Visual Arts Reviews
Ego: The Strange and Wonderful World of Self-Portraits, BBC FourFriday, 05 November 2010
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... Read more... |
Journey Through the Afterlife: Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, British MuseumThursday, 04 November 2010
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. Read more... |
Leon Kossoff, New Works, Annely Juda Fine ArtMonday, 01 November 2010
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. Read more... |
Cézanne's Card Players, Courtauld GalleryFriday, 29 October 2010
Give me a small side order of Cézannes over a great feast of Gauguins any day. Read more... |
Pioneering Painters: The Glasgow Boys 1880-1900, Royal AcademyThursday, 28 October 2010
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. Read more... |
Thomas Lawrence: Regency Power and Brilliance, National Portrait GalleryFriday, 22 October 2010
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... Read more... |
CarlosWednesday, 20 October 2010
The full-length version of Olivier Assayas's saga of Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, alias Venezuelan super-terrorist Carlos, was originally a three-part series for French TV and runs to five-and-a-half hours. Even the "short" cinema cut runs to two-and-a-half hours. Yet the director still felt it necessary to preface his opus with the warning that since many of Carlos's activities remained "grey areas" shrouded in mystery and ambiguity, it would be best to regard the film as fiction. Read more... |
The Genius of British Art, Howard Jacobson, Channel 4Monday, 18 October 2010
Howard Jacobson, fresh from his Booker Prize triumph, was on an admirable mission last night: to rescue the good name of the Victorians. He wanted us to stop caricaturing our 19th-century forebears as prudish, self-righteous, pompous and hypocritical - you know, the sort of people who were so repressed that they went about covering piano legs in case thoughts should turn to the sensual curve of a lady’s well-turned ankle, but who were also notorious for sexual peccadillos involving underage... Read more... |
Venice: Canaletto and His Rivals, National GalleryMonday, 18 October 2010
People love Canaletto, and the title of this exhibition - which puts the setting of the paintings above the artist who did them - gives a good idea why. Venice as a place and an idea is perennially popular, and Canaletto gives us the big views – the Doge’s Palace, the Grand Canal, the Rialto – in painstakingly literal detail. Read more... |
Film: Over Your Cities Grass Will GrowFriday, 15 October 2010
Action-movie season ain't over quite yet, folks. Sure. OK. Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow isn't exactly your conventional salute to Armageddon. No guns, no baddies, no hot babes, no long-haired hunks. The pace is slow. The dialogue's pretty non-existent - and mostly European. The setting is pastoral. The soundtrack is...
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