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Mass grave of murdered Vikings sheds light on King Aethelred’s doomed reign

A mass grave is unearthed

In January 2008, Thames Valley Archaeological Services began excavations near St John’s College, in preparation for the construction of a new accommodation building. They quickly discovered the remains of a 4000 year old neolithic henge, one of the largest ever found in Britain. Upon further investigation, broken pottery and food debris were found, indicating that the henge had been effectively used as a landfill site during the Middle Ages, thousands of years after it was constructed. However, it quickly became apparent that the site contained something far more significant, when human bones began to appear. It was a mass grave, bodies piled unceremoniously on top of each other. After a month of digging, the team concluded that they had unearthed the skeletal remains of 37 people.

Radiocarbon dating showed that the bones dated from AD 960 to 1020, the late Anglo-Saxon period. But, although mass executions were not unheard of in this time period, the remains were not consistent with those found at previously discovered mass execution sites.

The skeletons were all of fighting age men, ranging from their late teens to mid-thirties, and were unusually tall for the period. Analysis of atomic variations within the bones revealed that the men’s diets consisted largely of fish and seafood, which was not typical of the Anglo-Saxons, strongly suggesting that these were the remains of Vikings.  Given the evidence, it seemed probable that this mass grave might be archaeological evidence of the St Brice’s Day Massacre of 1002, in which the Anglo-Saxon king of England, Aethelred, ordered the extermination of all Danes living in England.

How were the victims killed?

It was concluded that the bodies had suffered extremely violent deaths. They had been brutally stabbed, with puncture marks in their vertebrae and ribs, and had suffered multiple blows from simultaneous attackers. One had been decapitated, with others showing evidence of attempted decapitation. Among the 37 victims, 27 had broken or fractured skulls, indicating traumatic head injuries. A detail that stood out as particularly significant to the archaeological team was the charring on some of the remains.

If context is everything in art, how does placing an art show in the middle of the sea change our experience of the work? That’s the obvious question posed by New York’s Half Gallery, which hosted the second iteration of one-day Miami Art week pop up Stiltsville Thursday. 

If nothing else, it made for quite the adventure for the 130 collectors, artists, and art world hangers-on (including yours truly) that braved the two-hour sea journey to the Bay Chateau, one of six houses still standing in Stiltsville. With guests traveling throughout the morning, the weather alternated between clear, bright sun and a steely downpour with gusts of powerful wind, until the boat reached its far-out destination for a genial afternoon of art, swimming, and sun. 

Stiltsville is a collection of houses built in Biscayne Bay, off the coast of Miami, in the 1930s. For decades, the houses, of which there were 27 at peak, were a major nightlife attraction, featuring restaurants, bars, nightclubs, and gambling houses. Illicit activity hidden from prying eyes was the allure. The surviving houses have become landmarks in Biscayne National Park.

“I think traveling via boat with a small group of other art lovers is more unique than bumping into someone at a fair,” Half Gallery’s director Erin Goldberger said in a statement. 

That’s an understatement. Between the mildly treacherous sea journey, a healthy amount of cocktails, and the convivial air from the many friends and family of the artists and gallery present, it was a unique experience indeed.

On a Tuesday evening last month, just before Thanksgiving, artist Ted Hartley was at a dinner to celebrate his recently exhibition of new paintings at Keyes Gallery in Sag Harbor, New York. As the dozen oysters he’d ordered were laid out in front of him, he was prompted to explain the inspiration for his latest body of work.

“It’s about walls,” Hartley said. “When you run into a wall you either have to get over it, go under it, get around it, or break it down. Life is about dealing with walls. It’s about not letting fear get the better of you” he said. After a moment to himself, he picked an oyster, swallowed it down, and placed its shell upside down on the tray of crushed ice. 

Apart from its zip code, an exhibition opening in Sag Harbor is not unlike one at a smaller gallery in Tribeca or Chelsea, or any in Brooklyn. The main difference, however, is the complete lack of pretense or cynicism, noticeable upon entering the gallery. 

The atmosphere was quite nonchalant for one of the chicest enclaves on Long Island, and by proxy in all of New York State. About 20 people filled the room, for a night full of conversation, appreciation, and very good wine served out of thin plastic flutes.

On view in the exhibition, which runs until December 5, was Hartley’s “Ukraine Series,” a collection of three punchy abstract works in blue, red, black, and yellow that bring together the influences of Post-Impressionism and Abstract Expressionism.

The New York-based Andy Warhol Foundation, which distributes grants in the creative sector, has announced the 2022 recipients of its lauded Arts Writers prize.

The non-profit organization will distribute a total of $695,000 that will go to support twenty writers producing project across three literary categories: articles, books, and short-form writing. Each recipient will receive funding between $15,000 and $50,000. The annual grant is focused on supporting arts criticism.

