British Museum
Marina Vaizey
Alonso Berruguete, Vicente Carducho, Juan Antonio Conchillos y Falco and Pedro Machuca are hardly familiar names in the Anglophone art world, but their drawings are on view in a revelatory exhibition. The British Museum is showing nearly all its Spanish drawings and a fine, succinct collection of prints, in an anthology called From the Renaissance to Goya. It makes for a particularly piquant sequel – or rather, prequel - to the high art of that temperamental genius, the Spaniard Picasso, whose Vollard Suite has just been on view. The milestones it encompasses are various. There was the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Where on earth do you begin if all the world’s a stage? When not sifting through the entrails of dynastic English history or sunning themselves in Italy, the plays of Shakespeare really do put a girdle round the known globe. They send postcards from the exotic neverlands of Illyria and Bohemia, wander deep into Asia, set foot as far south as Africa, trespass up to the chilly north of Scandinavia and Scotland, and even make reference to Muscovy. And of course there are the Anthropophagi (wherever they're from). To map this world is something only the British Museum, that most capacious cabinet Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
The premiere of the newly restored version of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1929 silent classic Blackmail, outdoors at the British Museum, will go down as one of the defining moments of the London 2012 cultural extravaganza. This was a thrilling, beguiling, resonant celebration of the city and its greatest film-maker.Of the four screenings of restored Hitchcock silents in marquee venues this summer, this will be the most singular, due to Blackmail’s climactic sequence – the director’s first major set piece – taking place at the museum itself. As the glowing building loomed over the forecourt screen Read more ...
fisun.guner
For dull reasons to do with a dodgy digital box and a very old analogue telly, I can’t tune in to BBC Four during live transmissions, so I either catch up on iPlayer, or (lucky me as a journalist) get to see programmes early. But I’m very glad I can get it at all, for when the BBC cuts come to pass and its premier arts channel starts broadcasting archive-only material, as it proposes to do, then I think I might just stop watching telly altogether.This is because everything, but everything, that the BBC stands for is encapsulated by BBC Four’s original programming. And in the visual arts it Read more ...
Ismene Brown
What lies ahead for dance as arts spending cuts bite? Can it survive the withdrawal of public funds that support dancers' training, choreographers' creativity, employment costs and health care? Is protest necessary? A panel of the British dance world's leading figures was brought together by theartsdesk for a major debate last Friday in central London, as dance faced its own Question Time.Royal Ballet ballerina Tamara Rojo and English National Ballet's managing director Craig Hassall led the ballet troops, choreographer Rosie Kay and Val Bourne, founder of Dance Umbrella, headed the Read more ...
mark.hudson
You might think that a sharp-talking, cross-dressing potter-artist with a teddy bear obsession would present a challenge to the British public. Not a bit of it. Grayson Perry is music hall, he’s pantomime – there’s even a touch of Brideshead in the teddy bear thing. One of Britain’s most intelligent and articulate artists, Perry was barely in the public eye before he was hived off into that comfort zone the British reserve for the loveable eccentric. And his articulacy is itself a problem: the fact that most of what he says makes perfect sense means he can’t hide behind waffling Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Down the stairs the visitor enters a sequence of galleries gleaming with gold, seemingly illuminated by softly filtered evening light and flickering candles: here be a treasure house of stories in paint: saints, sinners and the narrative of the divine made flesh, from the Annunciation to the crucifixion. Some 40 Italian altarpieces, from the 13th through to the 15th centuries – some whole but most just fragments – are theatrically displayed to suggest the atmosphere of late medieval and early Renaissance Italian churches, monasteries and convents.Along the way we are told of patrons and Read more ...
Sarah Kent
At the end of my road is a shrine dedicated to a young man murdered there more than a year ago. For the first few months lighted candles, plastic flowers, cards and poems penned by friends and relatives were left on a doorstep; now, though, a blue plaque commemorating his short life has appeared on the wall above a constantly burning flame. Over the years the messages have also changed from outpourings of sorrow to words of adulation; the lad, who by all accounts was a drug-dealing ne’er-do-well, has been elevated to the realm of sainthood by grieving parents determined to keep the flame Read more ...
fisun.guner
I’m in an exhibition of ancient artefacts from Afghanistan, all from the National Museum at Kabul, but I may well have stumbled into the wrong room at the British Museum. I could be in the BM’s Hellenic section of Greek art, or, taking a few steps to my left, the Egyptian rooms. But then again… here are some sensual sculptures of curvaceous semi-clad women from India (main picture), while a little further on there’s a Chinese hand mirror and some boot buckles, the latter with Chinese dragons whose wings are of turquoise.Afghanistan, a country whose recent war-torn history is part of our Read more ...
fisun.guner
Austere, elegant, impressive. Edwin Lutyens’s Whitehall Cenotaph is a thing of beauty, a monument that embodies permanence in the face of all that is impermanent, and solidity in the face of all that is ephemeral. It’s an inspired decision to bring it indoors, for inside a hushed gallery, away from the rush of traffic and stripped of its flags and sculpted wreathes, Lutyens’s memorial can at last be properly admired as a work of art.Of course, it’s only a replica, three-quarters the size of the original. But it seems less of a reproduction, more of a ghostly doppelgänger, its sheeny Read more ...
fisun.guner
Those ancient Egyptians, they loved life! So much so that they even conceived of an afterlife that differed hardly at all from the one on Earth, only better: they didn’t get sick and they carried on just as before, to eternity – which might sound like a bore to some, but given that the average life expectancy for an ancient Egyptian - even a very rich one - was 35, a certain reluctance to leave the earthly realm was understandable.In the divine realm of The Field of Reeds, the lucky few would drive their oxen, plough the fertile fields and paddle their boats. If they didn’t fancy doing much Read more ...
fisun.guner
The British Museum’s current exhibition of 15th-century works on paper, Fra Angelico to Leonardo: Italian Renaissance Drawings, explores the increasing importance of the preparatory sketch in the development of western art. Central to that development was the availability of cheaply produced paper. But as we discover in the British Museum’s free exhibition of the evolution of Chinese printmaking, The Printed Image in China, paper was being successfully manufactured in China by the third century AD. This innovation, along with the invention of the compass, gunpowder and printmaking, is among Read more ...