”, and “YOSEMITE”. Gunna‘s career started when he released his debut mixtape with YSL Records. Titled “Drip Season 3” the mixtape featured his hit single “Drip Too Hard”. The song would eventually reach number 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 2016. Causing his hip-hop, rap career to skyrocket. Giving Gunna huge opportunities to feature on songs with established artists such as Travis Scott, Playboi Carti and Offset. Now in the present day Gunna continues to perform for thousands of fans at the Rolling Loud Music Festival, showing his raw talent with outstanding stage productions.

Ken Carson

Ken Carson also make his appearance at Rolling Loud Europe Day 1. With some outstanding stage presence Carson performed his songs “It’s Over”, “Freestyle 3”, “Go”, “overseas” and “Lose It”. After Carson started making music in the year of 2015 he was also a member of the record label 808 Mafia early on in his career. He then met rapper Playboi Carti around 2018, which led him to sign to Carti’s Opium label as the very first artist to be signed to the label. From then on Ken Carson has been a trailblazer in the rap community.

Featured Photo Credit: Rolling Loud/ @SARA_SHOTS

10 July 2024, 07:02

The government has said it wants to make it easier for musicians to tour Europe in the wake of fresh calls for a deal to be struck with the EU.

Hundreds of artists have been urging ministers to pursue an agreement with the EU for years which would see them perform in Europe with less red tape and additional costs associated with Brexit.

And a petition started by the Musicians’ Union backing those calls for a so-called ‘Musicians’ passport’ gained more than 100,000 signatures.

There appears to have been little movement however on the issue under the previous Conservative administration.

But Deborah Annetts, CEO at Independent Society of Musicians, who currently have more than 10,000 members across the UK, told LBC they’re hopeful new Labour officials are more open to formalising an agreement.

Read more: Two-thirds of UK adults unaware of new EU travel rules coming in for British holidaymakers this year

Read more: Drugs 1000 times stronger than heroin could ruin this summer’s music festivals, charities warn

She said: “They (Labour) have been much more sympathetic. They understand how it would be possible to create a little carve out without dismantling the trade incorporation agreement.

“So it wouldn’t have to get rid of Brexit, this would sit alongside Brexit. It’s perfectly feasible.

“And what we’ve heard from them is they are definitely sympathetic. I hope that they will start having a conversation with the EU about this because everybody wins.

“It’s just a question of Europe and the UK sitting down. It’s a really simple one page agreement. I’ve seen it. It’s really simple. It’s something that is eminently achievable.

“Rachel Reeves has set out her mission to generate growth. The UK creative industry is an engine for growth, we just need the blockages dismantled so the creative sector can play its part in regenerating this economy”.

And Hamish Fingland from Bounce MGMT, who represent several bands and musicians in Scotland, told LBC they want to see an ‘artists’ passport’ brought in.

He said: “For me it would include all the different areas that are impacting us.

“We have to get a carnet to bring our equipment into Europe. You have to apply with that in plenty of time so you can go through border control. For artists like mine that can cost between £500 and £1000 which is all relative to what you’re making.

“There’s also the artist visa situation for staying out there for a period of time. You’re not there to emigrate, you’re there as an artist to entertain people.

“There’s also the taxes on the fees – I’d love it if there was a way it worked where that was the same for all the countries.

“And on merchandise as well – you have to do a declaration on your merchandise, you get taxed on your merchandise if it’s over a certain amount and you pay VAT on your merchandise if it’s over a certain amount.”

And CEO of DF Concerts Geoff Ellis agreed the touring situation is a problem for UK artists, telling LBC: “Certainly the touring aspect and the negative effects of Brexit on both artists coming to the UK but more specifically for the British artists for them having to travel, the issues of carnets and visas has become really problematic and costly for acts as well.

“Artists can speak better on that issue than I can because obviously I’m not going out on tour with them when they do Europe, but I know it’s been a big challenge for all artists whether it’s on a stadium level or probably more acutely on a grassroots level where the margins are so tight.”

A DCMS spokesperson said: “Our brilliant musicians and artists are some of the best on the planet, which is why we want to make it easier for them to tour and export abroad.

“We will be working closely with international partners and relevant stakeholders to consider how we can help create smooth arrangements for touring artists and support the huge potential for economic growth in our creative industries.”

