September 10 – October 12, 2022

March 26 – October 9, 2022

August 26 – October 9, 2022

The war of words over the incredible discovery of an English king

Nearly 'the year's most disturbing gothic horror movie'

A snapshot of life 'on the frontlines of totalitarianism'

The extraordinary day when the Beatles and James Bond redefined the nation

Fashion's most dramatic colour signifies power, rebellion, death, sex and more

Including Marvel horror Werewolf by Night and the return of The White Lotus

A biopic of Emily Brontë and a romcom starring George Clooney and Julia Roberts

The chilling power of controversial documentary-horror Häxan, 100 years on

The 'fiction based on real events' is flawed

Move over mid-century modern, French Art Deco is the interiors trend to watch

8 min read

England’s oldest surviving municipal seal

In the sealed charter of 1191, Oxford donated the island of Midney or Medley (‘with all those things pertaining to it…’) to the Church and Canons of St Mary, Oseney. It was the final episode in a decades-long spat with the Priory of St Frideswide about the right to occupy the island, probably now known as Fiddler’s Island, and to charge rent for its use. The charter and the seal are on display in the Museum of Oxford.

It’s a small matter, but the significance of the charter, carrying the Common Seal of Oxford, is the assertion of municipal [1] identity and authority – and among the earliest of its kind that has survived (Exeter’s has been dated to around 1180).

A contentious path

In 1147 the citizens of Oxford had made the original gift to the friendly Abbey, conferring perpetual use of the land for an annual fee of half a mark [2]. The charter for this gift carried the personal seal of Alderman William de Chesney (who was also a baron and the City’s Governor) at a time when there was no common seal for the citizens of Oxford (though they describe themselves as a ‘commune’ – in the old sense of a formal and legal assembly of citizens).

However, in 1139, by command of King Stephen, the island had already been handed over to St Frideswide’s, as compensation for the loss of revenue after the forced removal of their market stalls from the centre of the town. Appeals to King Stephen and the Archbishop of Canterbury by the citizens of Oxford, various royal interventions, and some humiliating concessions by Oxford, resulted in 1191, in a royal writ returning Midney/Medley to St Frideswide’s, but allowing citizens to rent it for eight shillings a year [3] (an increase from the previous annual rent of 6s. 8d.). Those concessions were formalized in a charter, carrying the (now lost) common seal of the citizenry. The basis of the authority for this seal is not clear, but evidently St Frideswide’s accepted its legality.

4 min read

Morris’ manufacturing legacy continues

Off of the Oxford Ring Road sits an array of white and grey cubic structures, whizzed past every day by workers starting their days, perhaps sparing a glimpse for the creatively placed MINI Cooper on the roof, posing pompously next to a billboard of itself. A sharp contrast to the architectural grandeur that is found just a few miles down the same road, it can be easily overlooked that this site has an immense history in its own right. In 1876, the Oxford Military College opened on these grounds taking cadets as young as 13 from the UK and British colonies around the world. Funded by Prince George, Duke of Cambridge, buildings were purchased from the Cowley Middle Class School and were expanded upon (although most of the said expansions have since been demolished) while colonial scholarships were set up, likely to attract colonial children to a life of military service in their overseas British territories. The college’s prestige, however, was short-lived as it was driven to bankruptcy in 1896, only 20 years after its opening. The stock of the British automobile, meanwhile, was exploding. Today the leading manufacturing employer in the county, assembling more than a thousand cars a day, and the head of a pyramid of factories (to engine manufacturer Plant Hams Hall, and body pressing manufacturer Plant Swindon), the property’s industrial beginnings trace to 1912 when the town community of Oxford scored a minor victory over that of the prevailing gown.

Taking inspiration from the assembly lines of Henry Ford in the United States, a rather successful engineer and bicycle repairman William Morris purchased the college lot to move into automobile production, starting with his recent design, the “bullnose” Morris Oxford. Finding some success amid a market dominated by less expensive American vehicles, the demand for British cars after wartime grew exponentially and WRM Motors Ltd. was exceedingly cheerful to pitch in. From 1919 to 1925, car production of William Morris’s cars rose from 400 a year to 56,000 a year, requiring massive expansion to other locations across England, and to the original factory in Cowley, new railroads to accommodate workers’ commutes. It was around this time that Morris Motors overtook Ford as the UK’s largest automobile manufacturer, moving Morris clearly into the national spotlight as a titan of industry.

With the Second World War looming the Oxford plant, as recommended by the government, expanded its facilities to accommodate the production and repair of aeroplanes. The de Havilland DH.82 Tiger Moth was a very popular model manufactured here, bought by the Royal Air Force for training pilots recently joined. As time progressed, the company’s founder became more authoritarian with his control over the company, refusing other key members shares of the business and refusing to adapt to new and necessary market techniques to keep up with competitors. In 1952 Morris Motors merged with the Austin Motor Company to form the British Motor Corporation, which Morris headed for a year before his retirement. From 1966 to 2000, the company to which the plant belonged went through a long series of acquisitions, mergers, restructurings and renamings, from the British Motor Holdings through British Leyland and the Rover Group to British Aerospace and BMW, which despite selling the Rover Group in 2001, kept the site to produce their new MINI line.

