Visual arts
Florence Hallett
Even more than most, Picasso exhibitions need a focus: he was so prolific and diverse that the alternative is neither practical nor comprehensible. As topics go, Picasso’s works on paper, it turns out, is not nearly focused enough, and the Royal Academy’s exhibition includes quantities of drawings, prints, paintings and paper cut-outs, all means by which Picasso organised and developed his thoughts, of which he had very many.Drawings are uniquely revealing, and a room dedicated to the preparatory works for Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907, a painting often credited as the first utterance of Read more ...
theartsdesk
Picasso and Paper, Royal Academy ★★★ A fascinating subject that proves too unwieldy for a single exhibition. Until 13 Apr Rembrandt's Light, Dulwich Picture Gallery ★★★★ A novel collaboration between curators and cinematographer Peter Suschitzky. Until 2 FebWilliam Blake, Tate Britain ★★★★★ Vast and satisfying show for a visionary and iconic artist. Until 2 Feb See all the theartsdesk's visual arts coverage
Florence Hallett
Notable anniversaries provided the ballast for this year’s raft of exhibitions; none was dead weight, though, with shows dedicated to Rembrandt, Leonardo and Ruskin among the most original and exhilarating of 2019’s offerings. Happily, a number of our favourites are still running, and there’s a month left to see Rembrandt’s Light at Dulwich Picture Gallery. The show skilfully eschews gimmickry in order to explore Rembrandt’s expert manipulation of light to aid storytelling and evoke nuances of mood and atmosphere (pictured below: Rembrandt, The Denial of St Peter, 1660). Rembrandt was an Read more ...
Florence Hallett
It doesn’t matter where you stand, whether you crouch, or teeter on tiptoe: looking into the eyes of Bernini’s Medusa, 1638-40, is impossible. The attempt is peculiarly exhilarating, a game of dare made simultaneously tantalising and absurd by the sculpture’s evident stoniness. This extraordinary work – all the more remarkable for being relatively little known – is no less than frank in its materiality, its buttery striations delicious to look at and almost irresistably tactile, its muscular mass of snakes a dangerous and beguiling invitation to touch.The Medusa’s face is no less equivocal in Read more ...
Katherine Waters
In one of Dora Maar’s best known images, a fashion photograph from 1935 (pictured below), a woman wearing a backless, sparkly evening gown appears to be making her way backstage through a proscenium’s drapes. The star of the show exits the limelight, cheekily concealing her face behind a six-pointed star snatched, maybe, from the star-spangled scenery. Though she’s bracing herself against the wings her posture is also suggestive of abandon, the kind of arms-up relief that comes with finishing a race or dancing late at night when no-one cares. She flirts with the lens and the lens flirts back Read more ...
Sarah Kent
As I write, I’m listening to Clara Rockmore intoning The Swan by Saint-Saëns. Her melancholy humming also welcomes you to Eco-Visionaries along with a globe suspended in the cloudy waters of a polluted fish tank. This simple installation by artist duo HeHe neatly pinpoints our predicament; our planet is suffocating.In the Air by Nerea Calvillo reveals the pollution hovering over the rooftops of Madrid as a coloured veil, while cars cruise along the city streets below. Electric vehicles, we are told, will solve the problem of these dangerous emissions, yet they simply shift the pollution from Read more ...
Katherine Waters
For a loved one to die by suicide provokes both pain and hurt. Pain, because they are gone. Hurt, because it can feel like an indictment or a betrayal. For Charlotte Salomon, the suicides that ripped holes in her family were also foreshadowings which provided the structure for her monumental cycle of narrative paintings Leben? oder Theater? (Life? or Theatre?) which is now on show at the Jewish Museum in Camden.About a third of the 769 gouaches that Salomon selected of the roughly 1,300 she painted over the course of two years are displayed in the exhibition. Like the full work, and in Read more ...
Katherine Waters
In 1922 Hussein Abdel-Rassoul, a water boy with Howard Carter’s archaeological dig in the Valley of the Kings, accidentally uncovered a step in the sand. It proved to be the breakthrough for which Carter, on the hunt for the final resting place of King Tutankhamun, was looking. The tomb they uncovered showed signs of having been robbed in ancient times but inside thousands of items remained, selected for a journey to the afterlife, which had lain undisturbed for millennia. The survival of some was almost inconceivable: wooden boxes, linen gloves, unguents and cases packed with food. Others Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Artist George Stubbs liked horses. The MK Gallery’s exhibition “all done from Nature” will try to convince you that he also cared about people. He did, to an extent; the commissions came that way. But about half way through the exhibition, the diminutive Study for Three Hunters and Two Grooms Waiting in a Stable-Yard, 1765-70, gives pause for thought. The detailed study depicts a horse with pensive eyes and toned flanks. One back hoof is elegantly raised, as if ready for parade. Its ears are perkily alert. It is a clever creature. Yet where bridle and saddle should be is empty space. Its Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Lucian Freud died in 2011 after a career spanning some 70 odd years. Over the decades, he painted and drew himself repeatedly, creating a fascinating portrait of a man who spent an inordinate amount of time scrutinising himself and others.One of the first images in the Royal Academy’s splendid exhibition is an ink drawing made in 1949 for a book on Greek myths. Freud casts himself as Actaeon who, according to the myth, accidentally came across Diana, goddess of the hunt, bathing naked. In punishment for the transgression, she turned him into a stag to be hunted down and torn apart by her Read more ...
Florence Hallett
“People collect diamonds because they sparkle; or they sit on a bench in Cornwall and look out to sea”. At the Hayward Gallery for the opening of her retrospective, Bridget Riley speaks of such uncomplicated pleasures with evident delight. To experience Riley’s works is to be exposed afresh to the thrill of seeing, the sensations induced by her optically challenging fields of lines, curves, spots and waves an unapologetic, bodily reminder that perception is a mechanism over which we have no control, a process that is mysterious and powerful, and fundamental to being alive.They may look like Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Of the British, the English have a reputation for satire. They’re also prone to stupidity. The combination of biting morality and excoriating wit required to deride this tendency reached notable heights in the work of engraver and painter William Hogarth (1697-1764). It is with bracing timing that curators at Sir John Soane’s Museum have brought together ten pieces of his work in an engrossing exhibition taking place across five rooms in the house of one of his most notable admirers.Soane’s (1753-1857) long-standing interest in Hogarth’s work did much to revive the artist’s reputation. His Read more ...