Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 254

Spilling the soup on Andy Warhol's legacy

With the Andy Warhol Foundation selling off its works amid a surreal series of authentication disputes, the artist's legacy is unravelling even as his prices continue to escalate

Andy Warhol was nothing if not controversial in his lifetime. To his critics, led by the late Robert Hughes, the artist of soup cans and car crashes, prophet of celebrity culture and pioneer of the hands-off business approach to art, was a moral reprobate and aesthetic fraud. Even his friends and defenders gossiped about his manipulation of people.

In death he can still stir sleazy dramas that say something about the modern world. In a tangled and surreal succession of lawsuits, Warhol's legacy is unravelling even as his prices escalate.

Last year the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, which was created according to the terms of Warhol's will after his death in 1987, announced that it is to sell its entire remaining collection of about 20,000 works. The foundation is funded by sales from a legacy of Warhol's art that originally numbered nearly 100,000 pieces: from the proceeds it created the Andy Warhol Museum and provides grants to artists.

The foundation says the selloff of its remaining Warhols will allow it to concentrate on grant-giving. It is no longer in the business of authenticating Warhol paintings and prints, another job it had taken on.

However, in a powerful investigative article for the New York Review of Books, the art critic Richard Dorment suggests connections between the planned sell-off, the closure of the Warhol authentication board and a series of legal disputes about what is a "real" Warhol work.

Warhol's paintings are more expensive than ever before – no wonder the Andy Warhol Foundation thinks it's a good time to sell. Yet it remains a mysterious decision – why dissipate an entire legacy like this?

Dorment's article insists there is more going on than meets the eye; but beyond legal debates, what struck me most is what his detective work reveals about Warhol.

There is a poison at the heart of Warhol's legacy. It is this: most of his works from around 1970 onwards were made in off-site studios that he never visited. He simply sent templates for the paintings and prints to be made from, and signed the finished works when they were sent to him.

This was a logical outcome of the idea he hit on in the early 1960s, of making paintings using silkscreened images. Warhol started by parodying factory methods, and went on to rely on them.

That's why authenticating his art is difficult. It was easy for those off-site studios to produce extras on the side. Some of these copies have obviously fake signatures. Others are ambiguous – hence the lawsuits from collectors who get works disattributed.

Warhol's prices today are phenomenal. But how authentic are those "masterpieces" that sell for millions? Is there even such a thing as a genuine Andy Warhol?

What you see is what you get, said Warhol. He was joking, as usual.

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How to paint a royal baby: why we need a new kind of portrait this time

From Holbein to Velázquez, from the Medicis to the Tudors, royal children in painting always seem weighed down by destiny and duty, their childhoods denied. It should be different this time

Royal children have been portrayed by some of the greatest artists down the ages, preserving images of childhood that are still touching today. Will this royal baby fare better than its mother in the portraits that are sure to come? Are there any artists out there who can go head to head with the greats of royal child portraiture?

Agnolo Bronzino has to be first among those greats, because he painted small children in a way that set the tone for many royal images to come. Some might say the Medici rulers of Florence, for whom he worked, were not properly royal – but they definitely acted like a royal family, and the artists who worked for them set the tone of court art all over Europe. In Giovanni de' Medici As a Child, Bronzino expresses the joy of children and the pleasure of parents in a way that was revolutionary in the 16th century. Chubby-cheeked and jolly, Giovanni clutches a pet goldfinch. In paintings of the Holy Family you know that if Jesus has a pet bird it probably has some dire symbolic meaning. But this pet is just a pet. Giovanni is just a happy kid. Actually, a happy baby: he was about 18 months old.

Hans Holbein took more care to clarify the regal uniqueness of his subject when he portrayed Edward, only son of King Henry VIII of England, in about 1538. Holbein, too, captures the face of early childhood brilliantly. But how old is Edward meant to be? In fact, he was two. Holbein expresses his infancy – his baby face, his baby hands – while having him stand holding out a majestic hand, dressed like his father, next to an inscription that praises the paternal glory of Henry. Who knows, perhaps he really stood like that for a second or two, long enough for Holbein to take a mental photograph.

Diego Velázquez recorded a more nuanced, even anxious, view of royal childhood in his paintings of the royal princesses of 17th-century Spain. In the greatest of them, Las Meninas, the five-year-old Infanta Margarita Teresa stands looking at us, accompanied by her ladies in waiting (meninas) and two dwarves, while Velázquez works on a portrait of her parents, the king and queen. The infanta is beautiful and confident, attended by her own micro-court – but as she looks out of the painting at her parents (who are standing where the spectator of the painting stands) she is performing. And she is under pressure to look and act like a little princess.

