Paris show pays homage to 'eternal style' of late designer Azzedine Alaia

Two months after legendary designer Azzedine Alaia’s sudden death plunged the fashion world into mourning, an exhibition in homage to the “King of Cling” opened Monday in his studios in Paris. The Tunisian-born designer, renowned for the way his clothes hugged the body, died suddenly in November aged 82, reportedly of heart failure after falling down the stairs at his home. The diminutive maverick, who ignored fashion week convention by showing when and where he wanted, in July produced his first couture collection in six years to rapturous reviews. Now some of his most iconic dresses are going on display in the glass-roofed gallery next to his studio and home in the Marais district where he used to show his creations. It includes the dress worn by supermodel Naomi Campbell, his longtime friend and muse, when she led his last collection down the catwalk.

Fondation Beyeler opens retrospective of the work of German artist Georg Baselitz

The Fondation Beyeler is devoting its first exhibition in 2018 to the German painter, printmaker and sculptor Georg Baselitz (b. 1938 in Deutschbaselitz, Saxony), whose work occupies a central position in the art of our time. The exhibition, marking the artist’s eightieth birthday, takes the form of an extensive retrospective, comprising many of the most important paintings and sculptures created by Baselitz over the past six decades. These include loans from renowned public and private collections in Europe and the USA, some of which have not been seen in public for many years. The exhibition begins at the end of January 2018 at the Fondation Beyeler and will be shown in the summer in a modified form at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. Baselitz exhibitions are rare events in Switzerland and the USA. The last monographic exhibition of Baselitz’s work in Switzerland took place in 1990 at

Hanny Newton: The amazing qualities of goldwork

Hanny is a hand embroidery artist specialising in contemporary goldwork. She teaches creative goldwork nationwide, including Embroiderers Guild groups, Ardington School of Crafts and most recently creating goldwork embroidery activities for the British Museum.

In this interview, Hanny describes her artistic journey, from being encouraged to stitch by her Grandma to discovering goldwork embroidery. We learn the potential this metal thread has to offer, how using it has helped Hanny cope with her personal anxieties, and why a phone call from the Britsh Museum has shaped her future endeavours.

Hanny Newton,

Nothing is permanent with embroidery

Three Flemish Baroque masters featured in a new exhibition at The Morgan

In a letter from September 13, 1621, describing a large painting of a lion hunt that he had just completed, Peter Paul Rubens expressed what he believed to be essential to his art: it had to be powerful and graceful. A constant quest to achieve an equilibrium of these two qualities lay at the heart of his work. The same can be said of Anthony van Dyck and Jacob Jordaens, who studied with Rubens and whose lives and careers were entwined with—and influenced by—the senior artist. A new exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum, Power and Grace: Drawings by Rubens, Van Dyck, and Jordaens, brings together an extraordinary selection of twenty-two works on paper by these three giants of Flemish Baroque art, demonstrating the crucial role the medium of drawing played in their individual practice and highlighting their graphic styles. The show, which includes work from the Morgan’s collection supplemented with a small number

Leopold Museum presents select works by the main exponents of Viennese Jugendstil

Vienna is marking 100 years since the death of a string of luminaries from its fin-de-siecle glory days with an avalanche of exhibitions of modernist art, design and architecture that still inspire and shock today. The year 1918 did not only mark defeat in World War I and the end of the Austro-Hungarian empire but also saw artists Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele and Koloman Moser and architect Otto Wagner pass away. Klimt died from a stroke at 55, an infection claimed Wagner’s life at 76 and cancer killed Moser aged 50. Schiele survived being conscripted into the war only to die in the Spanish flu pandemic, three days after his pregnant wife Edith. He was just 28. All were leading lights in the revolutions in art, literature, architecture, psychology, philosophy and music that made the imperial city on the Danube the buzzing intellectual hub of the world at the time.