In a statement announcing the awardees, Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant director, Pradeep Dalal described this year’s honored writers as “immensely rich.” Topics represented in the projects address issues related to race, eco-activism, and labor.

Dalal went on to describe the need to fund art criticism as “urgent,” amid “publication venues folding, national newspapers reducing their arts coverage and staff, and university presses relying on authors to find additional support for the publication of their books.”

The full list of grantees follows below.

RM, the leader of the pop group BTS, was recognized by a South Korean agency for his overseas efforts to help preserve and restore Korean cultural artifacts.

The 28-year-old singer, who released his solo album Indigo on Friday, received a plaque of appreciation from the Cultural Heritage Administration (CHA). RM, whose real name is Nam-joon, shared the news on Instagram with a short “Thank You” note.

According to the Korea Times, the plaque’s engraving says, “You have contributed to preserving and promoting Korean cultural artifacts outside the country with great affection for our cultural heritage and history. You are being honored with much appreciation and gratitude.”

The pop superstar has established a reputation for his interest in art and other artists through visits to museums, galleries, and major art fairs. In between publicity events and tours, he has shared news of all of this on his influential social media channels. RM also made large financial donations of 100 million won (about $77,000 USD today) to the Overseas Korean Cultural Heritage Foundation and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea.

In addition to collecting art from domestic and foreign artists, RM loaned a terra cotta sculpture of a horse by the Korean artist Kwon Jin-kyu to a Seoul Museum of Art for a retrospective that ran until May of this year.

A self-portrait by the German Expressionist painter Max Beckmann may now be the most expensive artwork ever to sell at auction in Germany, according to a report by the Associated Press.

The painting hammered for $20.7 million on Thursday at Berlin’s Grisebach auction house. The previous record was for a 15th-century bronze sculpture of a Buddhist deity from China, which sold last year for about $10 million.

The painting, titled Selbstbildnis gelb-rosa (Self-Portrait Yellow-Pink), was made in 1943 during the artist’s exile in Amsterdam, where he fled after his work was classified as “degenerate art” by the Nazi regime. Hundreds of his works were confiscated from German museums.

Beckmann gave the painting his wife, Mathilde Kaulbach, who kept it until her death in 1986. The painting’s buyer remains unidentified. With the buyer’s premium, the total price for the work came to about $24.4 million, according to the auction house.

Artnet News reported that the painting sold to an unidentified Swiss buyer over the phone. The sale marks only the second time the painting has changed hands since it was executed.

Pioneering cartoon artist Aline Kominsky-Crumb, whose self-deprecating drawings about frustrations and sexual longing made her a feminist hero, died from pancreatic cancer at 74 years old at her home in France on Tuesday. News of her death began spreading on social media and was later confirmed by David Zwirner, which represents her husband, R. Crumb.

Kominsky-Crumb came up in the underground comics scene that grew out of the 1960s counterculture. While the scene was not particularly supportive of women, Kominsky-Crumb broke through with her frank and unapologetic autobiographical comics, which often depicted women with hairy armpits, large noses, and big butts in black-and-white.

In 2016, she became one of twelve female cartoonists listed by the Comics Alliance as deserving of a lifetime achievement recognition.

Born Aline Goldsmith in 1948, Kominsky-Crumb grew up in Long Island, New York. It wasn’t until she attended the University of Arizona in Tucson in the late 1960s that she first got into underground comics. In 1972, she moved to San Francisco to pursue her artistic career. There, she met artist Robert Crumb, who is now better known by the name R. Crumb, after mutual friends noticed a resemblance between their work. They married in 1978 and had a daughter named Sophie in 1981.

While living in San Francisco, Kominsky-Crumb served as a founding member of the all-female collective that produced the long-running anthology Wimmin’s Comix (1972–85), which addressed such topics as queer life, abortion, and rape. In 1975, she cofounded with Diane Noomin the women’s comic Twisted Sisters, which tackled political issues around female empowerment, criticized of the patriarchy, took up sexual politics and lesbianism, and more.

London’s National Gallery canceled a plan with Moscow’s Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, to jointly organize an exhibition around modern art. The collaboration was nixed by the British institution in early March following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, The Art Newspaper reports.

National Gallery director Gabriele Finaldi is now working with its curators to replace 15 loans originally set to be supplied by the Pushkin museum for the show, titled “After Impressionism: Inventing Modern Art”. The Pushkin’s director, Marina Loshak, was overseeing the loan. (Loshak could not be reached for comment.)

The exhibition, which is set to go on view in London in March 2023, will focus on the defining modern art movements, from Post-Impressionism to Fauvism, Cubism, and abstraction. Artists in the show include Gauguin, Van Gogh, Rodin, Degas, Munch, Klimt, Derain, Maillol and Mondrian. The show planned to explore the nascent avant-garde scene in Moscow before relations with Russia soured.