The 19th-century painter Stephen Poyntz Denning may not be in the league of these masters. In fact, let's be blunt: he definitely isn't. But his painting Queen Victoria, Aged 4 is a fascinating curiosity. Like the Infanta, this royal princess is not allowed to be childlike. She is dressed in an oppressively formal way, in dark clothes that anticipate her mature image – a childhood lost to royal destiny.

This look at the greats reveals a fantastic opportunity. Even though Bronzino and Holbein capture the face of infancy, they do not show their subjects as helpless babies: in royal art of the past, even toddlers must have something about them of a grownup monarch. By four, Queen Victoria looked weighed down by duty, and by five, the Spanish Infanta was locked in a tense drama of mirrors and glances.

So here is an opportunity to truly add something to the canon of royal portraits: why not commission a painter like Paula Rego, who has a wild eye for childhood, to portray the royal baby as … a baby. Set someone to work next week. Let them draw the baby over the next 12 months and create a startling, honest image of a royal infant. It could be electrifying.

PaintingArtThe Duchess of CambridgeMonarchyJonathan Jones
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Timewarps, death masks and a Picasso torched in an oven – the week in art

Suck on free sweets as you gaze at Warhol's balloons. PLUS Picasso up in smoke, new blood for the Stirling prize and a museum full of fakes – all in your art roundup

Exhibition of the week: Indifferent Matter

This timewarping, mind-exercising exhibition juxtaposes fragments of ancient Roman sculpture with Andy Warhol's Silver Balloons, and prehistoric jade discs from China with sweeties by Felix Gonzalez-Torres. You can take away the sweets but not, presumably, the priceless jade artefacts. The show contrasts the made with the readymade, the formed with the lumpen. It includes Hans Haacke's 1967 work Grass Cube, on top of which grass grows, and Robert Smithson's self-explanatory 1969 object Asphalt Lump – plus a newly discovered mineral and a collection of strangely shaped stones once thought to be primitive works of art. Intriguing.
Henry Moore Institute, Leeds LS1 from 25 July until 20 October

Other exhibitions this week

Witches and Wicked Bodies
This exhibition explores witchcraft and magic in art from Durer to Paula Rego.
Modern Two, Edinburgh EH4 from 27 July until 3 November

Visions of Mughal India
Howard Hodgkin is a romantic, colour-addicted painter and his collection of Mughal art reflects a sensual appreciation of its power.
National Museum Cardiff, Cardiff CH10 from 27 July until 3 November

Mostly West
The much-missed artist Franz West is remembered through his collaborations with others including Douglas Gordon and Mike Kelley.
Inverleith House, Edinburgh EH3 until 22 September

Louise Thomas
This young painter creates exotic scenes, urban landscapes and other evocative, half-recognised images.
Bischoff/Weiss, London W1J until 2 August

Masterpiece of the week

Black-figured amphora signed by Exekias, ancient Athens, 540-530BC
Ancient Greek painting survives mostly on clay vessels like this one. Wall paintings and panel pictures from that world are mostly lost, but in decorating vases and wine jars and other useful objects, artists like Exekias created images of potent drama and beautiful restraint.
British Museum, London WC1B

Image of the weekWhat we learned this week

Why a stolen Picasso was burned in a stove in Romania

The Stirling prize shortlist for best building of the year has five newbie nominees on it – and lots of women

There are lots of broken dreams in America, as Walker Evans's beautiful 1930s depression-era photographs go on show at MoMA

And as the city of Detroit files for bankruptcy, we remember these stunning photographs of a city in ruins

Why academics are trying to stop a photo of Damien Hirst grinning with a real severed head from being exhibited

What a truly cycle-friendly city might look like

That there's a museum in China filled with around 40,000 fake artefacts

What Richard Rogers really thinks about his career

And finally ...

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Dzhokhar Tsarnaev capture pictures don't deromanticise this 'monster' | Jonathan Jones

These latest pictures of the Boston suspect actually look more heroic than the Rolling Stone cover. But anger at an image obscures the more difficult reality

"THE BOMBER. How a Popular, Promising Student Was Failed by His Family, Fell Into Radical Islam and Became a Monster."

That's the cover of the latest Rolling Stone magazine. Or rather, that's the heavily emphatic text that appears in the bottom right hand corner of the cover below a romantic-looking portrait of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the teenager who is to face trial for the Boston marathon bombings. These words explain the magazine's use of the picture quite sufficiently. It's hard to see how it is making a hero of someone to call them in print "a monster."

