Abstract Expressionism
Mark Rothko, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris review - a show well worth the trip across the ChannelTuesday, 28 November 2023The vast and various spaces of Frank Gehry’s monumental Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris suit the needs of the thrilling Mark Rothko exhibition now inhabiting its labyrinthine multi-storey suite of galleries.Some of the 115 works on display require... Read more... |
Sea Star: Sean Scully, National Gallery review - analysing past mastersTuesday, 23 April 2019Either side of a doorway, framing a view of Turner’s The Evening Star, c. 1830 (Main picture), Sean Scully’s Landline Star, 2017, and Landline Pool, 2018, frankly acknowledge their roots. Abstract as they are, Scully’s horizontal bands of... Read more... |
Big Sky, Big Dreams, Big Art: Made in the USA, BBC Four review - unexpected facts aplentyThursday, 24 May 2018“Oh say, can you see, by the dawn’s early light” was a vision of the American flag, that star-spangled banner, riding proud from Francis Scott Key’s patriotic poem of 1814 based on an episode in the War of 1812. His sentiments were decades later... Read more... |
Red, Wyndham's Theatre - Mark Rothko drama paints a vivid pictureWednesday, 16 May 2018The band’s back together. Alfred Molina plays Rothko for the third time in Michael Grandage’s revisiting of John Logan’s richly textured two-hander, first seen at the Donmar in 2009 and then bypassing the West End for Broadway. Another excellent... Read more... |
Best of 2016: ArtThursday, 29 December 2016Before we consign this miserable year to history, there are a few good bits to be salvaged; in fact, for the visual arts 2016 has been marked by renewal and regeneration, with a clutch of newish museum directors getting into their stride, and... Read more... |
First Person: The Juilliard ExperimentMonday, 26 September 2016When the French painter Fabienne Verdier told me she’d been invited to explore the relationship between painting and music at the world-famous Juilliard School in New York, I knew straight away that this unusual residency should be documented.... Read more... |
Abstract Expressionism, Royal AcademySaturday, 24 September 2016Gorgeous, sumptuous, thrilling: here comes Abstract Expressionism riding into town, the first major overview in London since its own contemporary heyday in the 1950s. A clunky, unappealing label for such fabulously appealing stuff, it's best just to... Read more... |
The World Goes Pop, Tate ModernSaturday, 19 September 2015There’s no sign of Oldenburg, Warhol or Lichtenstein and British pioneers Eduardo Paolozzi and Peter Blake are notably absent from this gritty vision of Pop art. Only in the final room do we come face-to-face with a Campbell’s Tomato Soup tin, the... Read more... |
Soup Cans and Superstars, BBC FourTuesday, 25 August 2015Pop went the easel, and more, as we were offered a worldwide tour – New York, LA, London, Paris, Shanghai – of the art phenomenon of the past 50 years (still going strong worldwide). We were led by a wide-eyed interlocutor, the bright-eyed and bushy... Read more... |
Philip Guston, Timothy Taylor GallerySunday, 21 June 2015Light. Light banishes the shadows where monsters lurk and where ghosts rattle their chains. “Give me some light, away!” cries the usurping king in Hamlet as his murderous deed is exposed by the trickery of art. What guilt plagues and seizes his... Read more... |
Alan Davie, 1920-2014Monday, 07 April 2014Alan Davie, who died on Saturday aged 93, was one of the great 20th-century British artists, a life-long maverick whose explosive canvases cut a swathe through the provincial aridity of the postwar art scene. The first British – probably the first... Read more... |
Making Painting: Helen Frankenthaler and JMW Turner, Turner ContemporarySunday, 02 February 2014Helen Frankenthaler is often presented as being both a stepping stone between art movements and as an artist who fell – because such things matter in the tidy narratives of art history – between the cracks of various American isms.... Read more... |
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