The Russian city was dropped from the exhibition’s plan amid the fallout from Ukraine invasion. The moves comes amid a period of isolation for the Russian arts sector from the rest of the museum world, which began in early March: Kremlin-affiliated trustees at international museums were asked to step down, while major exhibitions involving Russian art and preparations for Russia’s participation in the Venice Biennale pavilions were halted. Meanwhile, Russian art loans from Italy to South Korea were frozen in transit.

Since taking up the director position in 2013, Loshak has focused on developing the Moscow museum’s ties with institutions abroad in an effort to bolster its international reputation. (Her colleague, Vladimir Opredelenov, the former deputy director of the Pushkin Museum, resigned in March following the Russian invasion.)

A vast funerary building dating to Ptolemaic Egypt and decorated with portraits of the long deceased was uncovered in the Garza archeological site.

Heritage Daily reports that the structure was discovered at the Garza archeological site which has been under examination since 2016. Located about 50 miles south of Cairo, it was established in the third century BCE as part of an agricultural reclamation project launched by Ptolemy II Philadelphus (309–246 BCE).

The funerary building was constructed from stone blocks and descends several floors into the ground. A ring of arched doorways lead to burial chambers, some of which contained intricately decorated wooden coffins carved with ancient Egyptian and Greek glyphs.

The most notable find, however, is a collection of well-preserved Fayum portraits. Also called mummy portraits, these detailed portrayals of the dead were painted directly on the wooden coffins beginning in Egypt’s Roman period (100 BCE). The striking images ranged in style from realistic to highly stylized and have become icons of the period, with many housed in museums across the world.

This is the first significant discovery of Fayum portraits in over a century, since excavations by British archaeologist Flinders Petrie in Hawara in 1887, and German archaeologist, Von Kaufmann in 1910.

If you just so happened to look up at the Miami night sky over the last three evenings at the right moment—say, between 7 p.m. and 7:08 p.m.—you likely caught a glimpse of a swirling swarm of light. You weren’t dreaming, and it wasn’t a new UFO design. Instead, it was the work of Amsterdam-based artist duo Ralph Nauta and Lonneke Gordijn.  

Studio DRIFT, as the artists have long been known, staged a performance of Franchise Freedom, their famed drone performance, in honor of Art Basel Miami Beach’s 20th anniversary. The work premiered at the fair in 2017 and has since been staged only a few times, most recently in 2020 above Rotterdam in honor of frontline workers during the early days of the pandemic.

After opening remarks by Nauta and Gordijn in a small park across from the Miami Beach Convention Center, a mass of fairgoers grew silent as 300 Intel Shooting Star drones rose from behind the building and flew back and forth in concert with an emotive, minimalist piano score by Dutch composer Joep Beving. At times, the swarm briefly formed a double helix before flowing into more amorphous shapes and even a swirling vortex.

As the piece concluded, the drones formed the words “20 Years Art Basel Miami Beach” and then “DRIFT Supports Steam+,” referring to a program that places artists-in-residence at all Miami Beach public schools.

Franchise Freedom is strangely meditative, and the real magic of the performance is that, as the drones twist, turn, disperse, and reform in unison, they no longer appear as machines, but rather as an organic mass. This is by design, Gordijn told ARTnews after the performance. 

LA3C, an upcoming two-day culture and creativity festival launching later this month, will feature installations by a group of celebrated artists, including Jacolby Satterwhite, For Freedoms, and Patrick Martinez.

PMC—the parent company of ARTnews and Art in America, as well as Rolling Stone, Variety, Billboard, and SheKnows, among other publications—launched LA3C Culture & Creativity Festival last July, but had to postpone the event due to the pandemic. The festival is a celebration of culture in Los Angeles.

The festival will run from December 10 to 11, and will also feature performances by touted musicians such as Megan Thee Stallion, Maluma, and more.

The full lineup of artists includes Jacolby Satterwhite, Amanda Ross-Ho, Patrick Martinez, Edgar Ramirez, Tiffany Alfonseca, Abi Polinsky, Abi Polinsky, Rogan Gregory, and the collective For Freedoms. Their works at LA3C are being curated by Penske Projects. Information about each individual work is available on LA3C’s website.

In a statement, Alfonseca said, “I would say that I wanted to be a part of the LA3C project because I wanted to be a representation for people with Latinx roots. I want to be able to showcase work that’s relatable to the culture and make it accessible to people who can’t afford or are afraid to be a part of the art experience.”

November 4 – December 17, 2022

October 20 – December 17, 2022

October 29 – December 10, 2022

November 10 – December 22, 2022

November 2 – December 4, 2022

November 7 – December 30, 2022

October 15 – November 19, 2022

October 20 – November 26, 2022

November 5 – December 17, 2022