Visual arts
Sarah Kent
If you know of any chauvinists who dare to maintain that women can’t paint, take them to this astounding retrospective. Lee Krasner faced patronising dismissal at practically every turn in her career yet she persisted and went on to produce some of the most magnificent paintings of the late 20th century.Despite her brilliance, she is still known to most people as the wife of Jackson Pollock, whom she married in 1945, so it comes as no surprise to discover how hard it was for her to pursue her own path amid the male egos that dominated the New York art scene at the time. Among the abstract Read more ...
Florence Hallett
It is a commonplace to describe Leonardo as an enigma whose genius, and perhaps even something of his character, is revealed through his works. But as his works survive only in incomplete and fragmented form, it is drawing, the practice common to all his various endeavours, that brings coherence and perhaps even a comprehensive view of a lifetime’s labours.The 200 drawings on display at the Queen’s Gallery are a selection from the Royal Collection’s peerless Leonardo holdings. They were left to his pupil Francesco Melzi on his death and have remained together ever since, having been acquired Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Manga, the Japanese art of the graphic novel, took its modern form in the 1800s. Illustrated stories already had a long heritage in Japan — encompassing woodblock prints and illustrated scrolls and novels — but the introduction of the printing press by foreign visitors changed the rate at which works could be made and the extent of their distribution.Part of manga’s appeal is its restlessness — it never gets stale. While the 1950s saw distinctions crystallise between shōnen and seinen manga (respectively for boys and young men) and shōjo manga (for girls), the 70s saw the Year 24 Group of Read more ...
Katherine Waters
There are children screaming in a nearby playground. Their voices rise and fall, swell and drop. Interspersed silences fill with the sound of running, the movement and cacophony orchestrated by a boy who leads on the catch tone. It's simultaneously otherworldly and juvenile, adept and improvised – a fitting soundtrack to Anish Kapoor's latest exhibition at Lisson Gallery. While Kapoor is best known for his perception-manipulating sculptures, his painting practice spans four decades and is the explicit focus of this exhibition. Three groups of paintings occupy three rooms; the first Read more ...
Katherine Waters
There’s a barely disguised sense of threat running through the 2019 Venice Biennale. Of the 79 participating artists and groups, all are living and there’s a sharp sense that the purpose of the exhibition is to diagnose the ills afflicting the contemporary world. Colonial history, protest, ecological havoc, enslavement (of people, of machines), borders, murder, incarceration, poverty – all the fears of the day feature. Curator Ralph Rugoff's vision this year is clear, yet the show is not pessimistic and many of the works are graced by great dignity – though that is not to say the experience Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Dried flowers like offerings lie atop a gauze-covered rectangular frame. Pebbles surround its base alongside plaster casts, a desiccated dragonfly and an animal foot charm. Their placement is purposeful; their exact significance unclear. Four rib-high figures with moon faces, sausage string necks and wafer-thin bodies face the frame. Three wear golden gowns like devotees or disciples; all bear pendulous, darkly bellying stomachs before them over their clothes. From the first room of Northern Irish artist Cathy Wilkes’ installation for the British Pavilion in Venice, it is clear this is a Read more ...
Mark Sheerin
Cassel in Flanders is surrounded by the gentle and verdant landscapes that inspired Pieter Bruegel the Elder to create the populous and festive scenes for which he is still known and loved, 450 years after his death. Now the small town is celebrating his celebrations with a show at the new Musée de Flandre dedicated to his country fairs and weddings.Such an out-of-the-way exhibition was never likely to be packed with priceless masterpieces. If that is the type of show you are looking for, you’d be advised to head for the commemorations in Vienna: we know of no more than four country fairs by Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Placed in a long and artfully Arcadian vista, earthy bronze subdued against verdant grass and trees, the restless form of Henry Moore’s Two Piece Reclining Figure: Cut, 1979-81 (Main picture), both disrupts and is absorbed by its surroundings. A rampant limb rears snakelike, the energy in its writhing form arrested but not dissipated by a violently efficient cut slicing it in two. A cut this clean belongs to machinery and cold metal, not to nature, and it is the contrast with the gentle romance of Houghton Hall’s 18th century landscaping, complete with its Palladian folly, that draws out Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Who would have known that the word “Kubrickian” only entered the Oxford English Dictionary last year? You’d have thought that one of the great film directors of the 20th century would have earned his own epithet long ago. It’s taken a long time, too, for Stanley Kubrick: The Exhibition to reach his adopted homeland, and its current berth at London’s Design Museum – so long, in fact, that you might almost begin to wonder about prophets unhonoured and all that: the show opened originally in Frankfurt in 2004 and has been travelling the world, in one iteration or another, more or less ever since Read more ...
Robert Hollingworth
Leonardo da Vinci died 500 years ago on 2 May this year. We all know he was a painter, sculptor, architect, engineer, pioneer of flight and anatomist – yet according to Vasari, Leonardo’s first job outside Florence was as a result of his musical talents. We call him the "universal man," the ultimate polymath, but he would have called himself a “monomath” – bringing everything he did under one central embrace - the rational laws of God’s creation. These laws were mathematical, and it is on this foundation that he revered music as the only serious rival for his divine "science" of painting Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The National Gallery is on a roll to expand ever further our understanding of western art, alternating blockbusters dedicated to familiar and bankable stars, with selections of work by lesser known figures from across the centuries. Last year for example we had the Finnish Gallen-Kallela, the American Thomas Cole and the Renaissance painter Lorenzo Lotto.Now it is the turn of the Spaniard Joaquín Sorolla, (1863-1923) billed in 1908 as the "World’s Greatest Living Painter" for an exhibition at London’s Grafton Galleries, the first and last time he was to be shown in Britain. His reception in Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Paper is traditionally the medium though which artists think. Stray thoughts and experiments can be quickly tried out, pushed further or jettisoned. There are no penalties for starting something which goes wrong or transforms into something else because material is cheap, expendable. Erasure or high finish are equally likely, dead ends and new directions begin in the same place.Who’s Afraid of Drawing is the second exhibition of around 60 works from the Ramo Collection, which itself comprises some 600 works on paper by 20th century Italian artists. Many of the artists included in the Read more ...