Visual Arts reviews, news & interviews
theartsdesk in Leeds: OverWorlds & UnderWorlds
Monday, 21 May 2012
It’s cold, grey and damp. Welcome to Leeds. The city centre has grown more homogenous, less distinctive since I arrived here in the 1980s, but there are still delights to be found.There’s an art gallery with a very decent collection of 20th-century British art, adjoining the Henry Moore Sculpture Institute. At the other end of the city centre, on a site once occupied by an enormous utopian housing development, sits the West Yorkshire Playhouse. The building looks more like a large branch of...
The Queen: Art and Image, National Portrait Gallery
Sunday, 20 May 2012
The Queen is the first mass-media monarch, and still probably the most ubiquitously depicted person in history. Her 60 years on the throne is only exceeded by Victoria, and her reign has coincided, of course, with photography, film and television. The profusion of royal imagery is exaggerated and exacerbated by the cult of celebrity and the new technology of the internet and social networking. This has led to an overwhelming sense that the public has the right to know the most...
Prunella Clough, Annely Juda
Thursday, 17 May 2012
Prunella Clough, 1919–1999, was one of the most idiosyncratic and original British artists of the postwar period. Her art is reticent, shy, subtle -...
Read more...Writing Britain: Wastelands to Wonderlands,...
Monday, 14 May 2012
Wordsworth would not be happy. The bard of Grasmere once wrote a poem deploring the new-fangled habit of tourists wandering about the lakes with a...
Read more...Exposed: The Late Flowering of Ana Tzarev
Sunday, 13 May 2012
“It was a beautiful sunny day and we were just doing our work. All of a sudden the double doors opened of this gorgeous school on the waterfront,...
Read more...
Edmund de Waal, Waddesdon Manor
Friday, 11 May 2012
These dozen installations in a stately home are witty and beautiful, elegant and affecting Read more... |
Collect 2012
Thursday, 10 May 2012
The international fair for contemporary objects, plus theartsdesk in-conversation event and ticket offer Read more... |
Picasso Prints: The Vollard Suite, British Museum
Tuesday, 08 May 2012
The complete series of the artist's masterful etchings, never before shown in the UK Read more... |
Bauhaus: Art as Life, Barbican
Friday, 04 May 2012
A show focusing on life and work in the famous German art school concentrates on process as well as product Read more... |
Turner Prize 2012 shortlist
Wednesday, 02 May 2012
A so-so selection with a clear popular favourite Read more... |
Out of Focus: Photography, Saatchi Gallery
Friday, 27 April 2012
Saatchi's eclectic taste produces one of his best shows to date Read more... |
Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art 2012
Wednesday, 25 April 2012
The biennial celebration reaches into every corner of the city Read more... |
theartsdesk in Liverpool: The Sea Odyssey
Monday, 23 April 2012
Titanic-themed street puppeteering on an epic scale takes over Liverpool for the weekend Read more... |
Cotton: Global Threads, Whitworth Art Gallery
Monday, 23 April 2012
An exhibition exploring the importance of cotton as a global commodity could have given us more of a history lesson Read more... |
Liza Lou, White Cube Hoxton
Monday, 23 April 2012
Meticulous bead 'paintings' which are quietly seductive Read more... |
Ron Mueck, Hauser & Wirth
Friday, 20 April 2012
The model-maker with magic in his fingers Read more... |
Jamie Shovlin: Various Arrangements, Haunch of Venison
Thursday, 19 April 2012
Clever-clever paintings feel conceited, false and self-satisfied Read more... |
Footnote: A brief history of british art
The National Gallery, the British Museum, Tate Modern, the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Royal Collection - Britain's art galleries and museums are world-renowned, not only for the finest of British visual arts but core collections of antiquities and artworks from great world civilisations.
Holbein_Ambasssadors_1533The glory of British medieval art lay first in her magnificent cathedrals and manuscripts, but kings, aristocrats, scientists and explorers became the vital forces in British art, commissioning Holbein or Gainsborough portraits, founding museums of science or photography, or building palatial country mansions where architecture, craft and art united in a luxuriously cultured way of life (pictured, Holbein's The Ambassadors, 1533 © National Gallery). A rich physician Sir Hans Sloane launched the British Museum with his collection in 1753, and private collections were the basis in the 19th century for the National Gallery, the V&A, the National Portrait Gallery, the original Tate gallery and the Wallace Collections.
British art tendencies have long passionately divided between romantic abstraction and a deep-rooted love of narrative and reality. While 19th-century movements such as the Pre-Raphaelite painters and Victorian Gothic architects paid homage to decorative medieval traditions, individualists such as George Stubbs, William Hogarth, John Constable, J M W Turner and William Blake were radicals in their time.
In the 20th century sculptors Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore, painters Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, architects Zaha Hadid and Richard Rogers embody the contrasts between fantasy and observation. More recently another key patron, Charles Saatchi, championed the sensational Britart conceptual art explosion, typified by Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin. The Arts Desk reviews all the major exhibitions of art and photography as well as interviewing leading creative figures in depth about their careers and working practices. Our writers include Fisun Guner, Judith Flanders, Sarah Kent, Mark Hudson, Sue Steward and Josh Spero.