Yet the supposed "glamour" of Rolling Stone's Tsarnaev cover has become such a tasty subject for American outrage that Sean Murphy, a Boston police photographer, has released his own pictures of the suspect's capture as a protest against it. As he emerges from the shot-up boat where he was hiding, into the glare of police lights, in one image a bloodied Tsarnaev holds up a hand in a gesture of surrender. The red pin point of a sharpshooter's laser sight rests eerily on his forehead.

Another picture shows him leaning weakly against the boat, the blood on his face even more visible.

If anyone in the world is misguided enough to find what Tsarnaev stands accused of in any way heroic, or exciting, or remotely justifiable, Murphy's photographs are far more likely than the Rolling Stone cover to feed their fantasies. As he flops weakly against the boat the blood-spattered youth looks like he is auditioning for a Passion play: he looks like Jesus struggling to Golgotha. An entire history of Catholic images of righteous suffering can be read into Murphy's photographs. No wonder they were supposed to be kept under wraps – they do not help at all to deromanticise Tsarnaev.

But there is no danger of Tsarnaev becoming a youth idol as a result of the Rolling Stone cover, even with the unintentional help that the police pictures clumsily lend to such an imaginary fandom. This row is an example of the way modern culture overvalues and overemphasises images at the expense of reality.

It is a troubling reality of American life, indeed life in all democracies today, that after all the horror of 9/11, all the wars, all the homeland security, two young men living amid western prosperity and youth culture and modernity could apparently turn to mass murder in the name of politicised religion. How did it happen? How did someone who looks like he could be in a band end up here? That seems a reasonable, in fact a necessary, question for Rolling Stone to ask. To get angry about the use of his image is a refusal to investigate the human narrative that produces (in the magazine's words) "a monster".

This refusal to interrogate violence is America's biggest problem, and it long predates the attack on the World Trade Centre. The very existence of the death penalty is a denial of the humanity of criminals. To reject that common humanity is to fail to learn, and without learning from disaster how do you prevent it recurring? You get into an endless cycle of wars and drone strikes instead of trying to solve the terrible historical mess that turns faith into a bomb.

So yes – on the cover of Rolling Stone this "monster" looks all too human, and he looks even more so in the pictures of his arrest. Monsters walk among us and they are us. If you cannot face that, how can you begin to map the minotaur's labyrinth and decode the nature of evil?

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Scandal in China over the museum with 40,000 fake artefacts

Jibaozhai Museum in Hebei closes amid internet ridicule because nearly all its artefacts alleged to be forgeries

A museum in China has a problem. It seems to have a few fakes in its vast collection. Well, as many as 40,000. Everything it owns may be nothing more than a mass of crude forgeries.

Wei Yingjun, a consultant to the Jibaozhai Museum in Jizhou, about 150 miles south of Beijing, insists the situation is not that bad. He is "quite positive" that 80 or even more pieces out of tens of thousands in the museum are authentic.

In spite of this sterling defence, regional authorities in Hebei province have closed the museum amid a national scandal driven by some very free speech on China's internet. One online satirist suggested it should reopen as a museum of fakes – "If you can't be the best, why not be the worst?"

Maybe that's a good idea. All museums have a couple of fakes in their collections. Sometimes they own up to them, sometimes they put any dubious artefacts in a dark storeroom – and sometimes they don't know. But a collection that its accusers claim is entirely inauthentic is in its way a masterpiece of museology.

It's not like Jibaozhai is a small museum – it has 12 vast halls and cost 60 million yuan (about £6m) to build, opening its doors in 2010 during a culture boom that is seeing about 100 museums open every year across China. Unfortunately, it's hard to fill that many museums, and China also has a prolific faking industry. Art factories export low-cost fake Rembrandt and Van Goghs, while antique shops are full of eye-fooling replicas of classical Chinese art.

In one of his provocative works, Ai Weiwei smashes what appears to be a priceless historic vase. He is drawing attention to modern China's uneasy relationship to its long cultural past. This is a land with a continuous art tradition going back to prehistoric times – yet this creative past was severed from the present by the revolution of the 20th century. Surely the demand for museums across China reflects a desire to reconnect with a great heritage. The museum of fakes may be an absurd side-effect. But the angry and precise criticism that exposed it is a triumph of citizenship.

