Now 63, the grande dame of 1970s performance art is spending three months in silent vigil at at New York's Moma alongside a major new retrospective of her work. James Westcott sits down to see if he can hold her gaze

Last week, the 63-year-old queen of performance art Marina Abramović, dressed in a flowing dark-blue dress, and looking extremely pale, sat down at a small table in the towering atrium of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She will be there, motionless and silent, every day during museum opening hours for the next three months. This is the duration of her retrospective, The Artist is Present – the first career survey Moma has ever given to a performance artist – which is taking place concurrently up on the sixth floor. In the atrium, Abramović is making the title of her exhibition literal. And members of the public can share in her presence by sitting in the empty chair opposite her and engaging in silent eye contact for as long as they want, or as long as they can.

"I have to be like a mountain," the artist told me a couple of days before going into her "big silence" for the performance. She will go home every evening when the museum closes, but, in order to sustain her meditative state, she will not speak until 31 May. "The atrium is such a restless place, full of people passing through. The acoustics are terrible – it's too big, too noisy. It's like a tornado. I try to play the stillness in the middle."

While I was talking to her, Abramović was anything but still. Her habitual anxiety and jovial hyperactivity – so different to the formidable power and placidity she has demonstrated in 40 years of extreme acts of endurance – were in overdrive. "People don't realise it is pure hell sitting so long," she said in her thick Serbian accent, while fidgeting. Cramps will set in after an hour or so. Her bum will begin to hurt. But she will ride out the pain. "The concept of failure never enters my mind," she insists. To insure against it, a masseuse, a nutritionist and a personal trainer will visit her apartment before and after each day's work.

My meeting with the artist was the first time I had seen her in a year, in which time I had finished writing her biography. Her verdict on the book, now that it's finally out (after three years of intensive interviews and research, and four years before that spent working as her assistant, a position I quit in order to start writing) was this: "I will never let anyone write my biography again." We both laughed, even though she was deadly serious. I began dreading the inevitable moment when I would sit opposite her at the table a few days later.

But Abramović's conclusion was also validating: the book was always meant to be both intimate and critical, and it was not written at her behest, or subject to her approval. However, it did rely on her total co-operation. I came to think that the process of writing the book was like her 1974 performance Rhythm 0, in which she stood totally passive for six hours while members of the public were allowed to do whatever they wanted to her. Chains, feathers, a Polaroid camera, olive oil, razor blades, an axe, a rose, a bullet and a gun were among the objects set out on a table nearby. She surrendered control of her biography to me without knowing what the result would be; she simply had to trust that I would not put the gun to her neck, as someone did in Rhythm 0.

Before queueing to sit opposite Abramović on the opening night of the performance, I checked out the retrospective. It's a cacophonous, mercifully unpious treatment of her often ultra-serious work. It opens with videos, photographs and objects relating to her first performances in the early 1970s. In these, the svelte and self-conscious young artist performed acts such as stabbing knives repeatedly in the gaps between her splayed fingers, often missing and stabbing her hand instead (Rhythm 10, 1973); lying down in the (empty) middle of a burning five-pointed star, symbolic not only of the occult but of communism in her native Yugoslavia (Rhythm 5, 1974); and, in 1976, brushing her hair with increasing violence while repeating the mantra: "Art must be beautiful, artist must be beautiful." Abramović, always obsessed with her physical appearance, was probably not being that ironic.

Why did she do such things? I later came to think of them as the artist's revenge against the givenness of life. Growing up under dictator Jospi Broz Tito and the domestic regime of a militaristic mother, body art was a way for Abramović to create rules even more extreme than the ones she found herself subjected to. In that way she could demonstrate a different kind of freedom. Her performances were also irrepressible expressions of her natural theatrical bent, and her craving for attention and devotion. It's impossible to disentangle the narcissism from the public service in her work; the diva from the high priestess.

