Turner
Sarah Kent
In September 1899, Claude Monet booked into a room at the Savoy Hotel. From there he had a good view of Waterloo Bridge and the south bank beyond. Setting up his easel on a balcony, he began a series of paintings of the river and the buildings on its banks. So entranced was he by the river that, over the next three years, he came back twice to continue working on a series that would mushroom to over 100 canvases.Waterloo Bridge, Overcast 1903 (main picture) shows the bridge packed with pedestrians and horse-drawn, double decker buses picked out in flicks of yellow and red. Making their way Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Free as air, but there was a very heavy price to pay for his ecstatic exploration of the sky by the Cornwall painter Peter Lanyon, who died in 1964, aged just 46, as a result of injuries received in a gliding accident. The Courtauld Gallery is known for its series of original, incisive, acute and intense exhibitions taking a sharply focused view of one aspect of an artist’s work. Often these provide a revelation and so it is here.For Lanyon, who has fallen out of fashion as have several other significant figures of his generation of British artists, this is a very welcome examination of Read more ...
David Nice
Nothing pinpoints the Oscars' absurdity more than the absences of Mike Leigh’s masterpiece as Best Film candidate, of Timothy Spall from the Best Actor list - New York and London critics as well as Cannes made some amends – and even of Marion Bailey, Leigh’s partner, from the nominations for Best Supporting Actress. Spall fulfils the promise of his King Lear moment in Secrets and Lies as the artist described by Leigh as a "complex, curmudgeonly, convoluted character".Tenacious Dickensian dialogue – surely not all improvised, Leigh-style? – allows Spall to shine or appal in love, bereavement, Read more ...
fisun.guner
There is early Turner; there is late Turner. Early Turner is very much of his time: a history and landscape painter in the first half of the 19th century, looking back to the classicism of Claude and the Dutch Golden Age tradition of sombre marine painting; late Turner is outside time, or at least outside his own time. In his final decade, Turner paints his way to the future, gravitating towards formlessness and abstraction. And in these luminous late canvases, where colour-suffused light dissolves form, we find a path to Monet, Rothko, all those American colour field painters, even Twombly. Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The first room of Ruin Lust is a knockout. Three large-scale pictures indicate the enduring fascination that ruins have held for artists over the centuries. John Martin’s apocalyptic view of Vesuvius smothering Pompeii in a vast cloud of volcanic ash (main picture) is like a vision of Hell. The engulfing dust storm is shaped like a fiery grotto – seductive yet repellent. In its fleshy recesses, the erupting volcano appears like a fire-spurting nipple, while the flames reflected in the water tinge the sea blood red, making it impossible to distinguish the actual waves from the lava swamping Read more ...
fisun.guner
Helen Frankenthaler is often presented as being both a stepping stone between art movements and as an artist who fell – because such things matter in the tidy narratives of art history – between the cracks of various American isms. Frankenthaler, who made her name in the fertile New York art scene of the early Fifties and who died in 2011, found success and fame early, but then had the possible misfortune to be seen as a “transitional figure”. Since she created a bridge between Abstract Expressionism (specifically Pollock, with his drip technique) and later Color Field Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
All roads start from Rome, and so it proves in this challenging exhibition put together from the holdings of the Royal Academy’s art collection, archives and library. It features 17th-century Italian paintings – some of the grandest by the French artists who settled in Rome, and took inspiration from the surrounding campagna – brought back to Britain by the Grand Tourists who, in the midst of their various adventures, amassed substantial art for their stately homes.The images by the likes of the two Poussins (Nicolas, and his brother-in-law Gaspard Dughet, so often confused), Claude Lorrain Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Amid the splurge of programmes about London saturating the airwaves, apparently designed as a crude propaganda offensive to divert us from the impending Olympics clampdown, Matthew Collings's examination of the mystical relationship between the Thames and JMW Turner was thoughtful and rather touching. It's true that Collings sometimes ties himself in knots while trying to express some inexpressible truth about art, but he successfully conveys the idea that he's making an honest effort to tell you about something he genuinely believes in.Though a shrewd businessman who marketed himself Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The British grand tourists not only fell in love with Italy. They fell in love with the landscapes of 17th-century ex-pat artist Claude Lorrain (1604/5-1682), depicting the Roman campagna in which the gods disported themselves. JMW Turner (1775-1851) also fell for the Frenchman, whose work he had seen in significant stately homes while visiting his patrons. Turner studied and copied, and it is the anatomy of this artistic love affair over two centuries that is exposed, to enchanting effect, in the National Gallery’s spring exhibition.Turner was marvellously ambitious. Rather like Picasso (who Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Turner and the Elements is a visual joy and an intellectual pleasure. The backbone of the selection is Turner’s genuine engagement with the scientists of the day. The argument is that he amalgamated the traditional segregation of the elements – earth, air, fire and water – into a fusion of all four; that technically, instead of schematic compositions divided into discernable sections and monocular viewpoints, he painted, so to speak, from the centre out.Turner first briefly came to Margate as an 11-year-old London schoolboy. Then as now sea air was considered a good thing. In the Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The opening of Turner Contemporary is being heralded as one of the most important cultural events of the year. Described as "a national and international venue in the regions" the gallery, it is hoped, will attract visitors from London and abroad and transform Margate’s flagging fortunes by stimulating new businesses such as commercial galleries, as well as cafés, restaurants and bars.I hope they are right, but the opening exhibition is such a low-key affair that I can’t imagine visitors flocking to see it. Regeneration is clearly the name of the game, though. The train passes by the ruins of Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Toby Jones’s cameo in Notting Hill – he was cast as an over-eager fan of Julia Roberts - was deposited on the cutting-room floor. Most actors would have chalked it up as one of life’s bum raps. Jones, who while on set for his short scene was also failing to rent a flat in Notting Hill, fashioned a drama out of a double crisis. To perform Missing Reel he obtained permission to show the suppressed material. Anyone attending the play, or listening to it on Radio 4, would have laid long odds against the actor once cast as a stalker of stars eventually landing the lead in a Hollywood film Read more ...