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Scottish Sun
2 days ago
- Scottish Sun
From ace architecture to top tapas, the Spanish city that is mini-break heaven
Scroll down to find out the cost of cheap flights from the UK BONITA From ace architecture to top tapas, the Spanish city that is mini-break heaven LOUNGING on a double sunbed by the rooftop infinity pool as the sun sets, it's amor at first sight at Barcelona's Grand Hotel Central. With views stretching from the Mediterranean to the hilltop of Montjuïc, this is sundowner heaven, with a cocktail list to match. 6 Barcelona's Park Guell is a swell spot to chill out in 6 Be a beach babe and catch some rays Credit: Getty Images 6 The infinity pool and beyond at the Grand Hotel Central Credit: Supplied As I sip a Solera's Delight – a mix of rum, vanilla syrup and chocolate bitters that tastes like golden hour in a glass, £14.50 – while Balearic beats play, I can't think of a cooler spot to celebrate my first wedding anniversary with husband Nick. Go gaudi You'll find The Grand Hotel Central in the bustling Old Town – not that you'd know it once you cross the imposing 1920s facade. With a marble lobby and wood-panelled library, plus a spa, sunrise yoga and staff who can't do enough to help, this is a chic oasis of calm. Our superior room is equally stylish, with a rainfall shower and a bed so comfy we wish we could bring it home. Dinner at the hotel's Restaurant Can Bo offers a fusion of Spanish tapas with an Italian twist served in a lively, Mediterranean-inspired space. Top marks for the octopus brioche, £6.80, tagliatelle with oxtail ragu, £14.50, white asparagus in carbonara sauce, £11, and the decadent chocolate three ways, £7.65. As tempting as it is to chill at the hotel, Nick and I venture out to explore. The hop-on, hop-off bus takes you everywhere from Barceloneta beach to Catalan architect Gaudi's awe-inspiring Sagrada Familia basilica. Day tickets cost £25.25 per person ( Gaudi's magical Park Guell is a must-see. With jaw-dropping buildings, sculptures and mosaics, this architectural wonder leaves us speechless. Entry costs £15.30 per person ( Martin Lewis gives travel advice about checking your passport Take a ramblas The following day, fortified by a top-notch buffet breakfast, we mooch around the Gothic Quarter and El Born – two districts that form a labyrinth of cobbled streets, lined with bars, shops, restaurants and galleries. Nick picks up a shirt in Humana Vintage, while I can't resist a ceramic plate from Artesanat, plus a huge pistachio cinnamon roll from bakery Demasie, £3.50 (@Cookies_demasie). Food market Mercat de Santa Caterina delivers another gastronomical marvel in the form of cheese and Iberian ham cones, £4.25, which have lived rent-free in my head ever since. Fearing gout is imminent, we take a stroll around Parc de la Ciutadella, with its golden Cascada Monumental waterfall and lake, then hit the Picasso Museum. 6 Sleep in style in a Grand Suite at the Grand Hotel Central Credit: Supplied 6 Take your pick of Picasso pics at the Picasso Museum With an extensive collection of the artist's early work, it's well worth the visit. Entry costs £14.50 per person ( No Barcelona trip is complete without seeing the boulevard of Las Ramblas, thronged with tourists, locals, flower sellers and street performers. To rest our legs, we grab daiquiris, £11.50, in Boadas, Barcelona's oldest cocktail bar, beloved by everyone from Hemingway to Dalí. The tiny room with art-deco furnishings and tuxedo-wearing bartenders, is like stepping back in time. With time for one final indulgence, we hit restaurant Sagardi Argenteria for Barceloneta Bombas – a local speciality of meatballs encased in potato and breadcrumbs, then deep-fried and served with spicy brava sauce, £2.20 a pop – and swear to return for our second anniversary. Gout permitting. FYI Double rooms cost from £250 a night ( UK return flights to Barcelona with Vueling cost from £56 (
Los Angeles Times
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Commentary: 'Degenerate' or 'woke,' Paris museum exhibit shows what happens to art in the crosshairs of politics