At Moma, most of Abramović's work (which includes live performance pieces as well as documentation) is taken from her 1976–1988 collaboration in love and art with the German artist Ulay, here remade by a troupe of devoted young artists. A couple stare and point at each other without moving (a remake of 1977's Point of Contact), another motionless couple sit back-to-back with their hair braided together (Relation in Time, 1977), and another two stand and face each other naked in a doorway (Imponderabilia, 1977). You can pass between them, but Moma has neutered the confrontation of the original by placing the performers so far apart that you barely brush against them.

But there's a bigger problem than Moma's institutional prudishness: these re-performances cannot invoke the conditions – the audacity, trauma and charisma – of the original pieces. Abramović's work is inseparable from her and Ulay's history and magnetism. The pieces seen here seem to sap the originals of their unpredictability and strangeness.

The Ulay phase of the retrospective includes photos of Nightsea Crossing, which is Abramović's inspiration for this three-month-long sitting. In the 1980s, she and Ulay sat opposite each other, locked in eye contact and without moving, for a total of 90 (non-consecutive) days in museums around the world. If, in the first part of her career, she was masochistically confronting herself, and in the middle part she was confronting Ulay; since 1988, she has been directly confronting the public, though with an emphasis on physical presence rather than pain. The House with Ocean View (2002) is another prototype of her new performance in the atrium: the artist lived for 12 days without eating or speaking on three raised platforms in a gallery; her only nourishment was sustained eye contact with members of the audience.

So there is an irresistible force of historic logic behind what's going on in the atrium. And history revisited Abramović on the opening night, as a parade of fellow performance artists sat with her: Tehching Hsieh (the undisputed king of endurance, legendary for his one-year performances in the 1980s), the Austrian feminist (and friend of Marina's) Valie Export, and Joan Jonas, perhaps the only artist of Abramović's generation to continue with performance art after the 1970s.

In between each of these sitters, Abramović looked down and closed her eyes, resetting her gaze and gathering energy. When she looked up again, sitting opposite her was none other than Ulay. A rapturous silence descended on the atrium. Abramović immediately dissolved into tears, and for the first few seconds had trouble meeting Ulay's calm gaze. She turned from superhero to little girl – smiling meekly; painfully vulnerable. When they did finally lock eyes, tears streaked down Abramović's cheeks; after a few minutes, she violated the conditions of her own performance and reached across the table to take his hands. It was a moving reconciliation scene – as Abramović, of course, was well aware.

As a steady stream of people sat down opposite Abramović, it became clear that she was trying to engage with them all on a personal level, mirroring their posture and the varying intensity of their gaze. She was being anything but a mountain – and her frailty made an already difficult performance even more exhausting. But the apparent nightmare of the piece is an illusion: what could be better than three months of sustained eye contact with a public hungry for connection? What more fundamental human activity could there be?

After 90 minutes of queueing on the opening night, it was finally my turn to sit opposite the artist. I was immediately stunned. Not by the strength of her gaze, but the weakness of it. She offered a Mona Lisa half-smile and started to cry, but somehow this served to strengthen my gaze; I had to be the mountain. After about 10 minutes, I started to relish our unspoken dialogue. Then, suddenly and involuntarily, my head dropped. It was as if Abramović had sent me a laser beam, and the moment was over.

David Smith revels in his discovery of fabled township artist Ephraim Ngatane, aka 'The Hogarth of Soweto'

Steve McQueen's provocative art project reaches its final stage in London this weekend, featuring 160 postage stamp-size portraits of UK soldiers killed in Iraq

Ai Weiwei, the Chinese artist who will soon take over Tate Modern's Turbine Hall, on why he wants to tell people that it's OK to speak out

From clashes of pop culture to doodles, sculpture to collage, the ambiguity of Hofer's work frees us from history as it drags us in

It seems that anything goes in Andreas Hofer's artistic universe. You're as likely to encounter dinosaurs as comic-book heroes, Nazis, Sigmund Freud, John Wayne, Veronica Lake or spacemen and cowboys. With scant regard for chronological decorum or the tyranny of taste, his subjects are cut loose from history, to gallivant through a parallel world where their usual meaning slips away. The media carrying this overloaded pantheon of fantastical and historical characters are just as diverse. The German artist's exhibitions have featured comic-strip drawings on notebook paper reminiscent of boyhood doodles, messily gestural painting moving between suprematist-inspired abstractions and figuration; collages, enormous sculptures and collections of junk-store treasures.

