Visual arts
judith.flanders
In 1757, what had previously been the royal collection of manuscripts was handed over to the nascent British Museum. Edward IV, who started the collection in the 15th century, had created a collection of books designed to display the greater glory of God and (by extension) his chosen sovereigns and country: the Yorkist leader in the Wars of the Roses used these books, and the images they contained, to create a propaganda machine to suggest that God was on his side. Today the struggles of history are for the most part left to specialists, but the gorgeous propaganda machine is accessible to Read more ...
fisun.guner
Leonardo da Vinci was not a prolific artist. In a career that lasted nearly half a century, he probably painted no more than 20 pictures, and only 15 surviving paintings are currently agreed to be entirely his. Of these, four are incomplete. Indeed one painting, abandoned by the artist but currently hanging in the National Gallery, is so far from being finished that the two figures in it, that of Saint Jerome and the lion in the wilderness (c 1488-90, Pinacoteca Vaticana, pictured below), have been barely touched by paint.Yet the aged saint’s musculature, the way the taut sinews of his Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The Nikolai Ge retrospective at Moscow’s Tretyakov Gallery marks the 180th anniversary of the artist’s birth – not the kind of round centenary or bicentenary landmark that often brings such projects to fruition. But the show is literally a revelation – at its centre are the religious works from the last years of his life, many of which returned only this year to Russia from abroad. A series of pencil drawings based on the Crucifixion show the artist working in a style that seems astonishingly ahead of his time.The last time I visited these exhibition halls, part of the Tretyakov’s “new” Read more ...
fisun.guner
What a curious curate’s egg Tate Liverpool has pulled out of its hat with Alice in Wonderland. And what a complete rag-bag of minor, uninteresting artists. It starts with a disparate mix of recent works by a few better-knowns – neatly beginning at the end, as it were (Jason Rhoades’s neon-sign euphemisms for the female sex, Luc Tuymans’ dreamy Wonderland), but by the end proper we are left befuddled by the impression that any artist whose work features feeble wordplay, has some passing reference to burgeoning female sexuality, or simply contains a passing reference to a “looking glass” has Read more ...
judith.flanders
What is it that makes an exhibition special, keeps you looking longer than you expected, ensures you think about it long after you’ve left? Obviously, the art, or in a history show, the subject, is the first thing. The installation sometimes (although a good show is more usually damaged by poor installation than a poor one is rescued by good). Then there are the juxtapositions, the unexpected nuggets of information, novelty, rarity.The question arises because the National Portrait Gallery’s new show on the actresses of the 17th and 18th centuries should have everything it takes: some of the 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 ...