Shuimohua gallery blog

Within the Kirtlington Park Room from the 1740s, for instance, which once overlooked a Capability Brown landscape and where the decoration is richly inspired by nature, we have a series of traditional dresses in Spitalfields silk from the early 18th century juxtaposed with an exquisite but gloriously eccentric Hussein Chalayan pink nylon tulle dress with the look and texture of a vast piece of topiary.


In such ways, the focus of the room itself ties in with the theme of the mise-en-scène. The Hampton Court State Bed of 1698 becomes a deathbed scene in which Queen Victoria's famous two decades of black mourning-wear for her beloved Albert are contrasted with startling Alexander McQueen designs, including a black, cotton-coated, canvas angel-of-death dress, complete with a bony aluminium rib and spine corset.

The exhibition ups tempo as it moves from room to room, theme to theme, through monarchy, empire, sporting life and class, including powerful and even haunting images such as the John Galliano for Dior black silk taffeta dress in the Croome Court Room. The gown is topped by a raven headdress by Stephen Jones - a vision that would both stagger and suit a Venetian masked ball.

The climax of the show is a riotous assembly within the sedate environs of the Lansdowne Room, where a range of contemporary suited dandies from Richard James, Paul Smith and others sit alongside an array of punk ensembles from Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McClaren. Such dry descriptions do not convey the depth of thinking behind these tableaux, nor the sense of fun behind the execution, with hats from Philip Treacy and Stephen Jones as well as anarchic sculpted wigs by Julien D'Ys.

This is a show which, like any good exhibition, works on many different levels. One can take childlike pleasure from the sheer theatre of it all, but also dig deeper into the academic themes and arguments underlying these scenes.

"Ideas of Englishness, satire, theatricality and spectacle are all things that English designers are engaged with," says Bolton. "The clash of tradition and transgression is where creativity tends to come from."

Importantly, by continually juxtaposing past and present, Bolton uncovers the way British fashion has revisited and reinterpreted the same themes time and again. He also shows how what may be initially iconoclastic or eccentric gradually gets dragged into the mainstream, as with the work of Vivienne Westwood or Paul Smith.

There are many layers of Britishness on show here, from the way we perceive ourselves through to our image in the eyes of the world. British designers such as Chalayan - with Turkish-Cypriot roots - bring in added levels of multiculturalism. The fact that many British designers base themselves abroad further complicates the contemporary picture.

Complex and erudite but also fun and charming, AngloMania is a suitable reminder of the breadth and depth of thinking inbred into British style. Bolton's great party trick has been to combine the playful and the intellectual: to take it all too seriously would be to miss both the point and the pleasure.

British fashion is notoriously cyclical in its moments of confidence and crisis, famously uncertain of its power and position on the world stage. But AngloMania, which opened last week at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, imaginatively addresses the grand themes that underpin the enduring prestige of the nation's style: iconoclasm, theatricality, nostalgia, satire and eccentricity.

Curated by Englishman Andrew Bolton, this is an exhibition which also revels in its own spirit of subversion and makes the most of its surreal cast of mannequin poseurs. Set in the Met's Annie Laurie Aitken Galleries, the show takes as its backdrop the English period rooms. Mostly dating from the 17th and 18th centuries, these are carefully preserved interiors from English stately homes, purchased by or bequeathed to the museum. Within this sedate context, Bolton presents a collection of theatrical vignettes on a variety of themes, creating a series of clashes between traditional ideas of English dress and transgressional, iconoclastic modes of style.

Banksy's album cover for Blur sold for £288,000

Mac Robertson, the former electrician who acquired bin bags of rubbish from Francis Bacon's studio in the 1970s, received a windfall last week when the contents sold for more than £1 million at auction in Surrey - 20 times more than was expected.

At the sale, the Francis Bacon estate, which donated the contents of the artist's studio to the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin, bought some letters and photographs. Photography dealer Michael Hoppen bought a series of contact sheets, mainly of men wrestling, that reflected Bacon's interest in the photographs of Eadweard Muybridge. Estimated at up to £2,600, they fetched £23,400.

The most expensive items, however, were bought by private collectors. One, said by trade sources to have been the jeweller Laurence Graff, spent £127,000 on three small portraits from which the faces had been cut out, and will display them as a triptych. The paintings were estimated to make no more than £7,500.

