Visual arts
mark.hudson
Anyone who has had their sensibilities battered by Tate Modern’s Pop Life show is likely to be equally taken aback if they wander along the Thames to this year’s Turner Prize exhibition at Tate Britain – but for completely different reasons. If Pop Life leaves you feeling that art can only progress through ever greater acts of outrage – that if you’re not actually having sex on camera you hardly count as creative – the tone over at Tate Britain is measured, cool, even academic. Do these exhibitions even reflect the same world, let alone the same art world?While Tate has been happy to harness Read more ...
josh.spero
Is site-specific the new collaboration? What I mean by this is that where it was once the fashion for artists and dancers (think Robert Rauschenberg and Merce Cunningham) or film directors and opera houses (Anthony Minghella and the ENO) to mix art forms, now it is fashionable to have work inspired by and installed in a particular place.Take Punchdrunk with their Faust, which nightmarishly overran a Wapping warehouse, or Turner Prize nominee Roger Hiorns: his Seizure featured a flat in South London whose walls were daubed with liquid copper sulphate, eventually producing a blue crystalline Read more ...
josh.spero
The art world has never been unself-aware – its navel is deeper and more gazed-at than almost any other art form. So what happens when you bring artists unaware of the art world into the contemplated and contemplating fold? The Museum of Everything, a new space in Primrose Hill, north-west London, which opened this week, is devoted to Outsider Art and by extension to answering this question.James Brett is the founder of the Museum of Everything and a keen collector of art made by non-traditional artists; he rejects the term 'outsider art' as being too loose and inaccurate.He sees his artists Read more ...
sue.steward
Jillian Edelstein, the distinguished photographer, is joining theartsdesk. She grew up in Cape Town and in 1985 moved to London, where within a year she had won the Kodak UK Young Photographer of the Year award. It was to be the first of many such accolades. She has since established a reputation as one of the leading portrait photographers of the age, her work appearing widely in this country but also for American publications including The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Vogue and Interview.Between 1996 and 2002 she documented the proceedings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Read more ...
jillian.edelstein
Acclaimed photographer Jillian Edelstein's series of Portraits include images of significant figures from the world of arts, fashion and the demi-monde, but also politics: her portrait of Nelson Mandela, taken in Cape Town in 1997. There is also a delightful photograph of three South African boys mucking about by the water.Affinities is a series of studies of professional and personal connections between like-minded. "After I had a bad break-up, I started to think about how friendships and relationships come out of creative partnerships," she says. "Gilbert and George chose their cleaner, Read more ...
mark.hudson
That artists didn't just respond to the rapacious commercialism of the late 20th century, but actively contributed to it is hardly news. That the marketing of art can be part of the art itself is something everyone now implicitly understands, even if it’s only through hearing Tracey Emin wittering about herself on television.Yet if the fact that Tate Modern has chosen to base its major autumn exhibition around such chronically over-exposed figures as Emin, Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons seems at first almost incredible, such Read more ...
admin
History is written in blood, however elegant the cover. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the collapse in 1521 of the Aztec Empire, a culture that presented Europe with a vision of such otherness that it could only be destroyed. In 2002, the Royal Academy of Arts tried to persuade us to look beyond the grisly tales of human sacrifice to a more nuanced portrait of a people steeped in gory rituals that we, soaked in the serial-killer television porn of the 21st century, might strangely understand.It didn’t work – how many vessels designed to receive still-beating human hearts do you need to Read more ...
mark.hudson
In 1522, Jacopo Tebaldi, agent of Titian’s great patron Alfonso d’Este, paid a visit to the artist who had claimed to be too ill to work. "I have been to see Titian," he wrote to Alfonso, "who has no fever at all. He looks well, if somewhat exhausted, and I suspect that the girls whom he paints in different poses arouse his desires, which he then satisfies more than his limited strength permits. Though he denies it."The nature of Titian’s relationships with his models has exercised the imaginations of critics and historians from his day to this. For centuries it was simply assumed that Titian Read more ...
theartsdesk
With thanks to the National Gallery, the Musée du Louvre, Madrid's Prado Gallery, Naples' Capodimonte Museum and Washington's National Gallery, and to mark the publication of Mark Hudson's major new biography, Titian: The Last Days, we reproduce a marvellous gallery of masterpieces. This is the first part of a four-part special, including three extracts from Hudson's book, about the master Venetian painter, Tiziano Vecellio (1489?-1576), universally known as Titian. A powerful exhibition has just opened at the Louvre, in which several of these pictures are on display, and the £50 million Read more ...
mark.hudson
In 1519 Titian was commissioned by Alfonso d’Este, the famously irascible Duke of Ferrara, to provide the first of three paintings for a study, the so-called camerino d’alabastro or alabaster room. If the following five years of delays and procrastination drove the duke almost to distraction, they produced what is arguably the most famous room in the history of Western art.When I first saw Bacchus and Ariadne it hung on its own screen in front of a huge doorway, linking two of the most important parts of the National Gallery. You could see it shining out from several rooms away, a jubilant Read more ...
ash.smyth
It is a stinking hot afternoon. In an unventilated shed seemingly purpose-built for breeding mosquitoes, I am walking round and round a stone spiral. A benign-looking woman has assured me it is the way to peace. Despite my scepticism, I follow her instructions, pausing every few feet to read the peace-themed quotations carved on each of the rocks. Some are moving, some purely poetic. Most tread Oprahishly along that that very fine line between simple brilliance and childish naïvety.As an artwork, it is uncomplicated stuff, but it gives one pause – not least because several of the inscriptions Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Was he the prodigal son who abandoned Russia? Or the figure who did more than anyone to integrate Russian and European culture in the first half of the last century? As two major exhibitions open on the heritage of Sergei Diaghilev, celebrated impresario and “20th-century Medici”, for the first time Russians will have the chance to decide for themselves.It is the centenary of the first performances by the Ballets Russes in Paris, as well as the 80th anniversary of the death of the company’s no less legendary founder, and exhibitions marking his extraordinary creative achievements have been on Read more ...