Artist Sergiu Ciochină knows there’s more to the beauty of Europe than world famous landmarks. After all, charm and wonder can hide in the colors of a building or how light bounces off a field. With a unique eye for finding inspiration in his surroundings, the Paris-based painter mixes the elements that catch his attention to create landscapes that borrow from the real world but are ultimately his.

“All my paintings are largely created based on distinct elements from what I see: a building, flowers, a field, a street, the sky, or the shadows elegantly cast on walls and roads,” Ciochină tells My Modern Met. “However, none of them can be called copies of photographs. Photographs may serve as a reference or a starting point. Then I apply creativity, technique, time, and a lot of artistic work to conceive something unique so that people can see and perceive them in a beautiful way.”

The artist’s sources of inspiration are as varied as his subjects. “Sometimes I come across them unexpectedly—on my way home, heading to the studio, while traveling, or during nighttime walks,” Ciochină says. “A painting might be inspired by a few buildings or elements, or sometimes a real building is entirely reimagined, contrasting with reality, because that’s how I perceive them, and people appreciate that.”

His technical approaches are just as varied as well. Sometimes he only uses oil paint and other times he experiments with mixed media through small additions of acrylic, pastel, and charcoal.

Originally from Moldova, his move to Paris has greatly influenced his work. “I have shifted towards realism and enriched my painting techniques, and the time required to complete them has increased for certain series of paintings because I wanted to depict specific buildings and their shadows more accurately,” he explains. “I have been particularly influenced by the way buildings are constructed and streets are arranged, with the shadows in Paris being completely different from those in Portugal, Milano, or Chișinău, just like my paintings. However, sometimes I return to Blue Shadows or another wonderful series, Home is Where Your Heart Is, and I believe that not even Paris can change or reinterpret them. Some things must remain fundamental to maintain an artistic trajectory; after all, this is how architecture works too.”

But for all the luminous and mottled elements of his creations, he aims to stay clear of any labels, and build a visual language that stands on its own. “I understand that it’s easier for people to label me as a ‘Mini Van Gogh or ‘inspired by Monet, but in reality, I would like people to perceive me and my art beyond comparisons with others. I have developed my own style, and I am happy to continue developing it,” he concludes.

“It brings me joy to see people who understand what I convey through these structures and colors, who purchase and admire my art in their homes every day. This is the most important thing for me—to live through art and to make the world a better and more beautiful place, now more than ever when we need it.”

To stay up to date with Ciochină’s work, you can follow him on Instagram.

Artist Sergiu Ciochină mixes urban elements that catch his attention to create landscapes that borrow from the real world but are ultimately his.

“All my paintings are largely created based on distinct elements from what I see: a building, flowers, a field, a street, the sky, or the shadows elegantly cast on walls and roads,” Ciochină tells My Modern Met.

His technical approaches are just as varied as well. Sometimes he only uses oil paint and other times he experiments with mixed media through small additions of acrylic, pastel and charcoal.

“A painting might be inspired by a few buildings or elements, or sometimes a real building is entirely reimagined, contrasting with reality, because that’s how I perceive them, and people appreciate that.”

Originally from Moldova, his move to Paris has greatly influenced his work.

“It brings me joy to see people who understand what I convey through these structures and colors, who purchase and admire my art in their homes every day.”

“This is the most important thing for me—to live through art and to make the world a better and more beautiful place, now more than ever when we need it.”

Sergiu Ciochină: Website | Store | Instagram

My Modern Met granted permission to feature images by Sergiu Ciochină.

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Home to animated heroes from Tintin to the Smurfs, Brussels, Belgium is proud to display its cartoon heritage in mammoth murals that tower over the city’s stately streets. But all is not well in the self-declared capital of comics.

In an industry where animators routinely depict epic battles between superheroes and arch-villains, European cartoon artists are now in a real-life fight of their own, fending off a new, faceless adversary: artificial intelligence (AI).

AI-generated art currently operates in a legal grey area, ensuring novel intellectual property disputes in what is a fast-growing and ever-changing field.

Copyright laws in the European Union do not explicitly cover AI-generated art, leaving some artists wondering if AI will help or hinder creativity and throwing up the thorny question of whether low-cost AI tools will eventually replace human artists.