Since 1996, when Hofer was studying at Chelsea College of Art and Design in London, he's been signing his work with an alias: "Andy Hope 1930". The artist's alter ego resides in a pivotal year when historical currents swam together and pointed to different possibilities: optimism before the carnage of the second world war, but also the end of the Russian suprematist revolution. In fact, thanks to Hofer's postmodern vantage point, all categories are rendered fluid: past, present and future blend, but so do gender and even species.

The larger-than-life centaur sculpture Kardinal Julian (2006), for instance, has a fanged mouth and an abstract painting in place of eyes, overshadowed by an SS officer's cap. The looming Wooden Spaceships (2007) look like rockets as designed by a caveman. In Long Tomorrow, from 2005, a huge banner bearing a digital print of Captain America is set against a painting of what might be the wild west, a prehistoric wilderness or a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Political ideologies overlap, as with his pairing of American superheroes and Nazi supermen, though while Hofer signals alternative readings, he also suggests that nothing is fixed.

There are plenty of ghosts in Hofer's work, often conjured up as shades of places or things to upend our experience of time. One of his earliest projects, The Puschmann Museum (1996), shifted the contents of his neighbouring junk shop into a Munich gallery. More recently, Phantom Gallery, staged between art spaces in Zurich and Los Angeles, faked a sense of history by painting walls with faded markings to suggest absent artworks. Hooked up across space and time by live video feed, the galleries became spectral doubles of each other.

Hofer has described his work as a "labyrinthine infinity". He is attempting to re-imagine even the most loaded cultural signs, in an ambiguous imaginary world that can feel both liberating and ominous.

Why we like him: His atmospheric installation, Sweet Troubled Souls (2007), featured 13 portraits of haunted-looking women, shown in an old apartment in Paris.

Ahead of his time: Hofer is a long-time fan of cult B-movie director Ed Wood. He particularly cites Glen or Glenda (1953), for its open and forward-thinking take on cross-dressing.

Where can I see him? Hofer's solo exhibition, Andy Hope 1930 at the Freud, is at London's Freud Museum, until 2 May 2010.

The stuckists have retaliated to a post in which I called them enemies of art by naming their new show after it. Um, thanks

It's lovely to see your own portrait in an exhibition – especially when it has been painted by Raphael. The Renaissance master is no slouch when it comes to the digital age. From the heights of Parnassus he has taken my photograph from this blog, stuck it onto one of the mourners of Christ, written on my forehead ... oh, wait, wait a minute, I don't think Raphael is being nice about me at all.

And he isn't Raphael, either, but stuckist painter Darren Udaiyan, whose Renaissance travesty The Betrayal of Art – by Man can be seen in the stuckist exhibition The Enemies of Art, at Jesus Lane Gallery, Cambridge from today. In the painting (assuming it is the same as the image they emailed me), I am portrayed alongside several other supposed luminaries of the unstuck art establishment, burying art. Not only that but the title of the exhibition is a quote from an attack on stuckism that I published here. The stuckists are enemies of art, I said. And they're repeating it.

I remember some people who really are part of the art establishment explaining to me once that when they want to diss someone, they simply freeze them out. The stuckists obviously don't believe in that (repellent) strategy because they've given me quite a lot of free promotion here, haven't they?

The only problem is, their story doesn't add up, their satire is misplaced. My face is indeed ugly and putting it on a Renaissance painting is indeed cruel ... to the Renaissance. It's exactly the kind of crassness that made me call them enemies of art in the first place. Instead of lamenting beauty's supposed destruction, why don't they create some beauty? Instead of obsessing about my ugly mug, why not paint something like a vase of flowers or a cloud and just get on with it?

Lucian Freud did, and his figurative art is not exactly defeated by the modern world. Anyway – thanks for the homage, guys, and who knows I may even pop to Cambridge to see if there's anything more to this show than polemic.

