Visual Arts Reviews
Shadow Catchers: Camera-less Photography, Victoria & Albert MuseumFriday, 15 October 2010
Camera-less photography isn’t, as some might think, a 20th-century invention, discovered by experimental Modernists such as Moholy-Nagy and Man Ray. Thomas Wedgwood, before the invention of the camera and at the very beginning of the 19th century, made paintings on glass and placed these in contact with pieces of paper and leather which had been rendered light sensitive with chemical treatments. Where the painted areas blocked the light, the image left its trace. Unfortunately, since... Read more...
|
Frieze Art Fair, Regent's ParkThursday, 14 October 2010
Contemporary art can, unsurprisingly, become dated pretty quickly – the clue is in the name. Another of Damien Hirst’s mirrored cabinets of pills or of Gavin Turk’s piss-takes of Andy Warhol at the Frieze Art Fair in Regent’s Park is hardly the sort of sight which will enthuse hardened art-gallery goers. Read more... |
Alexander Ponomarev: Sea Stories, Calvert 22Friday, 08 October 2010
As well as being a great artist, Leonardo da Vinci designed machine guns, tanks and cluster bombs and worked out how to build a submarine; but so appalled was he by the potential of this last invention that he coded his notes to prevent anyone using them to instigate what he called "murder at the bottom of the seas". Read more... |
Turner Prize 2010, Tate BritainTuesday, 05 October 2010
There may be some who feel this year’s shortlist for the Turner Prize has done little to forge ahead with anything new, innovative and different. And then there may be others who will welcome the rather more established artists on this year’s list, that is those who have continued to steadily develop their practice for well over a decade, with no great surprises, such as Angela de La Cruz and Dexter Dalwood. Read more... |
The Genius of British Art, David Starkey, Channel 4Monday, 04 October 2010
“Henry VIII is the only king whose shape we remember,” David Starkey tells us in the first of a new series of “polemical essays” on British art. To demonstrate, he reduces the king’s form to its bare Cubist geometry. He sketches a trapezoid for the chest – an impressive 54 inches in life, as attested by his made-to-measure suit of armour; two “chicken-wing” triangles for the puffed sleeves; two simple parallel lines for the wide-apart legs. Oh, and a small, inverted triangle for the codpiece... Read more... |
Salvator Rosa: Bandits, Wilderness and Magic, Dulwich Picture GalleryFriday, 01 October 2010
Mount Vesuvius blew its top in 1631, spewing molten lava into the sea and filling the air with ash clouds that reached as far as Constantinople. The eruption and accompanying earthquakes killed 3,000 people and caused widespread devastation, all of which made a lasting impression on the 16–year-old Salvator Rosa. As an artist he was to specialise in darkly tempestuous landscapes filled with menace in which small figures are dwarfed by towering cliffs, or beset by bandits, while storm clouds... Read more... |
Gauguin: Maker of Myth, Tate ModernThursday, 30 September 2010
Gauguin has always been the poor relation in the art-legend sweepstakes. Unlike Van Gogh, there is no heartwarming story of overcoming lack of technical facility; no ghoulishly enjoyable story of genius crushed by madness. Instead, there is a story that veers from irritating to deeply unattractive: a businessman and Sunday painter, Gauguin acquired his technical skills across a range of art forms with almost insolent ease, before abandoning his wife and children in poverty to flee to... Read more... |
Treasures from Budapest: European Masterpieces from Leonardo to Schiele, Royal AcademyMonday, 27 September 2010
Treasures from Budapest – phew! It’s overwhelming. One staggers out quite cross-eyed and wobbly-kneed. There are over 200 works, for heaven’s sake. And so many Virgins: sweet-faced Italian Madonnas, austere Eastern European Madonnas, pallid German ones. There’s a tiny, exquisite yet unfinished Raphael Madonna, known as The Esterházy Madonna, since much of the collection of Old Masters shown here was amassed by Prince Nikolaus II Esterházy. Oh, and there’s the stubby-nosed,... Read more... |
Sellars and Viola's Tristan und Isolde, Royal Festival HallSunday, 26 September 2010
People always overlook how much of a hippie Richard Wagner was intellectually. His philosophical stance differs little from that of Neil from The Young Ones. It's a side of Wagner you can't get away from in Tristan und Isolde, with its endless railing against temporal realities and its search for universal oneness - yeah man, oneness. Read more... |
Diaghilev and the Golden Age of the Ballets Russes, 1909-1929, V&AFriday, 24 September 2010
Museum shows don’t often evoke a sense of smell, but without even trying, this Ballets Russes exhibition has visitors’ nostrils flared. The show is – intentionally – a feast for the eye, and even for the ear, with ballet scores (sometimes rudely overlapping) playing in every room. But smell? Read more... |
Pages
latest in today
Brancusi Pompidou Centre, Paris review - founding father of...
120 sculptures, and so much more: the current Brancusi blockbuster at the Centre Pompidou, the first large Paris show of the Romanian-born...
CVC, Concorde 2, Brighton review - they have the songs and t...
The joy of CVC, when they catch fire, is the zing of gatecrashing a gang of cheeky, very individual personalities having their own private party....
Hallé, Wong, Bridgewater Hall, Manchester review - meeting a...
Kahchun Wong, the Hallé’s principal conductor from the coming autumn season, presided in the Bridgewater Hall for the first time yesterday since...
Extract: Pariah Genius by Iain Sinclair
Iain Sinclair is a writer, film-maker, and psychogeographer extraordinaire. He began his career in the poetic avant-garde of the Sixties and...
Nezouh review - seeking magic in a war
The 21st century learnt afresh about the reality of carpet-bombed cities thanks to the Syrian civil war, which began in 2011. And the...
Album: Dua Lipa - Radical Optimism
This album has a lot to live up to. Its predecessor Future Nostalgia came along just as the Covid crisis was properly kicking...
Laughing Boy, Jermyn Street Theatre review - impassioned agi...
On the morning of the press show of Laughing Boy, the BBC news website’s top story was about the abuse of children with learning...
Guildhall School Gold Medal 2024, Barbican review - quirky-w...
While the Royal College of Music Symphony Orchestra were performing Messiaen’s Turangalîla-Symphonie – weirdly, despite its size...
Album: Sia - Reasonable Woman
Sia has well and truly stepped into her power. Gone are the days of releasing songs that were pitched to megastars but turned down (“This Is...
Minority Report, Lyric Hammersmith Theatre review - ill-judg...
Towards the end of David Haig’s new adaptation of Philip...