Visual arts
caroline.boyle
A few days visiting the Edinburgh Art Festival and the city itself becomes the encircling gallery. Under great canvases of lowering grey cloud, plunging up and down the different levels of the Old Town and the New, things unfold against the intense hues of emerald-green spaces, the coppery contrast of the beeches, the cold hardness of the towering walls of stone and the eddying flow of the crowds. Within this frame is the opportunity to see a wide diversity of exhibitions and events in almost 50 museums, non-profit, commercial and artist-run spaces, plus specially commissioned site-specific Read more ...
mark.hudson
Monaco, dormitory town of the discreetly super-rich, isn’t the most obvious place to find a major exhibition of street art, the subject on which many recent commenters on theartsdesk are impassioned. The pavements of this city within a principality on the scale of village, clinging to a precipitous Mediterranean hillside above a gleaming marina, betray barely a trace of chewing gum or dog excrement, let alone graffiti. Gaining professional access to The Art of Graffiti – 40 Years of Pressionism in the glass bunker of the Grimaldi Forum, the journalist is subjected to a level of Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The sturdy, healthy, almost glowing attractiveness of Ruby Loftus, her reddish curls partly tamed by a green hair net, her face punctuated by bright-red lipstick characteristic of the 1940s, her blue overall neatly complementing her red shirt, and her expression intense and concentrated as she screws a breech ring as part of the manufacture of the Bofors gun at a factory in Newport, is a famously captivating image of the Home Front in the last world war.Dame Laura Knight’s painting Ruby Loftus Screwing a Breech-Ring, 1943 (main picture), a portrait of the young woman choreographed among her Read more ...
theartsdesk
On October 10, 1994, a burglar with a sledgehammer smashed a window at the Rembrandt House Museum and stole a single painting, Man with a Beard (1647). The work had once been considered a Rembrandt, but is now attributed to an unidentified student of his. Its theft occasioned this inevitable headline in the International Herald Tribune: “Rembrandt Needed a Night Watchman”. Beard made its way back four years later after being seized from an Amsterdam lawyer who was reputed to be a shady intermediary for art recovery, having been involved in a Van Gogh case as well. The lawyer was privately Read more ...
peter.nasmyth
In Tbilisi, Georgia, artists and art historians are calling for the Government to stop destroying their classic Old Town with its winding streets and wooden balconies. New organisations have been formed, exhibitions held to publicise this creeping eradication of history. Now another grand, once-protected building, the former Institute of Marxism and Leninism, has appeared in the cross-hairs.When Europe’s Futurist movement briefly made Tbilisi its spiritual refuge in the early 1920s, the Georgian avant-garde rightly felt themselves riding the crest of a new social aesthetic. This balmy Silk Read more ...
theartsdesk
It’s not the first time we have showcased the work of Will Robson-Scott. Nearly two years ago we published a set of images from Crack & Shine, a portfolio which documented the nocturnal habits of a set of London street artists. Crack & Shine International takes the story beyond the UK to watch artists at work in other centres of street art culture - New York, Los Angeles, Paris, Berlin and Amsterdam. A photographer who specialises in shooting street artists at work, Robson-Scott incurs many of the same risks as his subjects. Unlike them, his work is in no danger of being erased or Read more ...
fisun.guner
In his later years, Stanley Spencer cut quite a figure in his native village of Cookham in Berkshire: he would often be seen pushing his rickety pram, with its battered umbrella, paints and canvas, and a hand-painted sign requesting all curious onlookers to desist from disturbing the artist at work. He spent most of his life in the village - even acquiring the nickname “Cookham” at the Slade, since he’d rush back by train after lessons every evening, presumably in time for tea.His beloved “village in heaven” resided in his imagination always, and his religious paintings, for which he is best Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Alfred Uhry, now 74, may boast the greatest ratio of accolades to output of just about any American playwright, having copped two Tony Awards and a Pulitzer Prize across merely a handful of works and an Academy Award for the film version of his best-known play, Driving Miss Daisy; the movie itself won the Best Picture Oscar in 1989 and a further trophy for its beloved star, Jessica Tandy. This autumn, the era-spanning comedy-drama arrives back on the West End in the same starry version, headlined by Vanessa Redgrave and James Earl Jones, seen last year on Broadway. Immediately before that Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Photography isn’t looking, it’s feeling. If you can’t feel what you’re looking at, then you’re never going to get others to feel anything when they look at your pictures. Thus Don McCullin, quoted on the information board of a new display at Tate Britain of around 50 black-and-white silver gelatin photographs, chosen and printed by the artist himself. No digital here, the process of the darkroom is under his control.The subjects cover anything but his direct war work, although his wholly justified fame rests on decades of hideous risk-taking (he was wounded several times and the lucky escapes Read more ...
alice.vincent
The round and the curtain are two of theatre’s oldest pieces of stagecraft. Yet architect and design legend Ron Arad has reinvented both in celebration of the Camden Roundhouse’s fifth birthday. The north London venue, which was transformed from a redundant 19th-century railway turntable shed into a famed music venue in the Sixties, was revamped in 2006 and has since become a hub of creative support for young and disadvantaged people in the area. Echoing these sentiments, Arad’s Curtain Call has been created with accessibility and opportunity at its core to try and bring art to the Read more ...