Visual arts
judith.flanders
When is a fake a forgery? When is it a mistake? And when is it simply not what it appears? The National Gallery’s second summer exhibition to focus on its own collection here examines the questions of attribution, using the latest scientific resources to back up – or contradict – tradition, connoisseurship and curatorial decisions, good and bad. The gallery is putting its own mistakes on show, and over the 170-plus years of its existence, there have been more than a few. Yet the exhibition, however openly acknowledging its errors, neglects to give historical context, so it is unclear Read more ...
theartsdesk
One of theartsdesk's founder-writers, Mark Hudson, has been shortlisted in the biography category of the annual Spear’s Book Awards, for his book Titian, the Last Days. Hudson did not intend to write a conventional biography of the Venetian artist, but took Titian’s mysterious final paintings as its starting point – works so baffling in their subject matter and background that they involved him in far more factual research than he had originally anticipated when he began work in 2005."If you write about the art of the past, people assume you must be an art historian," says Hudson. "But an art Read more ...
fisun.guner
Last month, the National Portrait Gallery unveiled a huge, new portrait of Anna Wintour. Painted by Alex Katz, the celebrated New York Pop portraitist, American Vogue’s scary editor-in-chief is shown with famous helmet bob intact, but minus her trademark dark glasses. The picture depicts Wintour, whose icy blue stare could run a chill through you (she's known as Nuclear Wintour), against a sunny yellow backdrop – which looks like an attempt to raise the temperature of that icicle glare. You pass it as you enter this year’s BP Portrait Award. I’m thinking of that picture because, in its Read more ...
mark.hudson
Terry Setch can lay claim to being the most underrated artist in Britain. Not that the Cardiff-based Londoner has been entirely neglected: acclaimed as one of Britain’s most powerful painters by his contemporary John Hoyland, he’s been garlanded with awards, granted a retrospective at The Serpentine and was recently made an RA. Yet Setch (born 1936) has still had nothing like the recognition he deserves as one of Britain’s most intelligent and inventive painters. And the crime for which he’s been sentenced to this relative obscurity: simply, not being based in London, but in Wales.If the idea Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Last week I watched a tiny tot being photographed by her father, on a beach in southern Turkey. There was no girlish giggling or splashing about in the sea; rather than a show of carefree happiness, she delivered a studied pose. She assumed an expression of supreme indifference and, with hand on hip and weight on one leg, twisted her body into a seductive coil. The four-year-old was imitating a supermodel! I didn’t see the pictures, of course, but I would still classify this kind of premature sexualisation as child pornography.The American photographer, Sally Mann was accused of kiddy porn in Read more ...
judith.flanders
It takes a lot of work to make a show look as unconsidered and chaotic as this one: thought and care and time and attention all have to be paid before something so random can be achieved. But as so often with Tillmans, the nagging questions persist: is randomness, are the offhand and the casual, valid as ends in themselves? Because Tillman’s über-hip affectless cool has become very tiresome indeed. Even worse, it’s becoming predictable and dull. Tillman's eye, as ever, remains wonderful, but I remain doubtful about the form in which he chooses to convey his ideas.Some of the most recent Read more ...
fisun.guner
Howard Hodgkin is unquestionably the grand figure of British non-figurative painting. Often compared to Matisse in his use of intense colour, he has always insisted that his paintings are not abstract. They allude, he says, to memories of people and places and states of being, so that his titles are what you would expect from a landscape artist or even, occasionally, a chronicler of modern manners: Dirty Weather, Spring Rain, Privacy and Self Expression in the Bedroom. And he often paints on unconventional surfaces, favouring wood rather than canvas, painting the frame so that we see the Read more ...
josh.spero
This time, the hype was perhaps deserved: Christie's did have a claim to be putting on, last night, the sale of the century.The Impressionist and Modern works were of a distinctly high calibre: Picasso's high Blue Period Portrait of Angel Fernandez de Soto, a moody but perceptive masterpiece; a Nymphéas by Monet verging on the abstract, with subtle fields of colour; and a clutch of 10-million-pounders, including another Picasso, a Van Gogh and a Klimt. So how can a record-breaking sale total of £153m be a disappointment? First, the Monet didn't sell, reaching £29.4m before it was withdrawn Read more ...
fisun.guner
It took Picasso four years to learn to paint like Raphael, but it took him a lifetime to paint like a child, or so he said. For Brancusi it wasn‘t a case of relearning childhood, but of being careful not to lose it in the first place. “When we are no longer children we are already dead,” he said. A little further down the food chain of contemporary art, Grayson Perry, the delightful transvestite potter who accepted his Turner Prize award as alter-ego Claire (because he likes to feel the prickle of humiliation when he’s dressed like Milly-Molly-Mandy in a crowd), evokes the spirit of Alan Read more ...
judith.flanders
In 1994, Francis Alÿs joined the regular hiring-line in the central square in Mexico City. Standing next to plumbers and carpenters with their hand-lettered signs touting their skills, his sign read "Turista", as he offered his ability to be an outsider looking in. Three years later, he returned to the square, the centre of city life, and the site of the annual Independence Day parade, and the "Grito de Dolores", the patriotic ringing of the bells at the National Palace which up to half a million people attend. For Alÿs's own Patriotic Tales, his parade is smaller, as he walks around the Read more ...
fisun.guner
The gallery has been turned into a little girl’s dressing-up closet. The walls are painted midnight blue and dusted with glitter. Ballet shoes, made for small feet, and a discarded tutu are to be found in a decorous pile on the floor. There are shiny trinkets and princessy things and pictures of ballerinas in bright, pastel shades. And miniature cabinets, almost empty but for one or two small objects – old, discardable things that might be hoarded away as treasures by a child wrapped up in its own imaginary world.I’m not quite sure what Joseph Cornell would have made of all this – his Read more ...
fisun.guner
The Hayward has been closed for the past six months for "housekeeping": those boring cleaning and repair jobs we all do. It's entirely suitable, therefore, that the two exhibitions that reopen the gallery showcase ideas of how we live both physically and emotionally. Ernesto Neto has become one of Brazil’s most successful exports, a powerhouse of an artist whose minimalist biomorphic shapes, created from stretchy, opaque nylon in sharply acid colours, alternately mould, mask, shade and reveal structures and forms. The Edges of the World is a vast installation across the entire Read more ...