fri 29/03/2024

drawing

Winnie-the-Pooh: Exploring a Classic, V&A review - nostalgic family fun

What was it about the privileged male Victorian/Edwardian British writer that led to such a fantastical outpouring of books for children that were to embed themselves so thoroughly that they have stayed with their readers into adulthood? All when...

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When Bowie and Boyd hoaxed the art world

In 1994 the art magazine Modern Painters invited fresh blood onto its editorial board. The new intake included a novelist, William Boyd, and a rock star, David Bowie. "That’s how I got to know him," says Boyd. "We’d sit at the table with all these...

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Best of 2015: Art

From weaselly shyster to spineless drip, the biographies of Goya’s subjects are often superfluous: exactly what he thought of each of his subjects is jaw-droppingly evident in each and every portrait he painted. Quite how Goya got away with it is a...

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Drawing in Silver and Gold: Leonardo to Jasper Johns, British Museum

Unlike Venice, where colour reigned supreme among artists such as Titian and Veronese, Florence was the city where drawing – disegno – was held up as the cornerstone of the artist’s education. Think of the well-defined musculature of Michelangelo’s...

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Grayson Perry: Provincial Punk, Turner Contemporary

Imagine if broadcasters thought the only living pop star worth giving air time to was Lady Gaga. Imagine – the horror. It would be wall-to-wall Gaga for the foreseeable future. And then imagine if the only living contemporary artist commissioning...

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Modigliani, Estorick Collection

Modigliani’s short life was a template for countless aspiring artists who, in the period after his death in 1920, were only too willing to believe that a garret in Montmartre and a liking for absinthe held the secret to creative brilliance. While...

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Goya: The Witches and Old Women Album, Courtauld Gallery

The sight of two old women fighting in the street would probably meet with roughly the same response from passers-by whether it happened today or 200 years ago – a queasy mixture of dismay, embarrassment and amusement. To get close to Goya’s drawing...

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Gallery: Honoré Daumier and Paula Rego - a conversation across time

Baudelaire called him a “pictorial Balzac” and said he was the most important man “in the whole of modern art”, while Degas was only a little less effusive, claiming him as one of the three greatest draughtsman of the 19th century, alongside Ingres...

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Egon Schiele: The Radical Nude, Courtauld Gallery

So many words have been expended on Egon Schiele, that it’s almost impossible to imagine what more can be added for such a relatively small and narrow, albeit intense, body of work. His was an early blossoming talent, and in his short life – he was...

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The Young Dürer: Drawing the Figure, Courtauld Gallery

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...

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Gallery: Derwent Art Prize

You can use a computer to draw, as Hockney does, every day on his iPad, yet, despite all the technological advances the 21st century has thrown our way, the pencil continues to be the artist’s most basic tool. And though there are those who lament,...

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Master Drawings, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Michelangelo evidently regarded drawing as the foundation of not only painting and sculpture but  of “architecture and of every other kind of painting and the root of all science”. His all-encompassing claim is subtly demonstrated in this...

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