Churchill "Mental" Art Goes

A controversial statue portraying Winston Churchill in a strait-jacket has been removed following complaints that the sculpture was in bad taste. The mental health campaign group, Rethink, erected the statue in Norwich on Friday as part of a campaign to change attitudes towards psychiatric illness. Officials said they chose to portray Churchill in such a fashion because he had suffered depression but had still made an enormous contribution to public life. They said the strait-jacket symbolised the stigma which restricted many mentally ill people.
But Churchill's family and veterans of the Second World War criticised the campaign, saying that the war-time prime minister should not be depicted in such a fashion. A spokesman for Rethink said it was being removed at the request of the owners of the building. "The owners of the building have asked us to remove it - they haven't given us any reasons," he said. "We can only suppose that it is as a result of complaints following the publicity."
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Irish Art

Masterpiece Art for Pennies

Van Goghs, Turners, Da Vincis and Klimts pour off the easels of China’s most unusual assembly line. The owner of New Century Oil Painting is in high spirits. She is sure they cannot find better value for money than in her shop in a grimy corner of the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen. More than 8,000 painters are crowded into the tenements of the Dafen Oil Painting Village. Some are trained artists, others are young peasants who paint by numbers and turn out Van Gogh’s Sunflowers by the score. Hundreds of Van Goghs hanging out to dry along with the washing and wind-dried pork at the workshop of Zhang Zhenhai.
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Irish Art

Picasso Accused Of Art "Theft"

He was one of the greatest artists of the 20th century and also one of the most controversial. And now, 33 years after his death, the first significant exhibition of Pablo Picasso’s work in South Africa has provoked a furious row after a senior government official accused him of stealing the work of African artists to boost his “flagging talent”. “Today the truth is on display that Picasso would not have been the renowned creative genius he was if he did not steal and re-adapt the work of ‘anonymous (African) artists’.” The Picasso and Africa exhibition, which has been drawing capacity crowds at Johannesburg’s Standard Bank Gallery, contains 84 original works by Picasso along with 29 African sculptures similar to those in the artist’s own collection, and is described as an “innovative dialogue between Picasso’s work and his African inspiration”. Picasso is not the only artists to have been accused of appropriating African art without giving full credit. Amedeo Modigliani, the Italian sculptor, was also said to have drawn inspiration from African masks.
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Irish Art