Stealing from artists

While artists spend years honing their skills, generative AI tools, such as MidJourney, use a machine-learning algorithm – trained on artists’ images – to generate pictures in minutes.

This has triggered a “complete rejection” of AI in the European comic-book industry, according to Gauthier van Meerbeeck, editorial director at Le Lombard.

His firm is publisher of the legendary adventures of Tintin, an intrepid boy-reporter who is now almost a century old.

Created by Herge, Tintin became known for his blond quiff, baggy plus fours and trusty sidekick, Snowy the dog, and is considered an icon in what is now a global industry.

“This art is generated by stealing from artists. So morally I could never get involved in that,” said van Meerbeeck.

AI in the dock

Across the Atlantic, Disney sparked controversy in June 2023 by using AI-generated images in Marvel’s Secret Invasion, and the boom in generative AI has spawned a flurry of lawsuits in the United States.

Prominent tech companies from Microsoft-backed OpenAI to Meta Platforms, have been hit with copyright cases by artists who say AI profited from their work without permission or compensation.

European comic book publishing houses are gearing up for litigation when new EU rules under the AI act kick in mid-2025, forcing tech firms to be transparent about training inputs and opening them up to potential copyright lawsuits.

The comic series about the legendary adventures of Tintin, an intrepid boy-reporter, is now almost a century old. Photo: Handout

“It’s huge for publishers,” Quentin Deschandelliers, legal advisor at the Federation of European Publishers, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation, explaining that if you want to litigate you need to “know what is under the hood”.

He said the incoming law may push tech firms towards licensing agreements to compensate artists if their work is used to train a generative AI model.

Amid growing scrutiny over copyright, several big tech companies that trained their AI using others’ output have already signed content-licensing deals with media outlets, such as OpenAI with the Financial Times and Google with NewsCorp.

However, some publishers and authors are afraid of “giving away the keys to the kingdom”, explained Deschandelliers, over fears of AI-generated works flooding the markets.

No soul in art by algorithm

Courtroom battles aside, artists are also wondering whether to harness or reject the new tools.

Belgian comic book artist Marnix Verduyn, who goes by the pseudonym NIX, describes himself as a computer engineer who “accidentally became a comic book artist”.

He chose to train a generative algorithm on his own comics, joking that he had a fantasy of replacing himself to spend more time at the beach.

But his fellow comic artists didn’t find it so funny, especially when the generative AI model Dall-E came out in 2021; it was a watershed moment.

“It was a shock how powerful it was,” he said. “That’s when I thought there’s a lot of people who are not going to have jobs in the future.”

In Europe, the cultural sector employed 7.7 million people in 2022, while its net turnover was about €448bil (RM2.273 trillion) in 2021, according to European Commission business statistics.

NIX believes his use of AI – taking on low-skilled, repetitive tasks – is “gently disruptive” and necessary to keep up with competition from Japanese and US comic-book giants.

A work from Belgian comic book artist Marnix Verduyn, who goes by the pseudonym NIX. Photo: Handout

But recent art graduates are worked up over entry-level jobs they might once have filled now being filled by machines.

“It’s cheap, fast, no humans needed, and it kills any kind of artistic endeavour in the industry,” said Sarah Vanderhaegen in an interview.

The 24-year-old Belgian artist described how a brush with AI during an internship had left her crushed, forcing her to reconsider options – and pivoting her to an archeology degree.

Now working on a comic book in her spare time, she sees AI as a bogus short-cut powered by an algorithm that can never hope to match an artist’s ability to translate emotions onto a page.

A point where artists and publishers agree.

“AI-generated images, I can spot them straight away,” noted van Meerbeeck, who thinks comics are safe for now, as storyline, text and images remain too complex for the current crop of generative AI to create.

For NIX the human remains the boss, AI – a mere tool.