A new V&A exhibition traces the history of British quilting, showcasing elegant bedspreads from the 1700s as well as contemporary designs by Tracey Emin and Grayson Perry

Jules George, 41, has just returned from being embedded with British troops in Afghanistan

The simple objective for a war artist is to record a particular war. You could ask why film and photography is not enough. I think that due to the very nature of painting or drawing, one can exaggerate or highlight poignant themes, atmospheres, moods, and it gives a completely different slant. With mass media, you see so much, so many evocative photographs. We're inundated with news footage and camera work. So you see these remarkable photographs, and then we've forgotten them.

But with a painting you can sit in a gallery, or open a book, and you can consider, and you can ponder what is going on.

Any preconceptions I had before I went to Afghanistan were based entirely on what I had seen in the newspapers and on television. But the reality was completely different.

I arrived at Camp Bastion and then I was at Camp Shorabak, the main Afghan base. I had no idea what it took to keep 100,000 troops going, the vast infrastructure. Twenty-four hours a day there were convoys of hundreds of lorries bringing in concrete for building and the food that is required to feed all these troops.

And then there is the stunning beauty of the landscape. It's incredible. When you see the local people in their traditional garments, there is only one word to describe it – biblical. It's 2,000 years ago. So there is this weird contrast of stunning beautiful landscapes, and war, with all the arms and army. Constantly you are pulled between the two.

I thought it was important not to go with too many preconceived ideas. The way I work is very rapid-fire, quick sketches and drawings. There was so much activity going on that was the best way. I had to make quick studies and drawings, encompassing all I could see.

I was embedded with the 2 Yorks (Green Howards) whose role was to lead mentoring and liaison training. I thought they might be a bit sceptical but they really supported the idea, they thought it was wonderful that someone was there to record it.

On the little patrol bases at night, when there is very little to do, I would paint a portrait of someone, watched by all the soldiers. They always wanted to know if they were in the picture, so I think it was appreciated.

I got camp life, and portraits. I went out on foot patrol. That was the first time I've ever walked and drawn and watched my step for IEDs all at the same time – a quick learning curve. On one occasion, we ended up in a firefight. I was not in the thick of it, but my role was to make drawings. So I witnessed a three-hour skirmish. Two vehicles hit IEDs but fortunately there were no bad injuries. Though one person had to be medevaced and we didn't initially know how he was and I felt physically sick.

On another occasion, at the district centre at Musa Qala, I was up on the rooftop and there was the most stunning view of the wadi and the mountains. I painted the landscape but it was so strange painting this incredible view and watching an amazing sunset with the sound of blasts and gunfire going off in the background.

I hope my sketches and paintings convey the experience of what it is like to be on the frontline, the elements of fear and energy, and equally the camaraderie and the determination of the troops. Because for every setback, for every friend injured, that makes them more determined to succeed.

Regardless of the rights and wrongs of the war, my objective was to study the British army in the theatre of war. I have so much respect for these men and women. They should be given full support for what they do.

Jules George was talking to Caroline Davies

An exhibition of George's work from Afghanistan is planned for later this year. Contact jules.george@ymail.com for details

The V&A's new quilts show is already causing a stir, with international enthusiasts block-booking hotels in west London. Viv Groskop finds out what all the fuss is about

As you step through the heavy wooden doors into the V&A's new quilts exhibition, the first thing you see is a four-poster bed, draped with bed hangings from 1730; these are made up of 6,500 individual pieces in shades of red, brown, green and blue. The lighting is low, the walls are baby pink, there are weird, echoing noises. I don't want to say it's womb-like, but it is.

Quilts is a strange, fascinating show, six years in the making and the first the V&A has ever devoted to the subject. It provides a window on to a world – a predominantly female world – that feels private and somewhat undiscovered. Already, it is one of the museum's most successful exhibitions, with 8,000 advance ticket sales; quilting groups from the US, Australia and Japan have made block-bookings with local hotels.