The phenomenal rise in prices for Bristol-born graffiti artist Banksy's work continued at Bonhams in London last week, when four paintings, estimated to fetch up to £100,000, sold for £600,000.

The artist's auction record was broken twice when a 4ft-square self-portrait with a monkey's face sold for £198,000, followed by Space Girl and Bird, commissioned by Blur for the cover of their 2003 Think Tank album, which sold for £288,000 to a private American buyer.

Banksy's elevation into the elite of the contemporary art rankings will be confirmed this summer when The Hospital in Covent Garden will show his work alongside Andy Warhol.

Sotheby's sale of Scottish paintings in Edinburgh last week received a setback when the two highest estimated lots, a still life by Samuel Peploe and a portrait by Francis Cadell, went unsold. The two paintings had been estimated to bring a minimum £550,000 together, and the owner had been guaranteed a fixed sum regardless of whether the paintings sold or not.

However, Sotheby's was compensated with a bullish £216,000 paid by a UK collector for a 1930s still life by Anne Redpath - double the artist's previous auction record.

Art collectors and critics assembling for the opening of the latest exhibition at Allsopp Contemporary, the London gallery opened by Henry Allsopp, son of the former chairman of Christie's, Lord Hindlip, could be in for a soaking tomorrow evening. The show presents two young Berlin artists, Kitty Kraus and Jonas Lipps, in the UK for the first time, together with works by the short-lived but influential German artist Blinky Palermo.

The central work is a large neon strip light encased in black ice and suspended from the ceiling. At the viewing, the lamp will be switched on to give off a darkened glow. But as the ice warms up, the installation will gradually melt to send a 60-litre river of black water cascading through the gallery. The ice lamp comes in an edition of three and is priced at £3,000.

"This is another song about real life…"

The crowd erupts as the other band members - Duncan Lloyd, Tom English, Archis Tiku, and Lukas Wooller - launch into the show's energetic climax, an infectious tune called Going Missing. Three minutes later, the euphoria of the song dies and the band leave the stage to a standing ovation.

Discussing his comments about "real life", Smith says he wants his pop music to communicate universal themes and emotions - a philosophy that shines through in his lyrics. His tales of loss and small town alienation give Maxïmo Park's music a broad appeal; the words are direct, the meaning concrete and the subject matter is always accessible.

"Sometimes it's easy to take certain things for granted. That's why I said that today, because I thought, 'There's a show here,' and we must always try to take the opportunity to connect with people. As an entertainer, I don't see a disparity between what I do on stage and the very true personal emotions that ground our songs."

Emotional connection hasn't been a problem thus far. Maxïmo Park's refreshingly urgent, honest, and melodious brand of guitar pop seems to be riding a public goodwill ticket to the moon. In a matter of months, the flea-pit clubs have been replaced by relentless gigging in America, Europe, and Australia, mania in Japan, and a plum slot supporting Kaiser Chiefs on an instant sell-out tour of Britain this autumn. Next week their critically acclaimed debut album, A Certain Trigger, is up for the Mercury Prize.

Smith is simply grateful for the opportunity to reach more people. "I'm proud of our album and I feel it sits up there with anybody else on the list."

But does he think they can win? "I suppose it's not beyond the realms of possibility that a guitar-orientated band could win two years in a row…"

Even the revelation that a statistical majority of past winners are "P" bands - Primal Scream, PJ Harvey, Portishead, Pulp - can't dent Smith's optimism. Although this logic favours jazz outfit Polar Bear, his eyes still light up like a pinball machine.

"This year it could be The Park!"

He starts to laugh, but why not? Maxïmo Park are living a charmed life right now.

It's early afternoon at the Leeds Carling Festival and the NME stage is full to bursting. Despite an early billing, upwards of 5,000 people have crammed into the tented dome to see a guitar band from Newcastle called Maxïmo Park.

Paul Smith, the band's lead singer, cuts a charismatic figure on stage. With the vibrant reds of his tank top, shirt and thin tie combo, and his trademark depression-era combover hairstyle, his image is as singular as his performance is theatrical. Up to now, he has been lapping up the very vocal enthusiasm of the crowd, but he looks wistful as the show reaches its finale.