PARIS – If all you saw of the exhibition at the Picasso Museum here was the art itself, you would recognize at once that here are wonderful canvases, powerful canvases, from many decades and countries and artists — Van Gogh, Klee, Picasso of course, Kandinsky, Chagall, landscapes, portraits, abstracts and striking sculpture. But what's the theme, the organizing concept? It's hate. The unifying theme is that every one of these works, and thousands more, were despised and maligned by Hitler and the Third Reich as 'degenerate art,' destined to be burned up, sold off, hidden away, or lost during the 10-plus years of the Nazi crusade against any art that it decreed was too modern, too un-German, work that Nazis said was created by 'idiots,' 'criminals,' 'speculators,' 'Bolsheviks' and 'Jews.' The exhibition, 'Degenerate Art: Modern Art on Trial Under the Nazis,' is at this museum until May 25. It's in Paris' Marais district, once the center of the city's Jewish life. And it's the first such exhibition in France. It takes a lot of time to assemble so many artworks from so many different collections and museums, but the show launched serendipitously not quite a month after Donald Trump was sworn in as president. His name does not appear in the exhibit, but a connection is palpable if not visible. Since Trump took office, the art world has watched his mission to end 'woke' art in taxpayer-funded federal programs and institutions. He justified his takeover of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts by claiming on social media that he would put an end to 'woke' performances of drag shows and 'anti-American propaganda.' He filled its board with allies who voted him in as director. He's cut the entire National Endowment for the Arts funding from his proposed budget. Vice president JD Vance has been tasked with removing 'improper ideology' from the Smithsonian Institution, those things and ideas that 'degrade shared American values' or 'divide Americans based on race.' President Trump stands in the presidential box as he tours the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington on March 17. This French museum's show offers a flashback to the era when, apart from the works including those displayed here, the artists who created them were reviled and persecuted. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, whose glamorous 1913 'Rue a Berlin' is here, died by suicide in 1938. Otto Freundlich's striking Easter Island-style human head was on the cover of the original July 1937 Nazi exhibition guide to some 700 'degenerate' works, and beneath it the German word for 'art' — 'KUNST' — in capital letters and quote marks, leaving no question that the Nazis did not regard it as art at all. Freundlich was sent to a concentration camp on March 4, 1943, and died there five days later. Before the fatal train departed, he wrote a note to his partner and fellow artist, Jeanne Kosnick-Kloss, ending, 'May heaven protect you and give you strength. I love you and will always be with you.' Room by room, the works unfurl their themes, among them 'Race and Purity,' 'Purging German Museums' and 'Trade in Degenerate Art.' In 1933, Marc Chagall's intense painting of a rabbi, 'The Pinch of Snuff,' was an obvious target. Taken out of a museum in Mannheim, pulled through the city streets on a handcart, inviting Germans to mock it, and then set in an art gallery window with the sign, 'Taxpayer, you should know how your money was spent.' Others make you wonder how they came to be reviled. Why would a striking Van Gogh landscape, 'Field of Poppies,' be offensive? Probably because the Nazis classed him as anti-traditional as well as insane, as they did the avant-garde artist Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler. She was committed to an asylum, where she drew portraits of her fellow patients, some on display here. The Nazis murdered her under their forced euthanasia program. 'Metropolis,' a painting by German artist George Grosz, is part of the 'Degenerate Art: Modern Art on Trial Under the Nazis' at the Picasso Museum in Paris. George Grosz's canvas 'Metropolis' was painted during World War I and shows a nighttime street teeming with the delights and vices of city life. The Nazis put it on display and then sold it at auction, in 1939, as they did many of the artworks they damned, to finance their handiwork. The painting wound up in New York. So did Grosz, who years later bought it back himself. Most of the work is vertical, on the walls. But horizontally, under glass in a large table, this caught my attention: an engrossing collection of 1930s and 1940s newspaper clippings Picasso kept — he was quite the packrat — about the Hitler 'degenerate' purges. My French is pretty fair, so I think I read it right. One article, on Aug. 20, 1937, is from the French illustrated weekly Voila, which was edited by a pair of Jewish brothers. The article appeared a month after July 18, 1937, when Hitler opened a Munich museum of approved Nazi artworks. The next day, he visited the 'degenerate' art exhibition. Voila used the back-to-back events to mock Hitler and his taste in art, as well as 'the violence of his methods and the scale