Curator Sue Prichard thinks this enthusiasm is partly due to the global downturn. "I started on this project in 2004. Now there is a huge revival of interest in traditional crafts. There are a lot of women out there who are really keen to learn new skills and step away from their computer and their Blackberry." She thinks many people will come not so much to marvel, but to gain inspiration for their own handiwork.

Not just a female pursuit

Personally, I think the exhibition's appeal is much simpler than this: quilts are comforting, intriguing, intimate and heavy with history. To enjoy them, you don't have to want to make one (and I really, really don't). But the air in the first room of the exhibition, which houses the oldest quilts, has a wonderfully musty tang to it, like breathing in the past – it's a transporting experience.

There are 71 pieces here, mostly displayed as intended: on beds or as wall hangings. Many give an insight into family life of their period; several are exhibited alongside letters and diaries. There are quilted cushions from the 18th century, when a mother was expected to "lie in" after childbirth, embroidered with mottoes such as Health to the Little Stranger and the slightly less sinister Welcome Dear Babe. (These gifts were given after birth; it was thought that receiving them before labour would make it more painful. If only a cushion could make a difference.) Every quilt tells a story: one depicting Aesop's Fables, dated 1780–1830, clearly shows evidence of two hands – one detailed and precious, the other slapdash. You start to form stories about who these people might have been.

Is this a women's exhibition? Yes and no. It showcases the ways in which women have used quilts to document the big events in their lives – love, marriage, birth, death, even their thoughts on politics and patriotism. But it is not an exclusively female art. One of the star exhibits is Grayson Perry's wonderfully disturbing Right to Life (1993), which depicts embroidered pink foetuses against a background of red, white and black velvet. And there are several military quilts, one thought to have been made by a private serving in India in the 1860s (soldiers were encouraged to take up embroidery to stop them drinking and gambling).

Some of the pieces are unexpectedly satirical. A cover depicting the A-Z of Love (1875-1885) shows a young couple cringing next to a moustachioed man, who represents G for Guardian. Other quilts are overtly political: one takes a fabric template of "Her Most Gracious Majesty Caroline, Queen of England" as its centrepiece. Caroline was never Queen; when she was divorced by the future George IV, many women were disgusted. (Jane Austen wrote: "Poor woman, I shall support her as long as I can, because she is a Woman, and because I hate her Husband.")

Impatience is a modern vice

What struck me most was how intricate the 300-year-old work was compared with the contemporary quilts. Perhaps this is an unkind thought. I'm sure a lot of work went into Tracey Emin's To Meet My Past, despite the self-consciously faux-naif stitching. Equally, Jo Budd's Winter/Male and Summer/Female (2010) is strikingly beautiful; but it is a quilt made of giant slabs of colour, not tiny woven pieces. Quilting has moved further towards the grand statement, and there is a kind of impatience to the more modern pieces. There is another tension here, too: the earlier works were never intended as art, or to be exhibited. It made me want to see more examples of modern domestic quilting, rather than the professional art work of Emin and Perry.

Above all, a theme of confinement pervades this exhibition – literal confinement (labour and childbirth); and domestic: these pieces required hundreds of hours of homework. Later, the theme resurfaces in another form. One of the most striking quilts here is by prisoners at HMP Wandsworth. The slogans are funny and poignant: "I miss my family"; "I will go home"; "I didn't do it, guv, honest". Having time on your hands can feed an extraordinary creative focus, whether you are an 18th-century woman, or a 21st-century inmate.

Quilts 1700-2010 is at the V&A from 20 March until 4 July. Details: vam.ac.uk.

Sew simple: How to make a quilt

Where to start

The V&A's Patchwork for Beginners by Sue Prichard is excellent, as are a number of free online tutorials. Quilting.about.com is a good place to start, or eHow's videos (tinyurl.com/ehowvideos). Save your cash for pattern books – Kaffe Fassett is worth a look, or for modern stuff try the Material Obsession set by Kathy Doughty and Sarah Fielke. There are lots of workshops: I learned at Liberty (liberty.co.uk), but London's Make Lounge (themakelounge.com) and Brighton's Just Sew (justsewbrighton.co.uk) come highly recommended, too. The Quilter's Guild can help find a course (quiltersguild.org.uk).

