Visual Arts Reviews
Treasures of the Royal Courts: Tudors, Stuarts and the Russian Tsars, Victoria & Albert MuseumSunday, 10 March 2013
Jewels, gold, silver, arms and armour, silks, embroideries, tapestries and lace: the world of the very rich and very powerful royals – and merchants – in Russia and Britain half a millennia ago is set out in glittering array in the V&A’s latest exhibition. The English imported fabulous furs from Russia, delighting in the finest sables, but also wood, hemp and tar, the better to build British ships. Read more... |
Chuck Close Prints: Process and Collaboration, White Cube BermondseyFriday, 08 March 2013
Chuck Close is often described as a photorealist. It’s a fair description. His paintings often look like photographs, and he came to prominence in the late Sixties, when photorealism was the rage. At first his huge heads were scaled-up painted transcriptions of black and white photos, such as Big Self-Portrait, 1968, which is the painting you’ll find in most art history accounts of the period. It captures a kind of rough diamond Easy Rider persona. Read more... |
George Catlin: American Indian Portraits, National Portrait GalleryThursday, 07 March 2013
Scores of reddish-bronze skinned men, and a few women and children, in full regalia, festooned in face paint, feathers, jewellery and decorations of all kind. They stare out at us, impassive and imperturbable, immortalised by George Catlin (1796-1872), the most famous American artist you have never heard of. Read more... |
Federico Barocci: Brilliance and Grace, National GalleryThursday, 28 February 2013
Federico Barocci, who he? According to the National Gallery, a great Renaissance, mannerist and Baroque painter hardly known outside Italy, the National’s own Madonna of the Cat his only easel painting in a public collection in the UK. Read more... |
Lichtenstein: A Retrospective, Tate ModernTuesday, 19 February 2013
Towards the end of Tate Modern’s retrospective of Roy Lichtenstein, there is a small abstract painting, Untitled, 1959, executed just before the artist found himself at the heart of the Pop Art movement. The painting is, by any measure, a failure. It is lurid and fussily composed – an ugly streak of red, blue and yellow terminate in a smudge of black. But in it we detect the desire behind Lichtenstein’s innovative aesthetic achievements: it’s too bold and too vibrant. Read more... |
The Bride and the Bachelors, Barbican Art GalleryMonday, 18 February 2013
It is often argued that Marcel Duchamp is the single most influential artist of the 20th century, and that Fountain, the porcelain urinal he signed R. Mutt and presented to the world in 1917, the single most influential artwork. But that’s not quite the whole picture. Read more... |
Becoming Picasso: Paris 1901, Courtauld GalleryMonday, 18 February 2013
In Yo Picasso!, a self-portrait from 1901 (pictured below, Private Collection), the 19-year-old Picasso is already projecting an inimitable bravura, emphasised by his dashing orange cravat. He looks out at us with that mesmerising and legendary, unwavering and intimidating stare he made his own. Even at the time, critical responses noted his courage and confidence. He had made the first of his several moves to Paris in the spring of that year. Read more... |
Through American Eyes: Frederic Church and the Landscape Oil Sketch, National GalleryFriday, 08 February 2013
Pre-Raphaelites, eat your heart out; and wherever he is, John Ruskin, once so dismissive of the artist, must be beaming with pleasure. The American landscape painter Frederic Church (1826-1900) was indeed seen as the heir to Turner, and his distinct landscape idiom is encapsulated by a handful of oil sketches – just over two dozen – of scenes from the Hudson River Valley to Petra, Ecuador to Newfoundland, Bavaria to Salzburg, Jamaica to Labrador. Read more... |
Man Ray Portraits, National Portrait GalleryThursday, 07 February 2013
Travelling through Canada by train – more decades ago than I care to divulge here – I bought a book of Man Ray photographs at Banff in the heart of the Rockies. I spent the rest of the journey with one eye on the majestic mountains, and the other glued to the luminous, edgy, ineffably stylish images of the American surrealist in Paris. Read more... |
Ice Age Art: Arrival of the Modern Mind, British MuseumWednesday, 06 February 2013
Prehistory – human life before written language - enters art’s mainstream with this seminal and eye-opening exhibition. This one-off show, amplified by excellent labelling and atmospheric lighting, is enormously ambitious: the largest anthology of portable prehistoric European art there has ever been, unprecedented in its scope with artefacts from museums in Russia, Germany, France, and the Czech Republic, homes to the greatest of the sites. Read more... |
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