The photographer is Lewis Morley who, two years earlier, had sealed his reputation with an unforgettable image of a naked Christine Keeler perched astride a curvy Arne Jacobsen chair.

A distinctive talent for portraiture and access to the cream of London's entertainment world (his studio was on the first floor of Peter Cook's Establishment club) earned Morley the first published photographs of 1960s starlets Jean Shrimpton and Charlotte Rampling.

These, among others, form part of a new retrospective at the Photographers' Gallery to celebrate Morley's 80th birthday. The exhibition focuses on his shots of cultural figures, but also includes some of his delightfully uncontrived vignettes of London life.

The power of Morley's best images comes from his personal engagement with the subject that allows him to get in close, taking our hand and pulling us in there with him.

A 30-year-old Judi Dench takes a break during filming Anthony Simmons's acclaimed kitchen-sink drama Four in the Morning. Draped across a chair, her stockinged feet casually dangling from its arm, the actress could almost be one of Matisse's odalisques.

But, in spite of this languorousness, it is Dench's volatility that wins through: with a snap of her head towards the camera, that intense commitment to the Agatha Christie novel in her hand could turn equally to either irritation or mischief.

In a way that is not quite true of any other great portraitist, the eyes carry the expressive weight of each portrait, whether to convey weakness, as in the downcast glance of John More the Younger, or a lively intelligence in the sideways glance of his sister Cecily.

Holbein even makes a distinction between young and old eyes. A vigorous and clear-sighted Thomas More looks out at the world as though surveying it, whereas the mild, watery blue eyes of his elderly father convey a serene detachment from the world.

There isn't a symmetrical face in this whole exhibition, for Holbein is particularly sensitive to differences between the right and left sides of the human face, and is careful to distinguish between the size of each eye and each pupil. To take a glaring example, he shows 17-year-old Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey's bland moon-face from straight on so that we can see the difference between his wandering right eye and straight left one.

In terms of composition, Holbein's portraits are remarkably static and surprisingly repetitive. But, as you walk through this show, you become aware of an unusual sense of vivacity and movement – the effect, I think, of the way the people in the portraits use their eyes.

Plump, middle-aged Lady Guildford shoots a flirtatious glance at her husband (depicted in a pendant portrait), while Lady Meutas's startled eyes dart to something outside our range of vision, as though she'd just been given a sudden fright. Without her downcast gaze, the National Gallery's Lady with a Squirrel and a Starling would not possess the ineffable sense of melancholy that makes the portrait so much more than a technical tour de force.

And, when you come to the portrait in chalk that is thought to show Anne Boleyn, your first reaction is surprise that a woman with this receding chin and prominent nose was considered such a beauty. Then you notice what Holbein noticed – that her sparkling eyes are full of amusement – and all at once you can well believe that such a sexy woman could change the course of history.

Indeed, there is something Shakespearean about the range of human emotion Holbein is able to suggest through the eyes alone. Sir Thomas Wyatt's swivel suspiciously; Sir Richard Southall's lazy right eye makes him look stupid; and poor cross-eyed Mary Zouch badly needs spectacles.

As we can see in the numerous objects, drawings and works on vellum and paper also displayed at Tate Britain, during his lifetime Holbein was also celebrated for his work as a goldsmith, illuminator, miniaturist, printmaker and designer. This suggests to me that his own eyesight must have been unusually acute. Certainly when it came to portraiture, he had a genius for picking out the telling detail – the quirk, tic or article of apparel another portraitist might have overlooked or consciously decided to omit.

Professionally, Holbein's livelihood depended on signalling distinctions in birth, class and power by accurately depicting jewels, badges, and costumes. What gives his art its emotional truth is not only its visual clarity (other Northern artists, such as Quentin Massys, had that) but also its emphasis on the specific over the general.

This is crucial for understanding the nature of Holbein's genius because, without it, the portraits could easily have become formulaic. Given the similarity in the format of his bust and half-length portraits, I subscribe to the theory that Holbein must have used some sort of a peephole to trace the initial likeness of the sitter on to a pane of glass before transferring the image onto paper. It was while working up the drawing into the image that he would eventually transfer on to panel that Holbein zeroed in on the details that lent verisimilitude and character to each face.