What to buy

Basics – a rotary cutter, cutting mat and a decent ruler – start at about £30. (Omnigrip rulers and Olfa cutters outshine any other products.) If you don't want to fork out just yet, though, get a decent pair of fabric scissors and cut each piece out with a cardboard template.

Stick to cotton, and mix expensive, patterned stuff with cheap, plain fabric to keep costs down. Liberty have a new range of material tied into the V&A show; if you're after something bright and contemporary, Amy Bulter quilting fabrics (at John Lewis) are your best bet. Or design your own – see UK-based thefabricpress.com – or recycle dresses or table cloths.

Seeking inspiration

Flickr's quilt group should give you a few ideas (flickr.com/groups/quilts/), as will blogs such as aquiltaday.com. See what contemporary quilters such as Laura Kemshall (sixart.co.uk/Laura_Kemshall) are up to; I also like the picture-heavy book Quilting, Patchwork & Appliqué: A World Guide by Caroline Crabtree and Christine Shaw. If it's real-life inspiration you want, take a trip to the Quilt museum in York (quiltmuseum.org.uk) or join the hardcore quilters who fly in from all over the world for Birmingham's four-day Festival of Quilts in August (tinyurl.com/festivalofquilts).

Perri Lewis

Europe's colonisation of New World is central theme of 'exuberant' 64th event

The troubled history of Europe's colonisation of the New World and the survival of vibrant, flamboyant cultures across the Americas and the Pacific will be the core themes for the next Edinburgh international festival, organisers revealed.

This year's event, the 64th annual festival, will combine shows that boast exuberant dance alongside dark and troubling works exploring Europe's destruction of the Aztec civilisation.

Jonathan Mills, the festival's Australian director, said the 2010 festival would be a "conversation" between the old world of Europe and the new world of Australasia, the Pacific and the Americas.

Among the major productions will be the European premiere of an Australian opera by Brett Dean based on Bliss, the sardonic novel by Peter Carey about the life of a "prolapsed" advertising executive. It opened last week at Sydney Opera House

The festival will also feature work from Samoa, Ecuador, Venezuela, Brazil, the US and New Zealand alongside a wide repertoire of work from Europe. Caledonia, a new satirical play about one of Scotland's greatest humiliations, the ill-fated attempt in 1698 to establish a colony at Darien in Panama, will be among those featured.

"If the 2008 festival was political in its dimensions and 2009 more philosophical in its ambitions, then 2010 is a festival about sensuality, texture, flamboyance — with a very important, serious message embedded in it," Mills said.

He said there was an important bridge which needed to be made between the old and new worlds.

"The New World wasn't new to the people who lived there but it was new to the European explorers who came there. So it has a kind of double-edge to it, some of it optimistic and some of it slightly dark," he said.

Despite its ambitions the festival has had to fight hard to secure its funding, with public grants and private sponsorship under intense pressure after the recession, said Mills and the leader of Edinburgh city council, Jenny Dawes.

Dawes had fought against a "mob" within the council, she said, who complained about having to cut money on schools and services while giving the festival a multimillion pound grant.

The festival had survived, but had to accept a cut of more than £10,000.

Mills said several new commercial backers had emerged, including the property company Arup and the Prudential. He had struck a series of deals with festivals abroad to co-produce new work including one of the major shows this year, Carl Heinrich Gruan's opera, Montezuma.

A co-production with partners in Germany, Mexico and Spain, it tells the story of the conquistadors' obliteration of the Aztecs.

"It's a story of the New World speaking back, poignantly, passionately, deplorably to the old world," he said.

He described the dance company Grupo Corpo, which is bringing two productions to the festival from the Brazilian Amazon region, as a "group with their bounces in all the right places".

"They're as sexy as all get-out, they're high-octane and energetic."

Mills disclosed that a major broadcasting deal with the BBC was imminent. He complained last year that the BBC had ignored the festival, particularly in its Scottish programming. BBC Radio 3 has agreed to record 28 concerts for later broadcast.

