Visual Arts Reviews
Devotion by Design: Italian Altarpieces Before 1500, National GallerySunday, 10 July 2011
Down the stairs the visitor enters a sequence of galleries gleaming with gold, seemingly illuminated by softly filtered evening light and flickering candles: here be a treasure house of stories in paint: saints, sinners and the narrative of the divine made flesh, from the Annunciation to the crucifixion. Some 40 Italian altarpieces, from the... Read more... |
Thomas Struth: Photography 1978-2010Sunday, 10 July 2011
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The Holburne Museum, Bath: In With the NewSaturday, 09 July 2011
Gleaming, shimmering, full of pizzazz, glitz and unashamed bling, although of the 18th-century sort, as befits its role as the most cheerfully mixed up and glittering show of baubles in Bath, the Holburne Museum reopened in May after three years' closure. At a cost of £11.2 million the museum has been expanded, rebuilt, refurbished and renovated. Much more of the collection, newly installed after extensive conservation, is also on view than hitherto. The whole works a treat. As many... Read more... |
Treasures of Heaven: Saints, Relics and Devotion in Medieval Europe, British MuseumWednesday, 06 July 2011
At the end of my road is a shrine dedicated to a young man murdered there more than a year ago. For the first few months lighted candles, plastic flowers, cards and poems penned by friends and relatives were left on a doorstep; now, though, a blue plaque commemorating his short life has appeared on the wall above a constantly burning flame. Over the years the messages have also changed from outpourings of sorrow to words of adulation; the lad, who by all accounts was a drug-dealing ne’... Read more... |
Twombly and Poussin: Arcadian Painters, Dulwich Picture GalleryFriday, 01 July 2011
Some years ago the Dulwich Picture Gallery invited Howard Hodgkin to exhibit alongside the Old Masters in their collection. I am not a fan of this vastly overrated artist, but even a diehard enthusiast must have found the juxtaposition cruel. How could Hodgkin’s crudely daubed, splishy-sploshy canvases (I exempt from the description a few works painted at the... Read more... |
Eyewitness: Hungarian Photography in the 20th Century, Royal AcademyThursday, 30 June 2011
A subtly haunting and brilliantly composed photograph by André Kertész lives on as a wistfully memorable image of exile: in Lost Cloud, 1937, a small, isolated cloud drifts we know not where next to a New York skyscraper. Kertész is one of the quintet of Hungarian Jewish photographers who are acknowledged as among the greatest of the last century. Kertész, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Robert Capa, Martin Munkácsi and Brassaï are the most familiar among the staggeringly accomplished Hungarian... Read more... |
Fake or Fortune?, Episodes 1 & 2, BBC OneTuesday, 28 June 2011
Fake or Fortune? on BBC One, with Fiona Bruce and art dealer and sleuth Philip Mould, ought to have been called CSI: Cork Street for its blend of fine art and forensic science. They were trying to resolve whether a Monet was in fact a Monet, using a 240 million-pixel camera, Monet's own accountbook (which Fiona Bruce ran her ungloved fingers across) and plenty of ominous music. Next up: who killed Marat in David's picture? Read more... |
Marcel van Eeden, Sprueth Magers LondonMonday, 27 June 2011
An article in this week's New Yorker bemoans the death of drawing in art. Why has the emphasis on craft, Adam Gopnik writes, been replaced by concept? He has evidently not seen the fantastic noirish drawings of Marcel van Eeden at Sprueth Magers in Mayfair. Read more... |
Toulouse-Lautrec and Jane Avril: Beyond the Moulin Rouge, Courtauld GalleryThursday, 23 June 2011
As one of the stars of the Moulin Rouge, she was variously known by the nicknames "La Mélinite", "Jane la Folle", and "L’Etrange". The first was after a brand of explosive, the other two attesting to a little craziness. Jane Avril’s eccentric dance movements evoked the involuntary spasms of female hysteria patients. Read more... |
The Vorticists: Manifesto for a Modern World, Tate BritainWednesday, 15 June 2011
Who were the Vorticists? Were they significant? Were they any good? And does this little-known British avant-garde movement – if it can be called anything as cohesive - really deserve a major survey at Tate Britain? Many of the group’s paintings never survived the First World War, and nor did one of its most talented supporters, the precocious French sculptor...
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