thu 15/05/2025

Visual Arts Reviews

Imagine: Ai Weiwei - Without Fear or Favour, BBC One

Josh Spero

If you found yourself thinking that you were watching Mission: Impossible rather than Imagine, you could have been forgiven. Alan Yentob had clearly been banned from meeting Ai Weiwei in China, and so one of their interviews was conducted over a webcam, with Yentob sitting in the dark, like some spymaster of the arts.

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High Society, Wellcome Collection

Fisun Güner Just say no? 'Morphinomane' by Eugene Grasset, 1897

It’s amazing what you might have found in your average bathroom cabinet 100 years ago. For those niggling aches and pains, what could be more effective than a bottle of Bayer’s Heroin Hydrochloride? Or how about a soothing spoonful of Sydenham’s Laudanum? If you’re simply in need of a quick pick-me-up, a sip or three of Hall’s Coca Wine – the “Elixir of Life” (basically liquid cocaine) - might put a jolly spring in your step. Oh, and don’t forget those cocaine eyedrops after a particularly...

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Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize 2010, National Portrait Gallery

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...

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British Art Show 7, Nottingham Galleries

sue Steward 'NUD CYCLADIC 10' by Sarah Lucas: 'Typical Lucas representations of the human body, its sexual habits, functions - and ridiculousness'

Nottingham always had an eye for beauty. When I was growing up near there, the boast was that its women were the most beautiful in England. Today, it could and should be boasting about Caruso St John’s magnificent concrete landmark adorned with green and gold, the Nottingham Contemporary Gallery and the seventh British Art Show. The...

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Ego: The Strange and Wonderful World of Self-Portraits, BBC Four

Fisun Güner Laura Cumming presents 'an intelligent, probing and charming visual essay on a unique genre'

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...

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Journey Through the Afterlife: Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, British Museum

Fisun Güner The sweet hereafter: Mummy of Katebet c 1300-1275 BC

Those ancient Egyptians, they loved life! So much so that they even conceived of an afterlife that differed hardly at all from the one on Earth, only better: they didn’t get sick and they carried on just as before, to eternity – which might sound like a bore to some, but given that the average life expectancy for an ancient Egyptian - even a very rich one - was 35, a certain reluctance to leave the earthly realm was understandable.

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Leon Kossoff, New Works, Annely Juda Fine Art

Judith Flanders Kossoff: 'Christ Church, Spitalfields', 1999-2000

It is one of the enduring mysteries of Leon Kossoff’s art. How does someone who uses such thick, impastoed paint and such muddy, earth-toned colours make his work so light, so delicate, so filled with grace? The more you look, the more mysterious is becomes.

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Cézanne's Card Players, Courtauld Gallery

Fisun Güner

Give me a small side order of Cézannes over a great feast of Gauguins any day.

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Pioneering Painters: The Glasgow Boys 1880-1900, Royal Academy

Mark Hudson James Guthrie, 'A Hind's Daughter', 1883

If you'd been a painter at the time of Impressionism, what would you have done? Rushed to Paris to become a disciple of Manet or Monet? Taken the Symbolist route with Odilon Redon or headed to Brittany to whoop it up with Gauguin and co? No, the chances are you'd probably have got it wrong and, like the so-called Glasgow Boys, hitched your talents to a now virtually forgotten figure like Jules Bastien-Lepage. Jules who? Exactly.

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Thomas Lawrence: Regency Power and Brilliance, National Portrait Gallery

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...

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