“It’s just a cocktail of ideas stolen from somebody. I see the mathematics (of AI), so there’s no soul in the mathematics.” – Thomson Reuters Foundation

In her illuminating book Archive of Feelings (2003), feminist and queer scholar Ann Cvetkovich observes how: “The act of archiving personal and collective memories can serve as a form of activism, a way to resist erasure and claim visibility for marginalized experiences.” 20 years on from the publication of this seminal work in the field of queer and feminist theory, across Central and Eastern Europe, LGBTQAI+ people continue to fight for equality and visibility against an unrelenting tide of right-wing hate speech and politics. One of the most notable recent cases is the ultra-conservative Polish government’s introduction of ‘gay-free zones’ in 2021, which has tarnished 1/3 of the country with xenophobic and fascist rhetoric, and reinforces the dangerous interpellation of not identifying heterosexual as ‘abnormal’. Considering that annual suicide rates for Polish LGBTQAI+ people have risen by 16% since the bill’s introduction, the fight for equality for sexual minorities, and changing homophobic legislation and public opinion continues. To coincide with the month of Pride, here are 8 LGBTQAI+ contemporary artists from Central and Eastern Europe who bring visibility to the community, contributing to an ever-growing archive of queer experience:

What do nettles, common weeds and unwanted plants have to do with the collective human experience? What can we learn from the anomalies and defects of herbs and trees? For artist Liliana Zeic (b. 1988, Poland), the infections, viruses and bacteria of the natural world are wonderful mentors that we live with rather than fight against.

In the artist’s recent forays into intarsia wood, female bodies emerge amongst the swirling cosmos and nebula of poplar, maple and walnut browns, recalling Cezanne’s bathers, or Gustav Klimt’s sensual charcoal reclining nudes. Yet here, the female figure is invested with agency, the frontwoman of the tableaus, reimagined for a queer audience. We spot women picking berries in the forest (Berry picking), or indulging in everyday habitual states, as laying lovers in bed (Sleepyheads). Zeic’s interdisciplinary arts practice involves video, photography and performance works to explore social issues and activism from a queer and feminist perspective. These recent intarsia works however, are the result of a more personal investigation, a form of manual self-expression, which combines Zeic’s rural upbringing in the Polish countryside with her family lineage – her parents owned a carpentry workshop themselves.

Essential to each work are the blotchy characteristics of this natural canvas, known as burr – fungi which have grown in a deformed manner on a tree trunk or branch. Zeic reclaims these organic deformities as her primary material to carve a new world for individuals on the margins of society. Turning to plants, botany and flora, she queers the school of biomorphism – the tradition of modelling society based on processes and forms in the natural world, repurposing what nature has discarded as ill, and man has colonised as purely decorative (intarsia is commonly used in furniture). 

In fact, these millennia-old life forms can teach us about resistance, survival strategies and mechanisms for navigating a world hell-bent on categorisation, cataloguing, upholding binary models and systems of power. Like the often trodden-on, discarded, or forgotten about weeds, overgrowths and bulbous tree protrusions, Zeic’s intarsia series enable new possibilities of living while on the margins of society.

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The rural imaginary gushes through Małgorzata Mycek’s (b. Sanok, 1993) buoyant and explosive paintings of strong and defiant burly women in quotidian countryside backdrops. The trans artist, who settled in their native village of Radoszyce in the Bieszczady region of Poland, peppers their works with countless references to village life. Playful titles, such as Chodzienie spać z kurami (Going to sleep with the chickens, 2022), Kosiarz (Mower, 2024), Żniwiarka (Reaper, 2023) or Kopienie siana (Digging hay, 2022), nod to the simple pleasures and slow pace of country life. Scythes, apiaries and haystacks coalesce with pin-up girl tattoos, hairy bottoms and consumer references of Nike ticks, weaving a hybrid identity of being a queer millennial living in Polish countryside. Mycek’s acrylic paintings on repurposed advertising banners undoubtedly possess a hopeful, optimistic charm, and utopian flavour of queer country life, boosted by their chosen palate of marigolds, vermilions, chartreuses and shamrocks. Yet their paintings and wider artistic practice evokes far deeper messages of fighting for gender emancipation, the struggle for queer rights, and importance of supporting local causes and grassroots initiatives.