The stubble on Thomas More's chin; the tubercular scars on the neck and face of Sir Richard Southwell; the toothless mouth of Sir Henry Wyatt; the loose lacing across the belly of the pregnant Cecily Heron; Christina of Denmark's subtle smile – these are the simple visual facts that tell us who these people were.

And who were they? The answer is a whopping great cliché, but an unavoidable one: they are ordinary people, just like us. No other Renaissance artist so consistently gives us a sense of the living person caught in chalk or in paint exactly as they looked on that day, that month, that year, that instant.

For this very reason the centuries have added a patina of melancholy to Holbein's portraits. The people in his pictures are so alive that, as we look at each individual face, the unwelcome thought arises that this person once planned, schemed, loved, hated, pursued his ambitions and coped with his losses, just as I do – and now he or she is dead, just as I will be.

The show traces Holbein's career from that first visit of 1526-28 to his return to England in 1532, where he stayed until his death in 1543. Though I could discern no marked stylistic development during his second English period, the interest of the portraits varies considerably. When painting portraits of the German and Dutch merchants of the Hanseatic League, he found it difficult to make them come to life. To be sure, their portraits are as beautifully executed as any Holbein ever painted, but the sitters all dress in black and their mild faces are not as vivacious or as compelling as those of those of Holbein's English sitters.

The explanation isn't necessarily that English courtiers were inherently more interesting than German businessmen, but that, even when an English sitter's face was insipid, the artist had room for manoeuvre to make other areas of the portrait lively.

And so you hardly notice plain Jane Seymour's double chins, widely-spaced eyes, big nose, tightly pursed lips and rigidly clasped hands because your eye is ravished by her golden headdress studded with pearls, the sleeves embroidered in silver under her heavy garment of crimson velvet, or her stiff shawl embroidered with a geometric pattern in thick gold thread.

The treatment of costume here rises to the status of still-life painting by a master who saw and recorded reality with a clarity and a precision unmatched by any other Renaissance artist I can think of. Add to that the profound humanity that shines through every portrait Holbein ever drew or painted, and it is easy to see why he is not simply the most important portrait painter in England during the Reformation, but one of the greatest artists who ever lived.

The eyes. You start to notice them from the moment you set foot in Tate Britain's enthralling autumn blockbuster Holbein in England. After an introduction covering the decade when Hans Holbein the Younger worked in Basle, the exhibition starts with the German born artist's first visit to this country in 1526. Armed with an introduction from the humanist scholar Erasmus to Sir Thomas More, the 28-year-old Holbein began to paint and draw portraits that are astonishing still for their refinement and delicacy.

Start with the wall hung with individual studies for Holbein's now lost group portrait of the More family and household. When we ask ourselves why each chalk drawing is so life-like, we see at once that it is because of the way Holbein uses the eyes to convey a sitter's humanity, character and personality.

The curators have pulled off a coup in securing the loan of Michelangelo's unfinished Manchester Madonna

In little more than a year from conception to execution, the brains behind the 1857 exhibition secured a site at Old Trafford and built a vast iron-and-glass palace, 700ft long and 200ft wide, which they filled with more than 16,000 works of art loaned by almost a thousand individuals and institutions. It took two months just to unpack and display all the exhibits.

Prince Albert opened Art Treasures on May 5 before an audience of 10,000, and more than 1.3million visitors from around the world travelled to the exhibition during the following five months. There were nearly 1,200 "Ancient Masters", including 39 by Rubens, 33 by Raphael and 30 by Titian, as well as almost 700 "modern" paintings (defined as by artists born after 1700). Henry Wallis's painting Chatterton was generally held to be the most popular work in the show, with policemen required to regulate the crowds.

Not everybody was sympathetic to the organisers' aim of showcasing the wealth of art held in Britain's private collections. The Duke of Devonshire responded to a request for a loan by demanding: "What in the world do you want with Art in Manchester? Why can't you stick to your cotton spinning?"

His question cut straight to the motives for mounting the exhibition in the first place. By the 1850s, Manchester had emerged as a hub of heavy industry, but the city's cotton lords were seen as brash, uncaring plutocrats, with little concern for the workforce in the mills that generated their vast wealth. Life expectancy in the city's cholera-ridden slums was little more than 26 years.