of his offensive' against modern art. It begins by reminding readers of the incompetent doctors in the plays of French playwright Moliere, men who endangered their patients' lives. It then likens Hitler to a doctor who cautions German artists to 'paint according to my directives, otherwise you'll be sterilized.' Instead, the writer imagines Hitler advising Germans to paint 'scenes from the life of the SS and the SA,' Hitler's armed Nazi forces, along with depictions of heroic young athletes in the mode of the mythic German hero Siegfried, and 'opulently formed women.' Stingingly, the article shows readers some examples of Hitler's own work, the rather stodgy and static products of a draftsman who aspires to art. Hitler twice applied and was twice rejected for admission to Vienna's Academy of Fine Arts, which remarked on his 'unfitness for painting.' The article notes that the mighty fuhrer had very recently 'wielded a paintbrush,' and 'not only as a housepainter.' That last is a sly point that's been an enduring comic take of Hitler's artistic preening. There's debate of long standing that Hitler's crusade against 'degenerate' art grew in part from his academy rejections. The 'housepainting Hitler' trope got a big boost, and a big laugh, in Mel Brooks' 1967 film 'The Producers.' The title characters find the worst screenplay they can, written by a crazed ex-Nazi soldier played by Kenneth Mars. The schnappsed-up Mars goes on a rant against Winston Churchill, 'with his cigars, with his brandy, and his rotten painting! Rotten! Hitler — there was a painter! He could paint an entire apartment in one afternoon — two coats!' A painting of President Trump is seen in the Grand Foyer of the White House as Trump speaks about investing in America on April 30 in Washington. With Trump now issuing an executive order about the contents of federal art institutions, his own artistic tastes are being highlighted, like his fondness for paintings of himself, and his touchiness about them. He and his supporters have shared 'fan' portraits of him painted as a boxer, a general and a king. He recently received — reportedly from Vladimir Putin — a portrait of himself with raised fist after the assassination attempt in Pennsylvania last year. A portrait of him that had hung in the Colorado state capitol for almost six years — a painting commissioned by Colorado Republicans and paid for by a $10,000 GoFundMe campaign — recently was taken down after it came to Trump's attention and he proclaimed it 'truly the worst' image of himself. In 2016, the Washington Post detailed how Trump had spent $20,000 of his charitable foundation's money to buy a large portrait of himself, which was said to have been installed in his New York golf club. Years before, when Trump invited his biographer Tim O'Brien aboard his plane as O'Brien was researching his 2005 book 'Trump Nation,' O'Brien spotted what looked like the Renoir painting 'Two Sisters (on the Terrace).' O'Brien said Trump told him, 'You know, that's an original Renoir.' In a Vanity Fair podcast, O'Brien said he told Trump, 'Donald, it's not.' He said, 'I grew up in Chicago, that Renoir is called Two Sisters on the Terrace, and it's hanging on a wall at the Art Institute of Chicago.' The original has, indeed, hung in the institute for more than 80 years. The Trump copy appeared to have been moved to Trump Tower, O'Brien said, because it could be seen in the background when '60 Minutes' interviewed Trump there not long after the 2016 election. The day before Germany's 1937 'degenerate' art exhibit debuted, Hitler opened another art show, also in Munich — an apotheosis of Germanic taste, the 'great German art exhibition.' Much of his speech was spent attacking the art he didn't like. 'Cubism, Dadaism, Futurism, Impressionism, etc., have nothing to do with our German people … I will therefore confess now, in this very hour, that I have come to the final inalterable decision to clean house, just as I have done in the domain of political confusion, and from now on rid the German art life of its phrase-mongering.' ' … with the opening of this exhibition, the end of German art foolishness and the end of the destruction of its culture will have begun. From now on we will wage an unrelenting war of purification against the last elements of putrefaction in our culture … ' The German artist Otto Dix was unsparing in his painted critiques of war. He'd already been under the disapproving eyes of Nazis for years, and several months before the Munich 'degenerate' art exhibit, he flung down this challenge in a letter to his fellow 'degenerate' artists: 'Then let's stay what we are. Long live degeneracy!'
