Visual arts
Sarah Kent
Even before going to art school, Tracey Emin discovered the work of the Norwegian expressionist Edvard Munch. And even though he was born 100 years before her, she embraced him as a kindred spirit. One can see why. Whether painting figures, buildings or landscapes, Munch projects onto his subjects the intense feelings of desolation, loneliness and abandonment which haunted him most of his life.When he was just five, his mother died of TB, his favourite sister following nine years later. Brought up by a neurotic father obsessed with death, he recalled an unhappy childhood in which, “The angels Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Hail the Dark Lioness (Somnyama Ngonyama in Zulu) is a powerful celebration of black identity. These dramatic assertions of selfhood are more than just striking self portraits, though. South African artist Zanele Muholi uses the pronouns they and them and refers to themself as a visual activist, since the photographs are a form of protest against the prejudices faced by the queer community of which they are a part.In this series begun in 2012, Muholi ratchets up the contrast, so their skin becomes ebony black, and decks themself in mundane materials such as raffia, rope, electric cables, Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
It must be tough being Michael Clark, subject of one the largest retrospectives ever dedicated to a choreographer still living. Post-punk’s poster boy is that curious thing, a creative figurehead who defined a very particular anti-establishment strand in Britain’s recent history but who is virtually unknown to today’s under-40s. Michael who? was the common reponse to my own admittedly fairly narrow survey. But Clark deserves a place in the pantheon of 20th-century movers and shakers for the same reason as, say, Andy Warhol or Jean Cocteau. Like them, he operated at the intersection of many Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Sin, what a wonderful theme for a show – so wonderful, in fact, that it merits a major exhibition. The National Gallery’s modest gathering of 14 pictures, mainly from the collection, can’t possibly do it justice; yet it’s worth a visit if only to remind oneself of the disastrous concept of original sin that weaves guilt into our very DNA by arguing that we are conceived in sin. How did such an invidious doctrine ever take hold, I wonder?The star of the show is Bronzino’s Allegory with Venus and Cupid 1545 (main picture), one of the strangest and most heavily encoded pictures ever painted. It Read more ...
Sarah Kent
"The true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths” reads the neon sign (pictured below right) welcoming you to Bruce Nauman’s Tate Modern retrospective. The message is tongue-in-cheek, of course. How on earth could an artist cope with such a ludicrously unrealistic expectation? Born in 1941, the American artist has had a huge influence on recent British art. In the late 1960s, he filmed himself messing about in the studio – performing silly walks or repeatedly bashing his back against the wall – thereby ridiculing the need to have something significant to say. He made it all Read more ...
Florence Hallett
It takes nerve to throw a shadow across the face of your heroine, still more to banish to the margins the severed head that might so easily dominate the painting’s centre ground. Instead, in imagining the aftermath of Judith’s beheading of Holofernes, Artemisia Gentileschi wrings out the excruciating tension of a moment, and concentrates it in a candle flame. What in reproduction looks like a minor detail is revealed “on the wall” as the visual and emotional fulcrum of this monumental painting, in which we see Artemisia, by now a mature painter, much in demand, brimming with painterly bravado Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
A digital exhibition for digital times – and just right: as a reproductive medium, photographs can work brilliantly when reproduced again. Currently closed for a major redevelopment, the National Portrait Gallery asked members of the public to send their photographs of life in lockdown to be chosen for a curated exhibition, a glimpse into life in these perplexing times. The response was overwhelming – over 31,000 from which 100 have been chosen. Choosing 100 – so that the exhibition itself would not be overwhelming and confusing – must have been an awesome task. If the idea was brilliantly Read more ...
Florence Hallett
In the gloomy splendour of Drumlanrig Castle in Dumfriesshire, the 10th Duke of Buccleuch gazes up at Rembrandt’s Old Woman Reading, 1655. The painting has belonged to the Scott family for more than 250 years, and like generations before him, the duke has known it all his life. “She is the most powerful presence in this house.” He pauses: “Do you see what I mean?”It is a statement of spine-tingling acuity, hinting at the peculiar magic that hangs like a charm around Rembrandt's paintings, and leaves its mark on this documentary by Oeke Hoogendijk, which follows on from her 2014 film The New Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Prince of Wales, Prince Regent, and finally King: George IV, (1762-1830) was an unpopular and greedy ruler, but his compulsive collecting and passion for redecorating have made a huge contribution to the arts of the nation, and form a significant part of the Royal Collection. The elegant Queen’s Gallery has now re-opened with a sumptuous display of his over-the-top royal carry-on, spanning the aftermath of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars.He was wildly and continually in debt, his coronation in 1821 costing many millions. After a decade of living at Carlton House, his debts were Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Khadija Saye was 24 when she died in the Grenfell Tower fire of 2017, the same year that her series of photographic self-portraits showed in the Diaspora Pavilion at the Venice Biennale: she was the youngest artist in a roster of well-established figures such as Joy Gregory and Isaac Julien.Claiming prescience in art is tricky and probably ill-advised, but still it is true that in the aftermath of Grenfell, In This Space We Breathe directly addressed the outrage of that disaster, in which the right to live and breathe freely at home had been so flagrantly violated. Since then, the murder of Read more ...
Florence Hallett
When Picasso left Barcelona for Paris in 1900, he took what by then was a well-trodden path for artists eager to be at the very centre of the art world. Trained in the academies of Barcelona, their ambitions nurtured in the bohemian environment of Els Quatre Gats - the city’s answer to the Parisian artists’ haunt Le Chat Noir – several generations of Spanish artists born in the 19th century went to the City of Light in search of the newest ideas and styles, and a market for their work.Picasso remained in Paris for much of his life, but many of his fellow countrymen returned to Spain, their Read more ...
Katherine Waters
With the first round of galleries opening their doors in June and a new round getting ready to open in July, we’ve a half-way home of a roundup this week. This month’s re-openings include the National Gallery, the Royal Academy, the Barbican, the Whitechapel, the Ditchling Museum of Art and Craft, the Mosaic Rooms, the Estorick Collection, the Garden Museum and the Tates – Modern, Britain, Liverpool and St Ives.Visitors will typically have quite a different experience. Expect timed tickets and one-ways lanes, face masks and hand sanitiser – everything that has become normal but may Read more ...