Eager to refute charges of callousness and philistinism, Manchester's magnates decided to mount a spectacular exhibition that would be devoted exclusively to art; unlike London's Great Exhibition, and similar events in Dublin and Paris in 1853 and 1855, there would be no space for trade and industry. The city's Victorian leaders wanted to project themselves as modern-day Medici, princely merchants with exquisite taste.

They also hoped that Art Treasures would fulfil a didactic function, but with no labels, the exhibition proved hard for the masses to assimilate. Spectators engaged instead in people-watching and boozing. Dickens complained that the crowd gossiped, promenaded and listened to music (conducted by Charles Hallé) - "did everything, in short, except examining the pictures".

The American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne was also transfixed by the crowds. "One rather interesting portion of the Exhibition is the Refreshment Room - or rather rooms, for very much space is allowed both to the first and second classes," he wrote. "I have looked most at the latter, because there John Bull and his female may be seen in full gulp and guzzle, swallowing vast quantities of cold boiled beef, thoroughly moistened with porter or bitter."

Art Treasures in Manchester: 150 Years On does a brilliant job of telling the story of the 1857 show. The display, containing about 160 of the works that travelled to Old Trafford, is free, but to really get to grips with the social context, consider buying the catalogue, which contains two beautifully lucid essays by the historians Victoria Whitfield and Tristram Hunt.

The curators have pulled off a coup in securing the loan from the National Gallery of Michelangelo's unfinished Manchester Madonna (so-called because it was first seen by the public at Art Treasures after it was attributed to the Italian master), which has an eerie, twilit feel. There are a number of other works by first-rank names, including Gainsborough, Fuseli and William Holman Hunt.

The exhibition is also jam-packed full of intriguing objects from around the world: suits of armour, goblets, reliquaries, vases, a monkey-headed vessel made by the Moche people of Peru.

Unsurprisingly, though, many masterpieces by artists such as Raphael, El Greco and Velázquez that were displayed in 1857 do not appear in this 150th anniversary celebration. Furthermore, some of the hang is woeful: Wallis's Chatterton, for example, is shunted to the end of the exhibition, rammed up against a neon-bright emergency-exit sign.

But, overall, the curators give an admirable sense of the sprawl and bustle of 1857. As an exhibition of art, the show falls short on several counts; but as a scintillating history lesson, it is absolutely first-rate.

You might think that we live in an age of blockbuster exhibitions. But the big shows mounted in our national galleries today are as nothing when compared to the Art Treasures exhibition held in Manchester in 1857.

This remains the largest temporary exhibition to be held in Britain. Inspired by the success of the Great Exhibition of 1851 at Crystal Palace in London, Manchester's industrialists were determined to organise a show that would trumpet the status of their upstart metropolis to the world. Their efforts are the subject of a show now on at Manchester Art Gallery.

The artist Sam Taylor-Wood, who was first diagnosed with cancer at the age of 29, has made a series of intimate portraits of the people Maggie's helps.


NORRIE BROWN, a sales engineer, was diagnosed with cancer in his right lung in January 2004. After having that lung removed, he discovered a year later that he had developed cancer in his left lung. He lives near Edinburgh with his wife, Christine.

'I go to a "Living with Cancer" support group at Maggie's every week – not being a group-type person, I wasn’t too keen, but it has given me a new perspective. You build up a wee circle of friends. It recharges your batteries for the week. You come out and get on with living. I had a dose of chemo on my left lung. It worked a bit, but not well. Then I was lucky enough to be put on a drugs trial, and the new drug has slowed the cancer down quite a bit.'


SHEILA HUGHES, and her husband, Drew, 62, a former pharmacist, are Rotarians who give talks around the country about Sheila’s experience of cancer, and of Maggie's Centres.

'Having cancer is like going on a journey to a strange country. You don’t know if you are going to survive the journey; you've got no map; you've got no compass; and you've got to drag your family along with you. Maggie's has been down that journey many times before and it can help you. There's a feeling that you don't need the armoury around you that you do elsewhere. It falls away and you can talk to people.'


RICHARD SMITH has had testicular cancer twice. He works for a database software company and lives near Edinburgh with his partner, Hilary.

'The hardest point is the diagnosis. The doctors don't have a lot of time. They have a scientific approach and they deal with people constantly. So it's: "You've got cancer, this is what we're going to do, see you in two weeks." You walk out of the place; you don't know where to go; you don't know what to think. The help that Maggie's gives at that stage is essential. They are so used to hearing all the thoughts you are having, and can advise you straight away on how to move forward.'


