Visual arts
Matt Wolf
It's all go – no, make that Van Gogh – when it comes to the Dutch post-Impressionist of late. Opening the same week as the Tate Britain's blockbuster exhibition about his years in London comes the artist-turned-filmmaker Julian Schnabel's biopic of the tragically short-lived artist, for which its star Willem Dafoe was an unexpected Oscar nominee last month for best actor. Ravishing to the eye as one might expect, and acted with a near-ferocious empathy by Dafoe (who, thank heavens, doesn't worry about an accent), the film as a whole is sure to divide opinion. Shot with a Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Soon after his death, Van Gogh’s reputation as a tragic genius was secured. Little has changed in the meantime, and he has continued to be understood as fatally unbalanced, ruled by instinct not intellect. Van Gogh’s characterisation of himself as a blue-collar artist-worker has only compounded this, so that the real revelation of Tate Britain’s new show is not Van Gogh’s affection for this country, or the influence he would himself have on British art, but the sophistication of his inner life, which acquired breadth and depth through his lifelong interest in British art and literature.Van Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Mike Nelson has turned the Duveen Galleries into a museum commemorating Britain’s industrial past (pictured below right). Scruffy workbenches, dilapidated metal cabinets and stacks of old drawers are pressed into service as plinths for the display of heavy duty machines. Rusting engines, enormous drills, knitting machines, crane buckets, a concrete mixer, a paint sprayer and various other unnameable objects are thereby elevated to the status of sculptures. They look terrific and, by comparison with their raw power, sculptures that aim to evoke the spirit of the machine age, such as the Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The Magnum photographer Martin Parr has spent decades observing contemporary human activity world-wide as – perhaps – a mesmerised observer, an anthropologist, a tourist, addicted to the vagaries of the human condition. This anthology at the National Portrait Gallery is dominated by what is called "Britishness", even when it is race goers in Durban. And the shadow over whatever "Britishness" may be – from the City Establishment, to a drunk young man all dressed up in black tie passed out at a May Ball, to men mending lobster pots in Cornwall – is of course Brexit (Main picture: Lobster Pots). Read more ...
Jasper Rees
When I interviewed John Richardson, who has died at the age of 95, he was edging through his definitive four-tome life of the minuscule giant of Cubism. Of the various breaks he took from the business of research and writing, one yielded The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, a gossipy, elegant account of his own friendship with Picasso in the 1950s, when he lived in Provençal splendour with Douglas Cooper, then the owner of the finest collection of Cubist art in the world. Where the biography is a vast monument, the memoir is a more intimate, dashed-off sketch, in which Richardson hangs out with Picasso Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Feelings run high at the Hayward Gallery in a fascinating pairing of two artists from widely differing backgrounds. Kader Attia muses on unhappy, conflicted relationships between cultures in visual meditations on variations of colonialism. Diane Arbus, who died at the age Attia is now, photographed people who were often at the margins of society.Once criticised for what might appear as an obsession with freakery, it is increasingly evident how her curiosity was flavoured with sympathy and empathy. Attia is mesmerisingly obsessed with the difficulties of groups and societies, while Arbus Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Pink walls, slightly dusky in the subdued light of a room shielded from the wintry sun, suggest the bodily concerns of this show, which through the touring collection Artists' Rooms, boldly reviews Louise Bourgeois’s career in a single, modestly sized, exhibition space at Kettle’s Yard. For a prolific artist associated with large-scale sculptures, the most obvious question is “How?”. But though four sculptures are featured, including one of the Cell series, this is a show that makes much of Bourgeois’s works on paper, including the 16-piece series, A L’Infini, where painting and drawing Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Tate Modern’s retrospective of Dorothea Tanning is a revelation. Here the American artist is known as a latter day Surrealist, but as the show demonstrates, this is only part of the story. Tanning’s career spanned an impressive 70 years – she died in 2012 aged 101 – but as so often happens, she was eclipsed by her famous husband, German Surrealist Max Ernst. They met in New York; he was scouting for artists to include in an exhibition staged by his then wife, Peggy Guggenheim. On the easel in Tanning's studio was Birthday, 1942 (pictured below right) a newly finished self portrait. The Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Franz West must have been a right pain in the arse. He left school at 16, went travelling, got hooked on hard drugs which he later replaced with heavy drinking, got into endless arguments and fights, was obsessed with sex and, above all, wanted to be an artist but hadn’t been to art school. His life reads like a bad novel or Hollywood’s idea of the tortured genius struggling to make his mark in a world indifferent to his talents. That world was 1970s Vienna, dominated by the Viennese Aktionists whose performances involved a lot of blood, guts and existential angst and were intended to shock. Read more ...
Sarah Kent
It doesn’t get better than this! Phyllida Barlow has transformed the Royal Academy’s Gabrielle Jungels-Winkler Galleries into a euphoric delight. Entering the space, you have to turn right and process through the three galleries; but by closing the end door to create the cul-de-sac of the title, Barlow has turned this somewhat prescriptive lay-out into a theatrical experience. Obliged to retrace your steps, you are rewarded by long-distance views from one gallery to another of her flamboyant sculptures. Greeting you on arrival is a vast portal (pictured below right). Perched precariously Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The power of seeing was the bedrock of John Ruskin’s philosophy. In the bicentenary of his birth, a revelatory exhibition at Two Temple Place in London opens out the idea and makes it manifest through both his own work and the treasures of his collection.Born in 1819, Ruskin was one of the Victorian era's great polymaths. Almost 200 objects are displayed across two floors of a neo-Gothic mansion, a grand domestic setting in keeping with Ruskin’s own childhood environment. Here a Burne-Jones design for stained glass, there a Dürer etching, Victorian copies of Verrocchio and Tintoretto, the Read more ...
Sarah Kent
I interviewed Don McCullin in 1983 and the encounter felt like peering into a deep well of darkness. The previous year he’d been in Beirut photographing the atrocities carried out by people on both sides of the civil war and his impeccably composed pictures were being published as a book. Some of these photographs are included in Tate Britain’s survey of his 60-year career, one of the darkest but most compelling exhibitions you are ever likely to see. There’s the group of young musicians approaching the body of a Palestinian girl lying prone in a bombed out street – celebrating her death Read more ...