He confirmed that last year's festival had sold slightly fewer tickets than in 2008. The Edinburgh Fringe festival reported record ticket sales last year, while the book festival also hit a new high. But breaking records was not his objective, he insisted.

"My primary focus is on creating a great event, with great companies, great artists, great shows," he said. "As long as our audiences stand up in terms of numbers and are robust, and as long as the central idea is attractive enough, that's what really matters."

The director added that he had decided to extend his initial five-year contract for a further 12 months, continuing as director until 2012.

This year's opening concert will be El Nino, an oratorio by John Adams set "in a nowhere land" on the California-Mexico border which retells the nativity with a heavy Latin-American influence.

The American theme is underlined by the world premiere of work by New York's Elevator Repair Group, performances by the avant garde Meredith Monk, and an exuberant gospel version of the Gospel at Colonus featuring the Blind Boys of Alabama. Another world premiere will be by the Paco Peña Flamenco Dance Company who will perform Quimeras.

The environmental theme will be captured by Mau, a Samoan dance company expert in indigenous rituals from across the Pacific ocean. Their production, Birds with Skymirrors, refers to the vast island of plastic waste circulating in the mid-Pacific, which poisons and kills seabirds; if the seabirds survive to line their nests with tiny shards of plastic debris their nests can be a "glittering jewel".

"It's a parable for the times we live in," said Mills.

Landscape and portrait artist often described as the father of Jamaican painting

Albert Huie, who has died aged 89, was often described as the father of Jamaican painting. Although he produced folkloric genre pieces, his main concern was with his island's rich landscape and the physical beauty of its people.

His appreciation of beauty occasionally got him into trouble. A locally famous example is his voluptuous nude Miss Mahogany. This caused an uproar when it was first exhibited in Kingston in 1960, and a second uproar 40 years later when it featured in Air Jamaica's SkyWritings magazine. There was such an outcry that the edition of the magazine had to be withdrawn.

Huie, who was by then living in Baltimore, Maryland, was philosophical about the revival of the scandal: "The first time, I thought the people were backward because nude paintings had been shown throughout the world for years. I now just think these people [who complained] are limited."

He had perhaps more reason to feel slightly aggrieved by the way in which the intellectual elite of his own country had turned away from the kind of art he practised. In his latter years, the fashion in Jamaica was for "intuitives" – untutored artists, usually from a Rastafarian background, whose work resembles that of the voodoo artists to be found in Haiti. These were thought to be more representative of local sensibilities and, in particular, to reflect links with African culture – something that Huie could not claim to do.

He was born into a poor family during colonial rule and grew up in the town of Falmouth, Trelawny. The only member of his family who encouraged his ambition to be an artist was his grandmother Sarah. He used to scribble on her walls and floors with pieces of charcoal taken from her stove. He moved to Kingston, aged 16, and became a china painter, although his family wanted him to become a teacher. His first formal training in art came from the Armenian painter Koren der Harootian, then living in Jamaica. He was selected for shows of world art at the New York World's Fair (where he was a prizewinner) and the San Francisco Golden Gate exhibition, both in 1939.

Huie joined the circle of the sculptor Edna Manley and, from 1940 to 1944, served as a teaching assistant at the art classes she organised. In 1943 he exhibited his work at the Institute of Jamaica in Kingston, his first major solo exhibition and the first solo show given there to any living Jamaican artist.

In 1944, thanks to a British Council scholarship, Huie went to the Ontario College of Art in Canada. He later studied aesthetics at the University of Toronto. Two of his teachers in Canada, JEH MacDonald and Frank Carmichael, who had been founder members in 1920 of the Group of Seven, influenced his attitude towards landscape. Later that decade, when he moved to Britain, he went first to the Leicester College of Art and then the Camberwell School of Art in south-east London. Here he studied under Victor Pasmore and Claude Rogers, founder members of the Euston Road school, which emphasised the close observation of nature.

Later he settled in Canada, before moving to Baltimore. He received a number of Jamaican honours – the Institute of Jamaica Silver Musgrave medal (1958), the Gold Musgrave medal (1976), the Order of Distinction (1983) and promotion to Commander of the Order of Distinction (1992). One of his images, The Vendor, was also used on a Jamaican postage stamp.