To prepare for this change, a large part of the factory was demolished and the land sold to be incorporated into the Oxford Business Park, now office space to the global headquarters of Oxfam, the European headquarters of Harley-Davidson, and major outposts for Royal Mail and HM Revenue and Customs. Next to these, the renovated Oxford plant now assembles about 1,000 cars a day (one every 67 seconds) and employs over 3,700 employees. BMW’s declaration that MINI will be the first of their brands to become fully electric starts with Oxford, as does their strategy to reduce emissions from all plants by 80 percent by 2030. It seems that 108 years later, this old and ugly factory, still often called “Morris’s”, strives for history yet.

4 min read

Unexpected connections to the past from volunteer Olivia

When I moved into my college accommodation this year, ready to start my final year at university, I was intrigued to find a plaque above the doorway, to one ‘H. Huggard’, with ‘Gallipoli 1915’ inscribed below it. I was immediately drawn to find out more – to develop this man’s story, and his connection to my room, into more than just a small plaque. This led further to an investigation into the university during the war, and the role that the city played in the ‘War to End All Wars’.

Hewitt Huggard was born on 5th August 1889, the eldest son of Reverend Richard Huggard, MBE, and Frances Marion Huggard (née Lloyd), in Tuam, county Galway. His family then moved to Dublin, before returning to Reverend Huggard’s town of birth, Dungannon, and then St John’s Vicarage, Barnsley. He attended Bronsgrove School between 1904 and 1908, before taking a second-class degree in History at Merton College in 1911, and enlisting in August of 1914. With the war starting on 28th July, this makes him one of the earliest to sign up; we can imagine that he would have felt eager to do his duty for his country. Hewitt then served in Egypt before being sent to Gallipoli. He was then reported wounded and missing during an attack on Tekke Tepe Ridge, at Suvla Bay, on 9th August 1915. He was later confirmed dead, at the age of just 26. He is commemorated on the Helles Memorial at Turkey (Panel 52-55), as well as the Dungannon war memorial in County Tyrone, the Roll of Honour in the East Yorkshire Regimental Chapel, Beverly Minster, Yorkshire, and on Merton College’s War Memorial. Unfortunately for the Huggard family, Hewitt’s brother Lewis was also killed in the war; they are not the only family to have lost multiple members in the conflict, as attested by the matching surnames on war memorials all over the country.

However, Hewitt was not acting in isolation; he was one of many students of the University who joined up (by 1918, virtually all fellows were in uniform and the student population in residence was reduced to just 12% of the pre-war total), and Oxford locals joined the forces in droves. As well as this, the city saw less obvious changes including the production of around 2000 mine sinkers a week by the Morris factory, and the 9th Duke of Marlborough speaking in the House of Lords about the loss of labourers to the forces, and the idea of bringing women in to replace them (as well as digging up the flowerbeds and lawns of Blenheim for vegetables and crops!). For those less actively engaged in the war, the effects were no less noted. The letters of Violet Bonfiglioli, an Oxford resident during the war years, reveal what life was like for her family in the city at the time: her son Owen, at just 17, was conscripted and sent to France; she was harassed in the street for handing out pacifist leaflets; noted soldiers drilling in the parks, and the city gull of hospitals and wounded soldiers. One of the things that many struggled with, understandably, was the lack of food: Mrs Bonfiglioli described getting to the shops before 8am and arriving to a queue of around 100 people! While it should not be surprising, in such an old building, to know that my predecessors would have been involved in such world-encompassing events as World War I, to come face-to-face with a name made the connection, and the history of the building, much more personal.

You can read more about Oxford’s war efforts during 20th century here.

The Power Plant, a leading contemporary art space on Toronto’s waterfront, has lost nearly its entire board of directors, with 24 out of 27 of its members resigning en masse earlier this week. The members who resigned have done so due to objections to the institution’s management by an affiliated nonprofit organization, the Harbourfront Centre, and have called for the institution to be held “accountable.”

The news, which was first reported by the Art Newspaper, comes less than a month after the Power Plant’s director and artistic director, Gaëtane Verna, departed to lead the Wexner Center for the Arts at the Ohio State University. Verna had been director at the Power Plant for ten years.

In a resignation letter that has circulated on social media, 15 board members, including the Indigenous artist Maria Hupfield (Anishinaabe-kwe of Wasauksing First Nation) and actor Richard Lee, detailed their claims, specifically against the Harbourfront Centre, a separate nonprofit that appoints around half of the Power Plant’s board and manages the site of the contemporary art space’s current location.

The letter reads, “Due to Harbourfront’s actions and our current impasse, we have concluded we can no longer fulfill our commitments and duties owed to the Power Plant’s stakeholders, including government stakeholders, funders, artists, the arts community at large and individual supporters of the Power Plant. The independent directors of the Power Plant have no choice but to resign because of the actions taken by Harbourfront.”

According to the letter by the resigning board members, on June 2, shortly after the Power Plant hosted its 35th-anniversary gala, the Harbourfront Centre sought to terminate 12 of the Power Plant’s board members “and replace them with its own slate of directors from its own board or staff. This decision was made without consulting the Power Plant, nor was any compelling rationale provided.”