DR BOB GRANT had bone cancer in his teens and subsequently lost his right leg. He has recently raised tens of thousands of pounds for cancer charities on sponsored walks on his crutches, most recently for Maggie's on a 108-mile hike along the Fife Coastal Path from Maggie's Edinburgh to Maggie's Dundee via Maggie's Fife.

'If we're going to take healthcare beyond where we are now, we need patient input. We can get the treatments right and get the support staff in place, but we need to ask patients how they experience it. Until we've got that, we haven't got it right.'

Masterpieces by Cézanne, Rothko, Bacon and Basquiat go on view at Sotheby's in London tomorrow in the build-up to New York's Impressionist, modern and contemporary art sales next month.

The 45 selected works are valued at more than $250 million (£125 million). Last month, Christie's held a similar exhibition in London that featured a rare Warhol portrait of Marilyn Monroe. The assembled works there carried a much lower combined value of $120 million. So, is Sotheby's trying to get one up on its old rival? You bet.

For the past two years, Christie's has been constantly reminding us that it has been selling more than Sotheby's to become the world's number one auction house.

Last November, at the all-important New York sales of Impressionist and contemporary art, Christie's amassed $866.4 million in the biggest sales bonanza of all time - almost twice as much as Sotheby's haul of $476.3 million. Sotheby's says it is more concerned, as a publicly-owned company, with profits - which have been extremely healthy - rather than market share. But, whatever it says, that was a gap that had to be closed.

And sure enough it has. Next month, even without the added stimulus of a big estate sale, a major van Gogh, or a trove of restituted Nazi loot, Christie's and Sotheby's are looking to rake in another $1.4 billion between them. The difference this time is that Sotheby's sales are valued higher, at $702 million, than Christie's expected $669 million.

The main change is in the distribution of Impressionist and modern art, where Sotheby's has put together a $295 million main sale against Christie's $245 million. But competition for the best works has meant that Sotheby's has guaranteed sellers of 10 of the highest estimated lots a minimum price regardless of whether they are sold or not.

These include two potentially record-breaking works - a watercolour of still life of fruit by Cézanne ($14 million to $18 million), and an Expressionist painting by the German artist Lyonel Feininger ($7 million to $9 million).

Competition has also resulted in numerous guarantees in the faster-rising market for contemporary art, where Sotheby's is aiming to top Christie's record November total with a $265 million sale. Its star lot is a large, gloriously coloured abstract painting by Mark Rothko for which its owner, David Rockefeller, has been guaranteed to receive more than $40 million - double the current auction record for a Rothko.

Also guaranteed is a powerful early self-portrait by the black American graffiti artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, estimated to set a new record at between $6 million and $8 million. Other highlights include two rare drip paintings by Jackson Pollock, one of which is estimated to sell for up to $25 million, and a classic Francis Bacon pope painting that's expected to set a new record of more than $30 million. The estimates, says Tobias Meyer of Sotheby's, are justified by similar prices achieved recently on the private market.

The Sotheby's exhibition is not only a display of raw market power, but a tactical move designed to give Europe's super-rich a chance to see the works well in advance of the sales. "We have been tracking the UK, Russian and European buyers in our New York sales," says David Norman of Sotheby's, "and it became clear we needed to show the best works in London. It's a reflection of where the money is."

But, while Sotheby's is clearly back in the running, Christie's has raised its game again with a contemporary art sale that could not only outperform the Impressionist sales, but break the $300 million barrier for the first time.

An early Warhol painting of a car crash could sell for $35 million - easily an auction record for the artist - and other records could tumble for Jasper Johns, for the minimalists Donald Judd and Agnes Martin, and for Damien Hirst.

How high things will go, however, is unpredictable. Most of these artists have made more on the private market. "Auction sales only take place every few months," says Brett Gorvy of Christie's. "But on the private market, the price points can change weekly."

Next month's sales will not only be a battle for market share, but a battle of wits as to who has anticipated those changes most accurately.

