Visual Arts Reviews
Whistler and the Thames: An American in London, Dulwich Picture GallerySunday, 27 October 2013
Dulwich Picture Gallery, the oldest publicly accessible painting collection in England, is hardly on the bank of the Thames, but its compilation of prints, drawings, watercolours and paintings by James McNeill Whistler (1834-1902) concentrates on his absorption with London’s river. Read more...
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The Young Dürer: Drawing the Figure, Courtauld GalleryWednesday, 23 October 2013
It surely takes courage to conceive an exhibition around a single, slightly obscure work by an artist whose oeuvre boasts an array of crowd-pleasers. Rather than gathering together the greatest hits, the Courtauld Gallery’s new exhibition takes as its starting point a single sheet of paper; on one side is a finely wrought figure from the parable of the Wise and the Foolish Virgins, while on the verso are studies of Dürer’s left leg. Read more... |
Elizabeth I and Her People, National Portrait GallerySaturday, 19 October 2013
At the beginning of the 17th century an anonymous Anglo-Netherlandish artist produced an elaborate procession portrait of the septuagenarian Virgin Queen, tactfully portrayed as though several decades younger, when she had succeeded to the throne in her mid-twenties. Elizabeth I is held aloft under an embroidered canopy and surrounded by Knights of the Garter, courtiers, members of the royal household, and aristocrats. Read more... |
Art Under Attack: Histories of British Iconoclasm, Tate BritainFriday, 18 October 2013
Seeing the statue of Saddam Hussein toppled in Baghdad in April 2003, I felt a rush of euphoria despite deep reservations about the American invasion. My (misplaced) optimism was shared by the Iraqi student, Ayass Mohammed. ’“Suddenly I felt freedom,” he told reporters; for him the fall of the statue symbolised the end of tyranny and the arrival of hope. Read more... |
Paul Klee: Making Visible, Tate ModernTuesday, 15 October 2013
"The objects in pictures look out at us serene or severe, tense or relaxed, comforting or forbidding, suffering or smiling." Thus said Paul Klee (1879-1940) in a lecture on modern art in 1924. It is an entirely accurate description of his own work, drawing as it does on dream and nightmare, fairytales and apocalyptic visions, not to mention landscape, portrait, architecture, aquatic scenes, the world around him and abstract imaginings: the whole gamut. Read more... |
Kara Walker, Camden Arts CentreSunday, 13 October 2013
American ladies, in the 18th and 19th centuries, passed their time in fashionable pursuits such as embroidering samplers and cutting out portraits of family and friends. Read more... |
Dayanita Singh: Go Away Closer, Hayward GalleryWednesday, 09 October 2013
In the 25 years she has spent taking photographs, Dayanita Singh has accumulated a huge body of evocative and memorable images. For instance, there’s the girl lying face down on a bed (main picture), dressed in what looks like her school uniform. She lies awkwardly, her legs stretched diagonally across to the edge of the mattress, presumably so that her shoes won’t dirty the sheets. Why didn’t she take her shoes off? Read more... |
Facing the Modern: The Portrait in Vienna 1900, National GalleryTuesday, 08 October 2013
“We should pity the age which finds its reflection in this ‘art’”, wrote one critic in 1911, after seeing too many Vienna Secession paintings. From the quotation marks, we see the despairing critic was attacking the art rather than the age. Read more... |
Sarah Lucas: Situation, Whitechapel GalleryThursday, 03 October 2013
I read someone recently describe Sarah Lucas’s sculptures as “aggressive”. Perhaps being greeted by a roomful of huge plaster cocks, mechanised wanking arms and greasy doner kebabs with two fried eggs in an abject arrangement of the female sex can feel a little confrontational, but aggressive? There’s surely something deflecting and bluntly one-note when it comes to the merely aggressive. “Aggressive” rarely lets other emotions in, and Lucas’s work is a many shaded affair. Read more... |
Shunga: Sex and Pleasure in Japanese Art, British MuseumWednesday, 02 October 2013
Sex please, we are Japanese. This astonishing collection of about 170 paintings, prints and illustrated books from 300 years of Japanese art, known as “shunga” or spring pictures, come in part from the culture of the “floating world” (ukiyo-e) mostly located in Edo (modern-day Tokyo), from the mid 17th- to mid-19th centuries. Read more... |
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