MuseumsChinaArtInternetJonathan Jones
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Don't lose your head over Hirst

Academics in Leicester object to a photo of Damien Hirst posing with a severed head being put on show – but why? It's a work of genuine artistic integrity

I really thought nothing could make me say a good word about Damien Hirst. The recent works of this artist – his talentless paintings, his anatomical statue whose kitsch arrogance would make Stalin blush, are so awful they make it easy to forget he ever did anything worthwhile. But he did. His early art deserves respect. Certainly, it does not deserve to be censored.

Yet, censor Hirst is exactly what the archaeology department of Leicester University is trying to do. In a ludicrous fit of academic pomposity, the university has issued a press release in which two archaeologists call for an early Hirst work to be taken off view. Since when were archaeologists empowered to ban artworks?

Hirst's With Dead Head is currently on view at the New Art Gallery Walsall in an exhibition that draws on the Artist Rooms collection of contemporary art. It is a black-and-white photograph of the artist, aged 16, posing with a severed head in a mortuary in Leeds. The head has its eyes closed and its features are clenched in a posthumous grimace: the artist is grinning like the adolescent he was, perhaps laughing out of his fear, or just showing off nervously in the face of death.

When Hirst decided in 1991 that this photo of himself was a work of art, he was forcing people to look at death. It was the same year that he put a shark in formaldehyde and entitled it The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. At this moment – his best – Hirst was a serious artist who was trying to see, and make us see, the absolute realities of life and death: the impossible gulf between them, the way we try to ignore death because it so mocks life.

With Dead Head starkly exhibits the greatest mystery in the universe: the difference between living organisms and dead matter. Hirst, grinning madly, is unquestionably alive. So was that head once, but now the man who lived in it is dead. What is life? Why does it end? Hirst was a brave artist when he made this. And now Leicester's archaeologists want to ban it. Matthew Beamish, of Leicester University Archaeological Services, and Professor Sarah Tarlow, an authority on "archaeological ethics", have written to the New Art Gallery Walsall claiming that With Dead Head should not be on public display. Tarlow insists that, "it deserves a place in Hirst's archive, but not in a gallery".

Have we become an authoritarian state and I wasn't told? Only in dictatorial regimes do university professors decide what does and does not belong in an art gallery. Even Damien Hirst deserves artistic freedom, and this image goes to the heart of what is most ambitious in his work. I deny that (as the archaeologists seem to think) With Dead Head is only defended by the art world out of some shallow Hirst fandom. I find it a substantial work of art – a moving, harrowing encounter with the reality of life and death.

Leicester University's experts say it contravenes guidelines on the ethical treatment of the dead: the poor man whose head is in the picture, they say, would have been recognisable to his relatives. He left his body to science and it was used in a jokey work of art. As archaeologists, they claim expertise in this strange field of postmortem ethics. Perhaps they got carried away by the sentimentality that surrounded Leicester's rediscovery of the bones of Richard III. That was a great excavation, but empathy for a medieval skeleton was displayed to a comic degree by weeping representatives of the Richard III Society.

Archaeology is the scientific study of the past, and it has no business pronouncing on the ethics of modern art. Personally, I would not have minded if the archaeologists had posed grinning next to Richard's skull – or at least had the courage to tell the Richard III Society that, in fact, the physical evidence of his twisted spine vindicates Shakespeare's image of him and makes a mockery of their belief he is the victim of Tudor myth. Because science does have an ethical imperative: to tell the truth.

I believe that when Hirst made With Dead Head, he was thinking more seriously about death than any professor of archaeological ethics ever has.

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Hull will go to heaven for this: gallery acquires Lorenzetti's glowing Christ

An enlightened attitude to pre-1800 art means Hull's Ferens Gallery now has a wonderful painting from 1320

A public art gallery in Hull has bought a masterpiece of European painting in one of the most important additions to Britain's art heritage in years.

The Sienese artist Pietro Lorenzetti painted Christ Between Saint Paul and Saint Peter, around 1320. Dante had just written The Divine Comedy; it was a moment of bold innovation in European culture, when the gothic age of cathedrals was reaching its climax. Lorenzetti's painting is a revolutionary artwork in which we can spy the birth of modern ways of seeing.

This gold-decorated wooden panel is full of things that are astonishing to see in a painting that is 700 years old. Saint Paul holds a sword whose fancy red and black scabbard is painted with eye-fooling realism: it is not a flat sketch of a sword, as might be expected in medieval art, but a solid object that has been carefully recreated. Meanwhile, the faces of Christ and the two fathers of the church have a finely shaded fleshiness that makes them movingly alive.