A new record of £4.7 million has been set for a Chinese painting by Sotheby's in Hong Kong. Far from being the work of one of the new breed of fashionable contemporary Chinese artists, the painting, Put Down Your Whip, is by one of China's foremost realist artists of the early 20th century, Xu Beihong. Painted in 1939 against the background of the second Sino-Japanese War, Put Down Your Whip is a topical patriotic work depicting a moment in an anti-Japanese street drama in Singapore staged by the actress Wang Ying, a friend of Xu's.

At that time, many Chinese living in South East Asia were returning to China to serve in the army. Unseen in public for 54 years, Xu's work is considered by traditionalists to be one of the most important modern Chinese paintings, and was bought by an anonymous Chinese collector.

ndian heritage groups are gathering forces to buy a Victorian marble bust of Maharaja Duleep Singh (pictured), which is to be sold by Bonhams on Thursday. Duleep Singh, the ruler of the Punjab and owner of the Koh-i-Noor diamond, was removed from his kingdom in 1849 at the age of 11 by the British East India Company and exiled to Britain. Here he joined the social elite, hunting with the Prince of Wales.

The bust was carved by the Royal Academician John Gibson in Rome in 1859. It was sold at Sotheby's in 1985 for £4,200, and has belonged to "a lady of title" in Britain ever since, says Bonhams.Today, Duleep is a figure of veneration for Sikhs, who make pilgrimages to his last home at Elvedon Hall in Norfolk. "The bust is our pride," said a spokesman for the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee in Amritsar. "We will leave no stone unturned in our effort to get such a precious thing back." Letters have been written to the Indian Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, and the Punjab Heritage and Education Foundation has issued a plea to Sikhs throughout the world to help buy the £35,000 bust for a museum in Amritsar.

An artist who worked for many years as a butcher has emerged as one of Britain's best-selling figurative painters. "Mark Demsteader is without doubt our best-selling artist," says Matthew Hall, co-director of the Panter and Hall gallery in Shepherd Market, Mayfair. "We have sold 99 per cent of everything he has done since we began representing him five years ago."

That includes annual exhibitions and works shown at art fairs in Islington and Chelsea. The Art Group, which publishes reproductions of paintings by Jack Vettriano, is also doing a "roaring trade" in reproductions of his work, adds Hall. For his latest show, which opens tomorrow, Demsteader asked the model Erin O'Connor to pose for him for a day. Last week, six of the 30 oils and drawings he made of her had already been sold at prices from £1,200 to £6,000.

The Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto opens the exhibition with an enormous walk-in yurt, supported on what appear to be dinosaur bones. Entering, we discover that the pendulous bags that hang from its translucent fabric roof are loaded with spices, filling the space with a musky aroma. It is an environment conceived solely in the service of sensory excitement.

Looking like a cross between a Second World War gun emplacement and an Inca temple, the Hayward Gallery is quite the most freakish building in central London. Over the years, there have been a string of proposals to tame its wilder excesses. The architect Terry Farrell wanted to give it a post-modern makeover, while Richard Rogers had plans to submerge it beneath a wave-like glass roof.

At times, the chorus of calls for demolition has been pretty deafening but, somehow, the Hayward has survived unscathed. This year it celebrates its 40th birthday, an event the gallery is marking with an all-too-suitably named exhibition - Psycho Buildings.

It is a show of the work of 10 contemporary artists, all of whom, in one way or another, take the built environment as their theme. Many of the pieces on display are essentially habitats in their own right; sculptures that flirt with the status of architecture. The helpful signs advising "The space you are about to enter is an artwork: please do not touch anything" suggest how fine the line between these two categories can sometimes be.

That freedom from any obligation to be useful is ultimately what separates all the work on show from architecture. It is a licence that some of the artists have exploited by making work of an unashamedly utopian nature.

On one of the Hayward's roof terraces, Tomas Saraceno has installed a huge inflatable sphere. It is entirely transparent and incorporates a floor at mid-level, which visitors are invited to access. Observed from below, they appear to be walking on air. The work is billed as a sketch in support of Saraceno's grand plan to create a floating metropolis in the sky.

This vision of a city that might move from place to place as the wind dictates has a strong whiff of 1960s avant-garde. Indeed, I was reminded of the 1964 proposal by the British architect Ron Herron to construct a "Walking City", which might roam the world on enormous legs. The fact that Herron was one of the architects of the Hayward lends Saraceno's project a curious perspective.