Works by Vincent van Gogh, Lucian Freud, Jasper Johns, Gustav Klimt, Georgia O’Keefe, and other major artists have been revealed to be part of the $1 billion collection of Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen that will be auctioned at Christie’s this fall.

News of Allen’s estate coming to auction was first reported in August. The tech mogul, who died in 2018 at the age of 65, was notoriously discreet about his collection. Details of Allen’s art holdings and where the collection would eventually end have long been shrouded in mystery. Now, Christie’s has revealed the top works that will be sold as part of the tranche of 150 works from Allen’s collection in November.

In what is billed to be the highest valued single-owner collection sale to ever come to auction, the works will be sold across multiple sales in New York that will take place on November 9 and November 10. Proceeds from the auctions will go to philanthropic efforts led by a foundation Allen set up during his lifetime. The collection is being sold by the executor of Allen’s estate, his sister Jody Allen.

Among the valuable works that will be auctioned range from those made by Old Masters to modern and contemporary artists. Two works produced in 1888: Georges Seurat’s Les Poseuses, Ensemble (Petite version), a figurative scene in the artist’s signature Pointillist style, and an orchard landscape scene, titled Verger avec cyprès by Vincent van Gogh, are each estimated to fetch in excess of $100 million.

Gustav Klimt’s Birch Forest from 1903, a landscape scene featuring a wooded area covered in orange leaves that was once owned by Adele and Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, is another of the high-valued works, estimated at more than $90 million. Allen paid $40 million for it in 2006. Claude Monet’s lavender riverscape, Waterloo Bridge, soleil voile (1899–1903), is expected to bring in an excess of $60 million. Also on offer is Lucian Freud’s Large Interior W11 (after Watteau), from 1981–83, that carries an estimate in excess of $75 million.

New York City mourned when famed rock club CBGB closed in 2006. The legendary home of rock and roll, punk, and dance, CBGB was where Johnny Rotten went to cope with the breakup of the Sex Pistols and where the Police and Patti Smith began their careers, often singing for a mostly empty club. When the space was taken over by men’s clothing brand John Varvatos two years later, many New Yorkers saw it as emblematic of the endless gentrification of the East Village.

But rejoice!

Art gallery Spazio Amanatia will soon open at 313 Bowery in a reinvention its founders hope will bring the famed venue to its roots. CBGB’s space was originally home to art gallery 313 Gallery. Spazio Amanita, which already has a space in Florence, is inaugurating the New York space with “Place Holder” featuring works by emerging Italian painter Leonardo Meoni opening on September 29.

Amanita is the brain child of two art world heirs: Caio Twombly, grandson of Cy Twombly, and Tommaso Rositani Suckert, whose great-uncle, Curzio Malaparte, was a leading Italian artist, writer, and filmmmaker who became a war correspondant and diplomat during World War II. 

“I came to here to become a lawyer, but America brainwashed me to become an entrepreneur,” Rositani Suckert told ARTnews over coffee this week. 

The Guggenheim Museum in New York will no longer award the prestigious Hugo Boss Prize, the museum told ARTnews Friday. The closely-followed biennial award has elevated the profile of numerous artists and comes with a $100,000 monetary prize and often an exhibition at the museum.

The Hugo Boss Prize was established in 1996 by the Guggenheim Museum in partnership with the fashion brand Hugo Boss to honor “outstanding achievement in contemporary art, celebrating the work of remarkable artists whose practices are among the most innovative and influential of our time,” according to the museum’s website.

The award has been given to 13 artists since its founding and it has catapulted artists already at the top of the game to even further heights in the art world. The winners for the prize have been Matthew Barney (1996), Douglas Gordon (1998), Marjetica Potrč (2000), Pierre Huyghe (2002), Rirkrit Tiravanija (2004), Tacita Dean (2006), Emily Jacir (2008), Hans-Peter Feldmann (2010), Danh Vo (2012), Paul Chan (2014), Anicka Yi (2016), Simone Leigh (2018), and Deana Lawson (2020). Lawson’s win, announced in October 2020, was considered major at the time as she was the first photographer to win the award.

Each of those artists was selected from a shortlist of other artists. Those rosters have been often star-studded, including artists like Cecilia Vicuña, Kevin Beasley, Cai Guo Qiang, Laurie Anderson, Maurizio Cattelan, Vito Acconci, Tino Sehgal, Damián Ortega, Patty Chang, Camille Henrot, Laura Owens, Wu Tsang, Teresa Margolles, and Ralph Lemon, who was announced as the winner of the Whitney Museum’s $100,000 Bucksbaum award earlier this week.

Just as with the artists, the jury for the prize over the years has been equally star-studded, with some of the world’s most influential curators making the final decision, including Bisi Silva, Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Okwui Enwezor, Robert Rosenblum, Christopher Y. Lew, and Naomi Beckwith, the recently appointed chief curator of the Guggenheim. The museum’s former artistic director and chief curator Nancy Spector chaired the jury for each edition of the prize.