The artist recently collaborated with Polish and Belarussian artists Alexey Lunev, Raman Tratsiuk and Katarzyna Wojtczak to produce the very first public LGBTQAI+ monument in Poland, Deus Pluto conservat (2024). Their signature motif – a femme farmer woman holding a sickle – is seen alongside Raman Trarusiuk’s two-headed sickles bobbing in space and Aleksey Lunev’s Latin motto. Pluto, which was downgraded by the International Astronomical Union in 2006 to become a dwarf planet, is reclaimed here as a symbol of queer resistance. An outcast of outer space itself, the former planet is an example of life on the periphery. The mural, entirely crafted from mosaic, reclaims a material widely used for perpetuating the Soviet propaganda machine and repurposes it for the LGBTQAI+ community. Following the writings of queer theorist and Brown feminist scholar Sara Ahmed, the collaborative cross-cultural project embodies the message that “We have to build our own buildings when the world doesn’t accommodate us.” (Feminist Killjoy).

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Soft and strong, tender and resilient, the faces which Zula Rabikowska (b. Poland) captures in front of her lens reflect the diverse and often contradictory experiences of migration, gender identity and belonging. The London-based artist’s photojournalism is inspired by her own story of migration and coming out as LGBTQAI+. Her works grapple with the lived day-to-day realities of the community, offering an antidote to mainstream representations which reduce human experience to fanciful queer parties, Pride parades, or the extreme – pathologizing rhetoric and rejection stories. In her ongoing project, Scared to Love (2022 –) Rabikowska photographs LGBTQAI+ people across the Balkans, a region of Europe that continues to record some of the worst violations of LGBTQAI+ human rights and discrimination. 

She incorporates analogue photography techniques, using a Kiev 80 camera in her 2019 acclaimed project Nothing But A Curtain, which produced a dazzling optical illusion, a ‘wall of light’ across the lens, and evoked the era of Soviet production. Combined with her interest in storytelling, Rabikowska constructs her own idiosyncratic visual language and challenges the stereotypes associated with the former Soviet Bloc nations. Her projects offer an earnest portrayal of the community, and contribute to weaving a queer archive of love, affect and belonging. 

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Alex Baczyński-Jenkins (b. 1987, Poland) is an artist and choreographer, and founder of the Warsaw-based queer feminist collective Kem, and dividing his time between Berlin and Warsaw. He explores affect, embodiment and relationality through durational performances and movement works. Baczyński-Jenkins’s performances, such as Until a thousand roses bloom (2018), seen at Foksal Gallery in Warsaw, challenge the social and cultural parameters which have been constructed to privilege the white, cis, able-bodied man. He draws on common LGBTQAI+ signs, codes and sexual practices, such as cruising, often carried out by gay men, incorporating them into his routines and using mixed-gender performers, thus creating new interrelations and being-in-the-world.

As bodies thrive, cavort and contort in his heady, visceral compositions, Baczyński-Jenkins demonstrates how archives are also constructed through the politics of touch. Time, another key factor in his works, is exploited for its elastic properties. It ruptures the somatic norm of heteronormativity, like the physiological networks formed through the touching of the dancers’ bodies. Baczyński-Jenkins’ dances reveal how a queer archive is resolutely affective and sensational, as stated by the queer theorist Eve Kosovsky Sedgewick in her seminal work, Touching-Feeling (2005), “touch can enable ‘tools and techniques for nondualistic thought”. 

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We swim through the supernatural waters of florescent divinities, cyborg aliens, and mythological warriors in Hortensia Mi Kafchin’s (b. 1986, Galați, Romania) giant oil on canvas worlds. The binaries of heaven and earth, land and cosmos, the digital and natural bleed and collapse in on each other, resulting in volatile and chaotic scenes, expressions of the abject. As feminist philosopher Julia Kristeva argues in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1982), the abject is a form of expulsion and rejection of the ‘Other’ – a body threatening to disrupt the ontological and hegemonic order of society. In Mi Kafchin’s paintings, sense and logic is destitute as the human body appears spliced and severed (Social Anxiety, 2019), or mutates into half-machine (The Fireworks, 2020), nodding to Mi Kafchin’s personal experience of transitioning gender. Her works reveal the power in the mutating body, the merging of man-machine, and the queer potentiality of new forms of being.

The Berlin-based artist’s troubles the tug-and-pull of the Cartesian dualism exquisitely: nature and artifice, man and religion, ying and yang swim in an array of psychedelic pools of neon, brilliant arches and Renaissance geometric naves. We are reminded of Hilma af-Klimt’s esoteric dreamworlds, but here they are injected with contemporary anxieties of technology, social media and AI. Countless cables, TV monitors, and video game paraphernalia littering her works merge with personal identity markers, to construct a unique archive of growing up as LGBTQAI+ in a post-Ceaușescu-dictatorship Romania. Chaotic, disturbed but also explosive and energetic, Mi Kafchin’s paintings reveal the boundless potential of being, of hybridity, pluralities beyond the ontological social order, the beauty in the abject.