Other artists have headed to darker places, presenting work of a frankly dystopian nature. Mike Nelson's installation To the Memory of HP Lovecraft is at once horrible and extremely funny. Climbing up one of the Hayward's concrete stairways we find the way to the next level has been largely boarded over: only a medieval-looking trap door allows us access.

Passing through, we encounter a scene of complete devastation. Furniture lies overturned and the plasterboard walls have been utterly shredded, as if by some monstrous captive who was desperate to escape.

It is a scene - as the title suggests - from a gothic fantasy and one that brings into focus the decidedly castle-like nature of the building in which we are standing.

Best of all is the project by the Austrian collective Gelitin, a group that found fame in 2000 when it illicitly accessed the World Trade Centre in New York and installed a balcony on the 91st floor. At the Hayward, it makes an equally robust intervention - it has flooded one of the gallery's roof terraces, converting it temporarily into a lake.

Boats have been provided, although their explicitly jerry-built construction - they are assembled from pieces of second-hand furniture - might put off all but the bravest visitor. I'd advise you to take the risk. The experience of setting course for the Festival Hall while water overflows on to the pavement 20 yards below packs a fantastic transgressive thrill.

Quite how the artists slipped this one past the health and safety inspector remains a mystery. However, their project perfectly catches the sense of the Hayward as an exotic and contrary presence in the city, a place where the usual rules have been momentarily suspended. May it continue to befuddle and provoke for many years to come.

Off the Wall consists of work shown on the floor or hanging from the ceiling.


The artists whose work is on show have removed art from walls and plinths in an attempt to involve and provoke the viewer in ways they believe traditional art cannot.


Among the highlights is Work No.370 Balls, by Turner Prize winner Martin Creed.


Off the Wall also includes Jim Lambie's Zobop, strips of coloured vinyl tape laid on the floor.


The Lamp of Sacrifice shows cardboard scale models of all the places of worship listed in the Edinburgh Yellow Pages.


Other pieces on show include work from Mona Hatoum, David Mach and Sol LeWitt.


Off the Wall is showing at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art until May 28.

There are an unusually large number of small children attending this new exhibition of "floor- and ceiling-based works" from the permanent collection of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. A heartening sight for those of us who believe that artworks with three physical dimensions are the best possible introduction to the visual arts for pre-school children.

This wonderfully diverse collection of contemporary pieces elicits fascinated and excited reactions, in adults as well as children. Take, for example, Five Modular Structures (1972) by American minimalist Sol LeWitt. My six-year-old son encountered the little 3D geometrical creations with the words: "They look like buildings."

He's right, they do. In fact, with their predominance of space, these little white-painted wooden structures look like the skeletons of buildings after a neutron bomb attack. Sitting side-by-side, the five pieces provide a premonition of a deserted downtown area after a devastating act of war. One is struck by the strange relationship between LeWitt's linear creations and the seemingly more chaotic drip paintings of Jackson Pollock, which can appear to be bird's-eye views of war-ravaged cities.

There is a sinister element, too, to Lebanese artist Mona Hatoum's ostensibly comic 1999 work Slicer, a huge, human-sized egg-slicer that plays, menacingly, with notions of nostalgia and familiarity.

Only slightly less disquieting, but more elegiac, is Spirit Collection: Hippocrates (1999) by Scottish artist Christine Borland. Bleached white leaves float in preserving solution in raindrop-shaped glass vessels suspended from the ceiling. The silver foil sealing them concludes the sense of deadening sterility that surrounds what would, otherwise, be unambiguously beautiful objects.

There is great fun in both Jim Lambie's Bridget Riley-esque piece of op-art flooring ZOBOP and Nathan Coley's obsessive cardboard miniatures of all 286 places of worship that appeared in the Edinburgh Yellow Pages in 2004.

The greatest pleasure (and, one suspects, the main reason for the attendance of so many very young patrons) is to be found in Martin Creed's Work No 370 Balls. From the tiniest little rubber ball to the world's biggest beach ball, Creed all but fills the gallery's largest exhibition space with playtime spheres; yet there is space enough for us to move around through the work, exploring its variety and our ever-changing relationship to it.

It is an innocent exploration, and, as any child will tell you, one well worth engaging in.