All this realism was utterly new in Tuscany 700 years ago. That was why Dr Caroline Campbell of the National Gallery stepped in to slam an export ban on Lorenzetti's painting when it recently came on the market after being recognised as his work. "Lorenzetti was an artist ahead of his time", she says, his emotional dynamism "unparalleled in 14th-century Italian art." This rare masterpiece that had long lurked in a British private collection could not be allowed to leave the country.

Enter the Ferens Art Gallery in Hull. At a time when councils are considering selling off works from their art collections to alleviate financial pressures, and when the quickest way for a regional gallery to attract attention is to stage an exhibition by Damien Hirst or Grayson Perry, the Ferens has gone back to the golden age of British art-collecting in the 19th century when cultured factory owners and merchants stuffed museums such as Liverpool's Walker Art Gallery with medieval masterpieces.

The Ferens has an endowment fund set up by its founder TR Ferens in 1928 specifically to buy works of art. Its former director John Bradshaw also made a bequest to Hull and asked in his will for some of it to be used to buy a pre-1800 work of art. Bradshaw, who died in 2001 and was famous locally for giving lavish dinners at the gallery where he cooked the food, has got his wish.

The Ferens needed some help. Lorenzetti's painting is valued at £5m: that was knocked down to £1.6m through a private treaty sale. When the Hull gallery put up half of that, its offer was matched by the Art Fund and Heritage Lottery Fund to secure this purchase for a British public collection. "Even in the midst of funding pressures and cutbacks", says Art Fund head Stephen Deuchar, "the Ferens and its supporters have pulled off a great coup."

Right now the painting is in the skylit restoration studio on the top floor of London's National Gallery, where it is being cared for by the chief art restorer Larry Keith. It arrived there on a blazing heatwave afternoon when the natural light in this state-of-the-art workshop set off the reds, dark blues and mellow flesh tones of Lorenzetti's figures against their heavenly gold background. As Larry Keith and Caroline Campbell explained how tiny stellar dots stamped into the gold surface reveal the history of the painting – because the tools to make these patterns were handed down from studio to studio – Christ's eyes blazed with life. It was clear to everyone, as the experts got excited and their science gave way to sheer enthusiasm, that Hull has got hold of something special.

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Bleeding art: where have all the British philanthropists gone?

From Raphael to Picasso, our heritage is being squandered by a rich elite who would rather sell paintings than save them

According to the Tate chairman Lord Browne, Britain can give itself half a pat on the back. We are the eighth most generous nation in the world in terms of charitable donations, according to the world giving index. However, we are some way behind Americans and Australians.

Browne gave a speech last night calling for a new approach to philanthropic support for the arts. But he would not have had to make it if there were no problem with charitable giving to the arts in Britain. The average British charity donation per head is 0.5% of income. That percentage, in Browne's words, is "relatively flat across the income scale, which is a sign that philanthropy is widespread." But, as he gently hinted – and as I am about to put in far starker terms – there is another way to read that information.

That flatness means the rich in Britain give on average the same proportion of their wealth to charity that those on lower incomes do – which actually makes them impressively stingy. Our middle classes may be "decent", as Browne claimed, but our millionaires are mean: if charitable giving in Britain were compulsory, it would on these figures be a flat tax.

In the arts, this is becoming a problem. Lord Browne put it carefully and in the language of consensus, obviously hoping to persuade, but the fact is that museums and galleries are increasingly desperate for big donations from society's richest.

Fat chance.

When Picasso's painting Child with a Dove went on the market recently, the custodians of culture hoped for a super-generous white knight to come along – and were crushingly disappointed. No one stepped in, and the painting was sold abroad. Lord Inglewood told the BBC: "While steps are being taken to increase philanthropy in this country, this suggests they may not be enough."

Why are the rich in Britain so lacking in public spirit? In fact, to talk of philanthropy may be missing the point. When it comes to art, our elite are more interested in making money than giving it. Why did the nation have to buy Titian's two great masterpieces from the Duke of Sutherland? Because otherwise he was going to sell them abroad. Similarly, Picasso's masterpiece was sold by its aristocratic owners, the Aberconway family.

Last year, I got stung myself by the aristocracy. I went to Chatsworth in Derbyshire to write in praise of a new gallery created by the Duke of Devonshire for his famous collection of old master drawings. I assumed this was some sort of public-spirited act. But there was more going on. Last December, a Raphael drawing from the duke's collection sold for nearly £30m. The Duke claims the sale will help run Chatsworth and fund its art. But that's a Raphael, casually sold off.