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One of the first openly-queer Polish artists emerging on the arts scene at the start of the noughties, Karol Radziszewski (b. 1980, Białystok, Poland) paved the way for a Central and Eastern European queer counterculture against the far-right government gaining traction at the time. An interdisciplinary artist, curator, film-maker and avid collector, community activism and forging an ongoing circuit of queer alliance are central themes in his projects. In 2015, the artist launched the online Queer Archives Institute – a Polish queer cultural organisation committed to promoting and upholding the queer memory of Central and Eastern Europe. Unlike some of the younger artists featured in this article, Radziszewski witnessed the fall of communism, already nine years old living in the city of Białystok in 1989. Remnants of his childhood filter through in his works, uniting the personal with the collective memory. The Power of Secrets (May 2021: Sternberg Press), is a mammoth tome comprised of archival materials sought by Radziszewski – newspaper scraps and childhood scrawls in scrapbooks of princesses in specs – together with documentation from personal and collective memory. The result is a mutating, hybrid and affective archive, blurring the lines between reality and fiction, and which offers alternative paths for remembering, digressions from the straight line. 

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In the contemporary late capitalist climate of state-controlled media, profit-driven and surveillant internet, and social media deep fakes, Maja Čule’s (b. 1984, Rijeka, Croatia) interdisciplinary project Electronic Witches (2023) reveals how sites of resistance and hope can flourish even under the most oppressive systems of war, capitalism, and patriarchy. Currently on show at the Croatian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2024, after its display at Arcadia Missa gallery in London in 2023, Electronic Witches is a multi-channel video installation and collage project, which centres around the story of two US and UK internet activists and hackers who moved to the Balkans in the 1990s to teach women how to use Bulletin Board System (BBS) networks to send emails.

During the Yugoslav wars, cross-border communication was interrupted by military state leaders, and women were rendered as helpless victims of the war without agency by mainstream news outlets. As a queer artist of Central European heritage, Čule offers a queer retelling of this remarkable case by combining archival footage from Croatian Radio Television along with their reconstruction of historical events. The artist chose a cast of predominantly queer, first-time actors to re-enact the events, thus defying stereotypes of gender and the labour market, and re-investing agency in the hands of women and marginalised groups. Like many of their works, Electronic Witches combines speculative fiction with reality, resulting in audiences questioning authenticity in an age dominated by social media and consumer culture. Čuje’s project is also an example of queer solidarity and of the dangers of staying indifferent, as the ZaMirNET training manual developed the hackers, could ‘bring[ing] to light the ways that silence can be violent.”, as one of the hackers, Kathryn Turnipseed, herself wrote in 1996. Electronic Witches reveals the contentious, fluid and shifting Central and Eastern European cultural identity through the lens of cyberfeminism and queer politics.

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Bodies frolic, limbs knock and bump together, shadow play in the chiaroscuro of the pounding dancefloor. These are the snap-shot instances of queer love, unity and celebration captured by LGBTQAI+ artist and photographer Libuše Jarcovjáková (b. 1952, Prague) in her project T Club (Untitled publishing, 2024). Her recent publication documents the ins and outs of the legendary Prague LGBTQAI+ club taken between 1983-85, a hedonistic enclave for marginalised sexualities living during the totalitarianist regime of former Czechoslovakia.

According to Jarcovjáková, this was a place of ‘eternal carnival’, where local taxi drivers and drugstore shop assistants descended into the comforting cloak of cigarette-vapours and strobe lighting flashes. Like the outcasts and misfits gracing Diane Arbus’ photographs of 1960s fringe New York, or Nan Goldin’s intimate and bruising portraits of LGBTQAI+ subcultures, Jarcovjáková’s photographs are unequivocally visceral and living. Charged with emotion, they reveal the beauty and power of queer alliance and community in the face of authoritarian regime and censorship. As the late queer photographer David Wojnarowicz stated, ‘Hell is a place on earth. Heaven is a place in our head.’