portraits
sue.steward
The National Portrait Gallery was early in picking up on the momentum gathering around photography in 2003, and committed itself then to an annual prize for portraiture. Today it’s one of the most anticipated competition exhibitions in the UK, and always exciting, fascinating and memorable. For many of the 60 exhibited photographers, it is often life-changing. This year’s submission exceeded 6,000 entries, all physical prints as the gallery still fends off digital domination. Part of the fun of the show is spotting any new trends in style, technique or subjects.The competition has a Read more ...
fisun.guner
Albrecht Dürer painted himself as Jesus (pictured below). Luckily, he was blessed with the looks, the hair and the initials – echoing the geometry of his golden locks the A straddles the D in his inscribed paintings. And when this German messiah of painting died, his beguiling 1500 self-portrait – one of the most hypnotic ever painted in the history of Western art – was carried through the streets of Nuremburg, his birthplace: celebrated during his life, upon his death Dürer became a cult. A lock of that famous hair is kept at the Vienna Academy.It was this self-portrait that kick-started art Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Thomas Lawrence was a child prodigy; from the age of 11 he supported his family by making pastel drawings of the fashionable elite who spent the season in Bath. The next step for an aspiring young artist was to learn how to paint in oils and Lawrence taught himself by doing self-portraits. He learned fast. The first painting in this exhibition of sumptuous portraits shows a diffident 19-year-old sitting sideways and glancing nervously towards us, as though fearful that his efforts will be laughed at.Thirty-seven years on, we see him again (main picture). What a difference! He may have lost Read more ...
fisun.guner
“Henry VIII is the only king whose shape we remember,” David Starkey tells us in the first of a new series of “polemical essays” on British art. To demonstrate, he reduces the king’s form to its bare Cubist geometry. He sketches a trapezoid for the chest – an impressive 54 inches in life, as attested by his made-to-measure suit of armour; two “chicken-wing” triangles for the puffed sleeves; two simple parallel lines for the wide-apart legs. Oh, and a small, inverted triangle for the codpiece. This last addition, as originally drawn-in for comedic value by the Tudor historian G R Elton, and Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Our culture is hungry for stories of buried treasure, for the lost archive. So when something of startling value is brought blinking into the light after many years, it answers a romantic urge. Of course it doesn’t happen much any more, not in a digitised e-culture in which, like Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, you really can put a girdle round the Earth in no time at all. Something interesting has just cropped up in Italy, mind.An artist called Pordenone Montanari put his house in Piedmont on sale. The name won’t mean anything. Montanari, now in his seventies, had been exhibited Read more ...
fisun.guner
A grisly "shadow portrait" of the late fashion muse and stylist Isabella Blow goes on show today at the National Portrait Gallery. Crafted from taxidermied animals, including a raven, a species of rat linked to the black death and a snake, as well as Blow’s trademark bright lipstick and a heel from one of her Manolo Blahnik shoes, the portrait shows the sitter’s head on a stake. Though the objects resemble a disordered, moth-eaten pile, a spot-lit shadow, which is projected on to the wall behind, shows a clearly defined silhouette of Blow’s uplifted head in profile. Famous for her Read more ...
judith.flanders
Visit the room in the Louvre where the Mona Lisa hangs, and all you will be able to see is a glass-covered rectangle and hundreds of camera phones held high. Certainly you will be unable to examine the woman in the picture, or contemplate the work of the artist who painted her. Yet they - sitter and artist - are, finally, what matters: that one day, the (probable) Lisa Gherardini, wife of a silk-merchant, sat down in front of an artist, who began to paint her. Five hundred years later, another sitter, the art critic Martin Gayford, sits down in front of an artist, Lucian Freud, who likewise Read more ...
judith.flanders
Camille Silvy may be the least recognised of all the great photographic innovators of the 19th century. After a decade of almost ceaseless technical innovation, and astonishing output as the society portrait-photographer of the 1860s, he abruptly closed his London studio, aged only 34, returned to France, and, after a brief stint in the garde mobile in the Franco-Prussian War, spent much of the rest of his life in and out of asylums. It has been suggested that the chemicals used in these pioneering decades of photography caused mental illness; but given his prodigious output - 17,000 sittings Read more ...
fisun.guner
What a troubled life Alice Neel led. The death of her first child, a daughter, who died of diphtheria in 1928 just before her first birthday; another daughter lost to her estranged husband’s family in Cuba two years later (as an adult and a mother herself, the daughter, Isabetta, committed suicide); life as a single mother raising two later sons on welfare in the slum district of New York's Spanish Harlem; and a neglected but always diligent artist for much of the rest of it, only achieving fame and acclaim towards the end.And yet we find her, in variously dated archive footage featured Read more ...
fisun.guner
Last month, the National Portrait Gallery unveiled a huge, new portrait of Anna Wintour. Painted by Alex Katz, the celebrated New York Pop portraitist, American Vogue’s scary editor-in-chief is shown with famous helmet bob intact, but minus her trademark dark glasses. The picture depicts Wintour, whose icy blue stare could run a chill through you (she's known as Nuclear Wintour), against a sunny yellow backdrop – which looks like an attempt to raise the temperature of that icicle glare. You pass it as you enter this year’s BP Portrait Award. I’m thinking of that picture because, in Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Aptly, this new documentary about how the Rolling Stones fled from England to the South of France to record Exile on Main Street was premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, with a supernaturally healthy-looking Mick Jagger on hand to give it a promotional shove. Jagger (along with Keith Richards and Charlie Watts) produced the film, working closely alongside director Stephen Kijak to knit together an evocative and emotional portrait of "the greatest rock'n'roll band in the world", at what many would argue was their peak.The fact that the project is an authorised job from the heart of the Read more ...
josh.spero
While wandering back from a meeting with a hedgie on Haymarket, I noticed a banner emblazoned with the logo of Browns, clothes shop to the well heeled (to mix metaphors), above the entrance to what appeared to be a building site. It was indeed a building site, off Marshall St, near Carnaby St, but two floors of the new apartment block there have been taken over by a pop-up exhibition to celebrate 40 years of Browns. Browns, ever since it was taken over by Joan Burstein in 1970, has always been one seam ahead of the pinking shears, which is why a pop-up museum makes perfect sense, although the Read more ...