Our daily round-up of news from the art world
Tate Britain to Stage Hockney Show in 2017 | Tate Britain has announced that it will hold the ‘most extensive’ retrospective of David Hockney’s work ever seen, covering everything from early 1960s paintings to the work he has produced since returning to California from Yorkshire in 2013. Tate Britain’s director Alex Farquharson has got in early with a reference to Hockney as ‘one of Britain’s Greatest Living Artists’: let’s see how many critics follow suit when the show opens next February…
Cass Sells London HQ | Developer Frasers Property has announced that it has acquired the Cass’s home in Aldgate for an undisclosed sum ‘significantly above the expected market value’, reports the Architects’ Journal. The Cass will continue to rent the premises until 2017, when it will move to a new site in north London. The planned move has proved controversial, prompting the resignation of several senior staff members. According to Building Design, campaigners have declared that the sale ‘won’t stop us’.
Will Jesus College Repatriate its Bronze Cockerel? | Students at Jesus College, Cambridge, have voted to repatriate a bronze sculpture of a cockerel to Nigeria, from where it was looted in 1897. The Jesus College Student Union passed the motion in a unanimous vote, the result of which is currently being considered by college authorities. The sculpture is one of the famous ‘Benin Bronzes’, claimed by Nigeria as part of its cultural heritage; a cockerel also features in the college crest.
Philipp Rühr & Henning Fehr Win BMW Art Journey Award | Art Basel and BMW have named video artists Philipp Rühr and Henning Fehr as the winners of the BMW Art Journey award for their piece The Art of Memory: Dub Music and the CCTV Tower. According to Artforum, the Cologne-based duo will go to Jamaica to interview dub musicians before heading to Beijing to record the architecture of the CCTV Tower.
The Weekend’s Best Comment and Reviews | There have been some mixed reactions to the National Gallery’s Delacroix show. In the Sunday Times, Waldemar Januszczak writes that it ‘deserves the highest praise’ (£), but the Observer’s Laura Cumming is not so sure: ‘We haven’t had a [Delacroix] show here for more than 50 years – and I am not sure that we have one now,’ she wrote, citing the ‘sickly homages’ painted by followers like Fantin-Latour and Cézanne. Elsewhere, both the Observer and the Independent on Sunday ran pieces on Hilma Af Klint, while the FT interviewed Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers about the opening of their new space in LA (£). And, if you’re in the UK, be sure to catch Zaha Hadid’s turn on the BBC’s Desert Island Discs.