In addition to Miss Mahogany, his best known images include The Counting Lesson, a portrait of a Jamaican girl, now on extended loan to the National Gallery of Jamaica, and Crop Time (1955) in the National Gallery's own collection. The Bahamian art historian Krista Thompson said of The Counting Lesson that it provides "a rare representational mirror of black Jamaica, allowing black viewers to attribute to themselves the signs of distinction, prestige and selfhood formerly reserved for the white colonial elite".

Huie was much loved for his genial personality and was always celebrated when he returned to Jamaica. He is survived by his wife, Phyllis, three daughters – Evelyn, Christine and Alicia – and three grandchildren.

• Albert Huie, artist, born 31 December 1920; died 31 January 2010

Theatre composer to sell Portrait of Angel Fernandez de Soto, which is predicted to fetch between £30m-£40m at auction

Andrew Lloyd Webber's charitable foundation is to make a second attempt to sell one of its most valuable possessions: a Picasso blue period portrait which Christie's today said would have the largest pre-sale estimate of any work ever auctioned in Europe.

The work, Portrait of Angel Fernandez de Soto and the party-loving sitter's languid expression may be explained by the painting's other title, The Absinthe Drinker. It has been estimated at between £30m and £40m and all proceeds will benefit Lloyd Webber's charitable foundation.

An attempt by Lloyd Webber to sell it in 2006 was aborted after lawyers for a German academic, Julius Schoeps, claimed the painting had been sold under duress to the Nazis in the 1930s. The claim that Schoeps, an heir of Paul Mendelssohn Bartholdy, was the rightful owner was dismissed by a court in New York two years ago. In January it was revealed that a confidential new agreement had been reached between the heirs and Lloyd Webber's foundation, in which the former relinquished all their claims.

The settlement means that an extremely rich person or institution now has the chance to buy an enormously important masterpiece. Christie's president Jussi Pylkkänen called it "one of the most important works of art to be offered at auction in decades".

Lloyd Webber bought it in 1995 for £18m and his foundation has been encouraged to sell by recent high amounts raised at auction, not least the record £65m paid for a Giacometti sculpture in February.

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The Institute of Contemporary Arts does what it says on the box better than any other public gallery I can think of at the moment. Its closure would be a terrible loss to creativity

This Thursday at the ICA in London's Mall, artist and musician Billy Childish will be talking to curator Matthew Higgs about his exhibition there, which has been extended until May 2. I enjoyed this show, and I can't think of any other important public gallery that would currently harbour such a subversive figure – well, maybe the Serpentine, which is brilliant these days. It's the second intriguing exhibition at the ICA in the last few months: the other one that I enjoyed being Rosalind Nashashibi's films.

This venue, right now, puts on interesting, worthwhile explorations of contemporary art that are a little bit more engaged with what's happening than you might get in, say, the temporary space on the Tate Modern's riverfront, which always seems to host the most God-awful irrelevant art to be found anywhere in the global art scene.

The ICA, in this critic's humble opinion (I've always wanted to say "in this critic's humble opinion") is doing pretty much what it says on the box. Institute of Contemporary Arts. It's still doing what it did when Richard Hamilton and the Independent Group were here in the 1950s: putting forward stuff you might not see elsewhere, with a certain courage and indifference to the mainstream.

But everyone is saying the ICA is financially doomed. The place appears to be erupting behind the scenes with Mark Sladen, responsible for the shows I've praised, leaving, and it seems fashionable to opine that it doesn't matter, that the ICA is past its prime and superfluous, and God, wasn't it always a pain anyway.

I disagree. Being imperfect is part of its heritage of supporting the new. But to dismiss it is ignorant, philistine, and dangerous. The ICA has a powerful character and a permanent purpose. It is a precious part of British culture. It would be a tragedy to see it close – a terrible loss to creativity. It is a great British eccentric. It should highlight, not change, what it is: a place where the new is always incubating in ways that no one expected.

Save the ICA! We would miss it badly.