New York Times
20-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
A Hong Kong Picasso Show Aims to Help Viewers See Him ‘in a New Light'
Pablo Picasso stands, cigarette in hand, gazing intently at the viewer. A white pocket square pokes out of his suit jacket; strands of hair reach up to the top of the canvas. 'Picasso' is a 2011 oil portrait by the Chinese contemporary artist Zeng Fanzhi, and it is the first piece visitors see walking into a new exhibition at the M+ Museum in Hong Kong: 'The Hong Kong Jockey Club Series: Picasso for Asia — A Conversation.' Running through July 13, the show combines 72 Picasso works — most of them loans from the Picasso Museum in Paris — with about 140 works by 31 Asian and Asian-diasporic artists, most pulled from the museum's own collection. The aim is to set up a dialogue between the Spanish master and four generations of Asian artists, the oldest born in the 1860s, and the youngest in the 1990s. Zeng, who was born in 1964, explained why Picasso was important. 'His work impressed me with its vitality — the fearless innovation, as well as the ventures into the unknown,' Zeng said in an email interview. While he started studying Picasso in his student days, and was long inspired by the Spanish master's Rose Period, Zeng said that he kept making surprise discoveries, when, for instance, he saw the sketches and preparatory drawings recently shown at the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the sculptures in the 2015-16 survey of Picasso's three-dimensional works at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. 'Picasso's career was no static journey,' Zeng said. 'I was struck by this pioneering spirit.' Five decades since his death, and nearly 150 years since his birth, the 20th century's most famous artist continues to dominate the international art conversation. And now, M+, a museum of visual arts and culture that opened in Hong Kong in late 2021, is continuing that conversation with this exhibit — the first of its kind. Picasso has, in recent years, been blasted for his treatment of the women in his life, notably in the 2023 Brooklyn Museum exhibition 'It's Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby,' curated by Gadsby, an Australian comic who had taken on the artist in a Netflix special. The M+ exhibition curators have deliberately mentioned those debates in the show. Yet as Doryun Chong, the artistic director of M+, writes in the catalog, the 'revisionism' of the past few years appears not to have 'curbed the public interest in, if not the appreciation of, Picasso's art in our time.' In a video interview, Chong, who co-curated the exhibition, explained that while the show contained direct homages to Picasso such as the Zeng painting and Simon Fujiwara's 2024 revisiting of Picasso's 'Massacre in Korea' — 'Who vs Who vs Who? (A Picture of a Massacre)' — 'it was also really important to think about other modalities of relationship' besides 'the one-way direction from the master to the follower.' Chong and his exhibition co-curator François Dareau (an associate curator at the Picasso Museum in Paris) worked out that Picasso represented four archetypes (or commonly held views) of the artist: the genius, the outsider, the magician and the apprentice. Those archetypes are the four component sections of the exhibition. In early 20th-century Asia, Picasso was widely known, and many artists painted in the style of synthetic Cubism (a later stage of the Cubist movement) in Japan, Korea, China, India and different parts of Southeast Asia, Chong said. But from the mid-20th century onward, artists in Asia didn't necessarily 'think of him and his particular style as an inspiration anymore,' he added, because they were more interested in artists such as the Abstract Expressionists. Chong said that for the general public, however, the interest in Picasso 'continues and even grows' across Asia, irrespective of controversies and debates. 