Philanthropy? Before getting the rich to subsidise our art heritage, we need to stop them profiting from it.

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Happy birthday, Rembrandt van Rijn! Why Google really shouldn't have

How can a doodle on an internet search page convey the enduring greatness of this master painter? Answer: it can't

Rembrandt is in the news. He's all over the web, just for today, with articles explaining who he was. And why? It is his 407th birthday and Google has honoured him with one of its doodles.

Come, now. Rembrandt does not need a doodle to make him interesting. It's the equivalent of Google celebrating the fact that planet Earth is 4.54bn years old or honouring the human species. Rembrandt, like these phenomena, is too big to need a Google doodle.

This artist who lived and worked in 17th-century Amsterdam, who in his lifetime was rich and poor and happy and ruined, who painted portraits of such depth and perceptiveness that when you stand in front of one you feel challenged by the living essence of a person looking straight back at you, does not need to be namechecked to make him profound, arresting or timeless.

The entire online world is less substantial than a single piece of paint on one of Rembrandt's encrusted canvases. If there is one artist who cannot be experienced on a screen, it is Rembrandt. You have to encounter his paintings for real.

Rembrandt sat down in his studio one day in the 1650s to make a painting of his lover Hendrickje Stoffels. She posed in a fur wrap over her bare breasts in a dusky bedroom moment. Her dark eyes look honestly out of the painting he created. At that moment, she was being censured by the reformed church in Amsterdam for living with Rembrandt out of wedlock. The community branded her a whore. Rembrandt portrays her as a woman of character and beauty whom he loves.

She is alive in the painting, just as he is alive in his self-portraits. Hendrickje and Rembrandt look back at us down the corridor of time in works that go beyond art, into the realm of absolute truth.

Then again, you can look at Rembrandt purely as a technical wizard. In his painting Belshazzar's Feast, the opulent layering of gold and white in the glistening robes of a Babylon tyrant is one of the most seductive, yet slightly disgusting, passages of painting on Earth. Rembrandt expresses the moral squalor of luxury through a stupefying excess of painterly richness.

The point is, all these paintings – Hendrickje Stoffels, Belshazzar's Feast, the many self-portraits – need to be looked at in the flesh, as physical realities, to exert their power. A quick snack of information online – Google doodle, Rembrandt's birthday, let's move on – has absolutely no purchase on the authority of his art. It has to be experienced in real time, in a real place.

The real place where these paintings can be found is the National Gallery in London, where they can be looked at on any day of the week, free of charge.

Rembrandt is looking back at you and me – and at Google, too. We look less substantial every day, in his eyes.

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Edinburgh festival 2013: our critics' picks

Crockery-jugglers, cancer comedy and a church full of comics – plus Richard Burton and Frank Zappa come back from the dead. Our critics select the hottest shows at this year's Edinburgh festival

Theatre

The Events

The fringe show that has attracted the most pre-festival publicity – albeit mistakenly linking it with the attacks committed by Anders Breivik in Norway – David Greig's new play takes place after an unidentified atrocity, and examines what it feels like to be attacked from within. Could be Edinburgh's hottest ticket. Traverse (edfringe.com), 31 July to 25 August.

Leaving Planet Earth

Probably the most ambitious theatre show in this year's international festival, Grid Iron's site-responsive promenade production investigates humanity's search for new worlds. Digital technology combines with live action. Edinburgh International Conference Centre (eif.co.uk), 10-24 August.

Hamlet

New York's Wooster Group are the Rolling Stones of experimental theatre, and they're on dazzling form in this brilliantly reckless but touching take on the world's most famous play. A production haunted by ghosts in every way – particularly that of Richard Burton, with footage of his 1964 Broadway performance put to superb use. Royal Lyceum theatre (eif.co.uk), 10-13 August.

Nirbhaya

South African director and playwright Yaël Farber's reinvention of Strindberg's Miss Julie was the sizzling hit of last year's festival. Now she turns her attention to something very different: the rape and murder of Jyoti Singh Pandey, the young Delhi woman whose ordeal in December 2012 shocked the world, and broke the silence around attitudes to women in India and beyond. Assembly Hall (edfringe.com), 1-26 August.

Secret Agent

Theatre O's distinctive physical style is brought to bear on Joseph Conrad's classic story of violence, exploitation and betrayal. Music hall and early cinema mix in this sinister tale of bungling policemen and state-sponsored terror. Traverse (guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds