Picasso
theartsdesk
Yesterday the record for the most expensive painting ever sold was broken. At Christie's in New York Leonardo da Vinci's Salvator Mundi the hammer was knocked down on a price of $450 million. It's a lot of money, period, and even more for a painting which some doubt is by Leonardo at all. One doubter insists that Leonardo the great scientist would have refracted the light through the orb in Christ's hands. That won't bother the buyer, whose identity is unknown.Salvator Mundi soars to the top of the list of the 75 most expensive paintings sold in the last 30 years. The recent Leonardo Read more ...
Alison Cole
At 93, Picasso’s revered biographer, Sir John Richardson, has curated a vital new celebration of the artist’s life and work, focusing on one of his most enduring and delightful subjects, the Minotaur. The exhibition at the Gagosian in fact charts two magnificent obsessions: one is, of course, Picasso’s passionate identification with this savage, absurd and tragic mythological creature (the Minotaur is the half beast/half human offspring of a bull and the wife of King Minos of Crete); the other is Richardson’s own inexhaustible study of the artist himself, whom he describes as “intensely funny Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Chilean director Pablo Larrain has described Neruda as a “false biopic”, and it’s a film that surprises on many levels in its presentation of Pablo Neruda, the great poet who is his country’s best-known cultural figure. It captivates for the scope of its invention, its ludic combination of reality and artifice, poetry and politics, as well as the contradictions of its central character.Larrain's last film Jackie was also a biopic with a difference, but Neruda goes further in every sense. It’s also something of a departure from the director’s earlier works, such as No and Post Mortem, which Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
A good triple bill should have something for everyone, so Rambert have all bases covered with their latest: rare must be the person who likes neither love, nor art, nor rock 'n' roll. In fact, it's a safe bet that most people like all of them, and so last night's programme at Sadler's Wells was something of a crowd-pleaser – no mean feat for an evening with two new works, created for this season and here receiving their London première.If you want to count in whole numbers, as it were, then Didy Veldman's new The 3 Dancers is probably Art, inspired as it is by Picasso's 1925 painting Les Read more ...
fisun.guner
So, Picasso’s last words turned out not to be, “Drink to me. Drink to my health. You know I can’t drink anymore” – yes, those famous last words that inspired a Paul McCartney dirge – but were, according to this TV biography looking at Picasso’s women and how each significant relationship informed the direction of his work, “Get me some pencils”. A more prosaic request, certainly, but he died in bed, aged 93, his pencils delivered and drawing to the last. It was a good and fitting end.It was, however, an unpromising beginning, for when Picasso entered this world it was feared he was still born Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
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. And here Picasso undertook perhaps the most significant of his many metamorphoses. (Self-Portrait, pictured below, Private Collection)The 18 paintings Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
For a man immortalised by his wails of rainy misery from the moors of Withnail and I, you would expect Richard E Grant to be very happy on the Riviera. He is, with the suave aristo manner of the Englishman abroad. Which is fitting for The Riviera: A History in Pictures, because the Riviera practically belonged to the Brits - we hivernots, winter escapers from northern cold - before the French realised it was there at all. And it came to their attention because artists from the Impressionists onwards went there.I’m not sure that A History in Pictures quite knows what it is aiming for: Grant is Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
MoMa and the Met, the Whitney and the Guggenheim – all very fine, but if you crave something different when in NYC, it’s worth braving Penn Station’s circles of hell to get a train to Philadelphia (takes just over an hour) to visit the mind-boggling Barnes Foundation. This private art collection, worth around $30 billion, is in a league of its own. Dr Albert Barnes owned the largest number of Renoirs in the world - 181, acquired between 1912 and 1942; 69 Cézannes - more than the Louvre - 59 Matisses, 46 Picassos, many works by Monet, Degas, Van Gogh, Rousseau, Modigliani, Seurat, Pissarro, Read more ...
fisun.guner
The Vollard Suite is Picasso’s most celebrated series of etchings. Named after Ambroise Vollard, the influential avant-garde art dealer who gave the 19-year-old Picasso his first exhibition in Paris in 1901, the series was commissioned by the dealer in 1930. For the next seven years Picasso worked on it in creative bursts, completing a series of 100 etchings. Last autumn, one of the complete set – a total of 310 were printed – was purchased by London-based private collector Hamish Parker as a gift to the British Museum.Since the series has never previously been shown in its entirety in the UK Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Pablo Picasso is the presiding genius of 20th century art, the most influential artist in the modern period, lauded for his protean inventiveness, originality, individuality and overwhelming productivity. In 1934 poet Geoffrey Grigson declared that he was all the history of modern art, in 1942 the artist Jankel Adler observed that “Picasso, the greatest innovator of the twentieth century, has knocked on the door of every painter’s studio in the world”. Too true: his ghost is still present amongst art’s practioners and its audience.It is in the shadow of this colossus that Tate Britain's new Read more ...
josh.spero
The easiest mistake to make in appreciating George Condo would be to assume that his manic style reflects a manic creation or a manic practice. Some of Condo's paintings and drawings, with their childlike loops and gurning, disfigured faces, look like he made them in a fit of violence or some hysterical trance, but the real surprise of two new shows at the Hayward Gallery and at Sprüth Magers in Mayfair is the care and the calmness that lies behind them.Condo has developed a language of painting which mixes quotations from earlier artists with a cartoonish accent, adding his familiar Read more ...
fisun.guner
Who were the Vorticists? Were they significant? Were they any good? And does this little-known British avant-garde movement – if it can be called anything as cohesive - really deserve a major survey at Tate Britain? Many of the group’s paintings never survived the First World War, and nor did one of its most talented supporters, the precocious French sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska; two of the most talented artists who did – David Bomberg and Jacob Epstein – were never signatories to its manifesto, and Epstein, for one, distanced himself; and, in its short life, there was only one Read more ...