'There is a bit of a gap between his influence on more recent generations of artists and the public's continued and increasing passion for his work,' he said. Among Western artists, Picasso continues to have impact and influence. As the catalog points out, numerous living artists in the West represent him or his art in their work, such as David Hockney, George Condo and Maurizio Cattelan. Yet Picasso himself was not interested in spawning a following, said Anne Baldassari, one of the world's foremost Picasso scholars. Baldassari was the president of the Picasso Museum in Paris from 2005 to 2014, and in 2012 staged what was then the largest Picasso exhibition in Hong Kong: a solo show with 56 paintings and sculptures from the museum's collections. 'Picasso always denied wanting to establish a 'school' or contribute to any artistic movement,' Baldassari said. She added that having gone through 'what he viewed as years of sterile academic training in the exact representation of reality,' he was 'an anarchist and a freethinker' who sought a 'complete break' with what came before. He also liked working away from the public eye. Between 1906 and 1914, a period of experimentation during which he radically reinvented painting, he refused to exhibit his paintings or allow them to be published or marketed, said Baldassari. Only those who visited his atelier or acquired the works — such as his collectors Gertrude and Leo Stein — could see them, she noted. What is also true is that during his lifetime, Picasso actually met few Asian artists: 'You could count them with the fingers of one hand,' said Dareau, the M+ exhibition's co-curator. How did the Picasso Museum decide what to lend to the M+ show? Dareau noted that the works selected enabled 'an interesting and coherent dialogue' with the M+ collections, and allowed 'a visitor to the exhibition who knows nothing about Picasso to get a sense of the different periods and styles in his career.' There are loans from the Blue Period, the Cubist period, and from Picasso's Surrealist period, in a variety of media: painting, sculpture, drawing, prints and ceramics. The largest Picasso loan from Paris — and the work that ends the M+ exhibition — is 'Massacre in Korea,' completed in January 1951. The work, which Dareau said was the only painting by Picasso of an Asian subject, shows gun-wielding men in armor taking aim at a group of naked women and children. It was inspired by past art-historical masterpieces: Goya's 'The Third of May 1808 in Madrid' (1814), and Manet's 'The Execution of Emperor Maximilian' (a series painted between 1867 and 1869). Chong noted that 'Massacre in Korea' was a powerful antiwar manifesto, completed 14 years after 'Guernica,' at a time when Picasso was known across the world as a pacifist and the creator of a famous series depicting the white dove of peace. Chong said that the 'less than savory aspect' of Picasso's personality — his relationship with women — was explored in the second section of the show, focusing on the idea of the artist as outsider and on the 1920s and 1930s, when the human body was Picasso's main subject. The painter's successive female partners are represented alongside allusions to the abuse and mistreatment that they experienced. Chong noted that by displaying these Picasso works alongside 'artists making feminist or postfeminist critiques' about 'gender dynamics,' you end up with 'an indirect but still very pointed critique' of Picasso's relationships with women. One example in the show is the work of the Shanghai-born, New York-based artist Pixy Liao, whose humorous photographs portray her and her male life partner in a variety of poses. They 'subvert conventional representations of heterosexual relationships and challenge traditional notions of masculinity,' Chong writes in the catalog. Chong said he hoped that visitors to the exhibition would see Picasso as an artist who was still 'a relevant and very productive interlocutor,' and one who was 'able to have a dialogue with artists from our part of the world.'