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Booking Now
Dance
23-28 July: Peter Schaufuss Ballet from Denmark shows Schaufuss's Tchaikovsky Trilogy - his wholesale reinterpretations of Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker in his own style. All three are played end to end on the Saturday. Swan Lake...
23-28 July: Peter Schaufuss Ballet from Denmark shows Schaufuss's Tchaikovsky Trilogy - his wholesale reinterpretations of Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker in his own style. All three are played end to end on the Saturday. Swan Lake...
23-28 July: Peter Schaufuss Ballet from Denmark shows Schaufuss's Tchaikovsky Trilogy - his wholesale reinterpretations of Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker in his own style. All three are played end to end on the Saturday. Swan Lake...
3-11 August: English National Ballet - Swan Lake in Derek Deane's fine theatre production (not the same as his arena one) Booking: http://www.eno.org
19-22 September, Swan Lake, The Lowry, Salford. Sir Peter Wright's superb production created with former ballerina Galina Samsova in 1991 for BRB, designed with marvellous luxury by Philip Prowse. booking: www.brb.org.uk
26-29 September, Opposites Attract mixed bill: Jessica Lang’s Lyric Pieces / David Bintley’s Take Five / Hans van Manen’s Grosse Fuge, Birmingham Hippodrome. A triple bill features US choreographer Jessica Lang in her UK premiere, set to Grieg's...
8 Oct-24 Nov, Swan Lake (20 performances). Anthony Dowell's production of the Petipa/Ivanov classic designed in lavish Art Nouveau style by Yolanda Sonnabend. Casts: Odette+Odile/ Prince/ Rothbart Oct 8, 13M, Nov 10E Nunez/Soarez/Saunders Oct 10,...
3-14 Nov, Viscera (COMPANY PREMIERE)/ Infra/ Fool's Paradise (6 pfs). The first mixed bill of Kevin O'Hare's directorship joins three of today's strongest ballet voices at the Royal. Liam Scarlett's work was created earlier this year for Miami City...
8 Dec-15 Jan - Peter Wright's beautiful, high-style staging of The Nutcracker to Tchaikovsky's ever-magical music Casts: Dec 8, 13 Marquez/McRae Dec 10, 14 Nunez/Soares Dec 11, 23M, Jan 2M Morera/Bonelli Dec 27M Hamilton/Trzensimiech Dec 27E, Jan 8...
17 Nov- 5 Dec: MacMillan night: Concerto, Las Hermanas, Requiem Casts: Nov 17, 27 Choe/McRae/Lamb/Hirano/Cuthbertson* Yanowsky*/Morera*/Hamilton*/Soares* Benjamin/Nunez/Pennefather/Acosta/Cervera Nov 21 Takada*/Campbell*/Nunez/Pennefather/Calvert...
21 November-9 December, Cinderella, Birmingham Hippodrome. BRB's Christmas seasonal offering is David Bintley’s Cinderella premiered at Birmingham Hippodrome in November 2010, to celebrate BRB's 20th anniversary. With breathtaking designs by John...
12 Dec-5 Jan (Linbury Studio Theatre), The Wind in the Willows (30 pfs). Will Tuckett's charming stagework based on the Kenneth Grahame children's classic has a delicious dressing-up box quality. Booking: http://www.roh.org.uk
22 Dec-11 Jan, The Firebird/ In the Night/ Raymonda Act III (6 pfs). Fokine's glittering fairytale to Stravinsky's magical score marks 100 years since the work was first performed at Covent Garden. Jerome Robbins' In the Night is a romantic...
19 Jan-8 Feb, Onegin (13 pfs). John Cranko's romantic ballet retelling of Pushkin's story of an aloof man who comes to regret breaking the heart of young Tatyana has become a favourite with ballerinas everywhere. Music adapted from Tchaikovsky -...
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15-23 February 2013, Aladdin (UK PREMIERE), Birmingham Hippodrome. David Bintley tells the magical tale of love, trickery and triumph in a production created originally for the National Ballet of Japan in 2008, and now aimed to be a popular family...
22 Feb-14 Mar, Apollo/ New Wheeldon (WORLD PREMIERE)/ New Ratmansky (WORLD PREMIERE) (5 pfs). Headline news that the two leading ballet choreographers of the world today each unveil a creation for the Royal Ballet. This will be Ratmansky's first...
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Theatre
in rep at the Lyttelton (from 24 July) is G B Shaw's The Doctor's Dilemma
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Classical music
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New music
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Jane Birkin is no stranger to performing the songs of her late partner Serge Gainsbourg. But this is a sole London outing for a show she has performed to rave reviews in America. It's a new slant: she is performing the songs with Japanese jazz...
The French legend beams down for two London shows – what must be his first for over four decades. Buy tickets: http://www.ticketline.co.uk/johnny-hallyday#bio
The French legend beams down for two London shows – what must be his first for over four decades. Buy tickets: http://www.ticketline.co.uk/johnny-hallyday#bio
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