Observer
16-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Observer
Hong Kong museum puts Picasso in cross-cultural dialogue
More than a century ago, Pablo Picasso smashed the Sacre-Coeur Basilica in Paris into a web of tangled lines on his canvas, deconstructing reality with the brushstrokes of a master cubist. At a Hong Kong exhibition opening Saturday, that painting will be shown alongside a more literal form of destruction -- a "gunpowder drawing" by Chinese-born artist Cai Guo-Qiang -- as part of a cross-cultural exchange. "Interest in (Picasso's) life and work hasn't subsided at all, including in Asia" in the half-century since his death, said Doryun Chong, artistic director and chief curator at the M+ museum. The show will pair more than 60 masterpieces loaned from the Picasso Museum in Paris with around 130 works by Asian and Asian-diasporic artists. Highlights include "Portrait of a Man" from Picasso's Blue Period, a 1937 horse head sketch for "Guernica" and "Massacre in Korea", a 1951 expressionist anti-war painting. "Exhibitions on Picasso tend to be very monographic," said Chong, who co-curated the event. "We felt that it's more productive for understanding Picasso... that we create these unexpected juxtapositions and dialogues." Cecile Debray, president of the Picasso Museum in Paris, hailed the approach as being "decentred from the Western point of view". The last major Picasso showcase in Hong Kong, a more straightforward affair, took place in 2012 and drew huge crowds. In the intervening decade, Picasso's reputation has been dented by the #MeToo movement as critics decried his abusive treatment of wives and girlfriends. "We are of course very open and honest about the rather disturbing aspects of his biography, but we also shouldn't let that determine the meanings of his whole career," Chong said. Hong Kong officials have touted the four-month exhibition as part of "Art March", hoping that high-brow events at museums, fairs and auction houses can boost the city's international appeal. Since opening in late 2021, M+ has seen more than eight million visitors -- a bright spot for Hong Kong's loss-making West Kowloon Cultural District. Chong said the museum connects visual culture between Asia and the world, citing the example of how Picasso is placed next to self-taught local painter Luis Chan. Chan, who drew ample inspiration from the Spanish master, was "of the older generation when formal training in art was not possible in Hong Kong". "Still he felt connected to the centre of the art world at the time in Paris, and the very important figure in that context (that is) Picasso." —AFP
Asharq Al-Awsat
14-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Asharq Al-Awsat
Hong Kong Museum Puts Picasso in Cross-cultural Dialogue
More than a century ago, Pablo Picasso smashed the Sacre-Coeur Basilica in Paris into a web of tangled lines on his canvas, deconstructing reality with the brushstrokes of a master cubist. At a Hong Kong exhibition opening Saturday, that painting will be shown alongside a more literal form of destruction -- a "gunpowder drawing" by Chinese-born artist Cai Guo-Qiang -- as part of a cross-cultural exchange, AFP said. "Interest in (Picasso's) life and work hasn't subsided at all, including in Asia" in the half-century since his death, said Doryun Chong, artistic director and chief curator at the M+ museum. The show will pair more than 60 masterpieces loaned from the Picasso Museum in Paris with around 130 works by Asian and Asian-diasporic artists. Highlights include "Portrait of a Man" from Picasso's Blue Period, a 1937 horse head sketch for "Guernica" and "Massacre in Korea", a 1951 expressionist anti-war painting. "Exhibitions on Picasso tend to be very monographic," said Chong, who co-curated the event. "We felt that it's more productive for understanding Picasso... that we create these unexpected juxtapositions and dialogues." Cecile Debray, president of the Picasso Museum in Paris, hailed the approach as being "decentered from the Western point of view". The last major Picasso showcase in Hong Kong, a more straightforward affair, took place in 2012 and drew huge crowds. In the intervening decade, Picasso's reputation has been dented by the #MeToo movement as critics decried his abusive treatment of wives and girlfriends. "We are of course very open and honest about the rather disturbing aspects of his biography, but we also shouldn't let that determine the meanings of his whole career," Chong said. Hong Kong officials have touted the four-month exhibition as part of "Art March", hoping that high-brow events at museums, fairs and auction houses can boost the city's international appeal. Since opening in late 2021, M+ has seen more than eight million visitors -- a bright spot for Hong Kong's loss-making West Kowloon Cultural District. Chong said the museum connects visual culture between Asia and the world, citing the example of how Picasso is placed next to self-taught local painter Luis Chan. Chan, who drew ample inspiration from the Spanish master, was "of the older generation when formal training in art was not possible in Hong Kong". "Still he felt connected to the center of the art world at the time in Paris, and the very important figure in that context (that is) Picasso."
