Visual arts
Veronica Lee
Was Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), who straddled the arts and science in such a unique way, several hundred years before his time? Did the painter-inventor-engineer really draw the prototypes for, inter alia, the aeroplane, the motor car, the helicopter and the submarine, or were they doodles to which history has ascribed more genius than they are due? This small but interesting exhibition attempts to answer those questions as it places his mechanical works under scientific scrutiny.This show has its origins in an exhibition in Milan in 1952 to celebrate the 500th anniversary of Leonardo's Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
It is an inspired pairing: iconic images by the American photographer Richard Avedon (1923-2004) and the painter, printmaker and filmmaker Andy Warhol (1928-1987), almost all of whose mature work was based on the photographic image. They are together in a large exhibition at Gagosian, Britannia Street, itself one of the largest and most elegant commercial art spaces in London, designed by that cultural architectural duo Caruso St John.The show is also making, if you like, a statement about the market. Photography as a medium has been around since the 1840s, ubiquitous for much of the 20th Read more ...
Florence Hallett
In Hell, the souls of the damned endure cruelly imaginative punishments for all eternity. Corrupt churchmen are buried headfirst in the ground with their feet set on fire, and soothsayers, who in life presumed to be able to see into the future, have their heads turned 180 degrees and are forced to walk around looking backwards. Drawn in metalpoint strengthened here and there with ink, Botticelli’s lines are as fine as spider’s silk. Sometimes barely there at all, their extraordinary refinement lends a strange, jarring intensity to the violence and terror they depict. By contrast, their Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The earliest known selfie is as old as the medium itself – literally. Hippolyte Bayard, one of the inventors of photography, pictured himself as a drowned man. His technique of photographic printing on paper had been upstaged by the daguerrotype, a metal plate alternative developed at the same time (1839) by Louis Daguerre. While Daguerre was showered with honours, Bayard was overlooked and, in disgust, he posed as a martyr to wasted endeavour; his hands stained with photographic chemicals, he slumps in a chair like a corpse newly dragged from the water. Performing for the Camera Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Art exhibitions hardly seem comparable with battery farming, and yet just as our insatiable appetite for cheap meat gives rise to some troubling consequences, so too does the demand for definitive exhibitions that require vulnerable works of art to be shipped around the world. And so it really is a cause for celebration that an exhibition exploring Eugène Delacroix’s influence in the 50 years following his death maintains its focus, argues its case and thoroughly immerses us in his work, without actually showing us any of his best known paintings.We are left to guess at the sheer scale of The Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Waldemar Januszczak always has a provoking agenda to shape his now nearly countless forays into television art history. In this four-part series he's out to challenge what he sees as the unthinking acceptance of the one-dimensional traditional and monopolistic version of the Renaissance.He assumed we all blindly agreed with that second-rate painter but potent myth-maker Vasari (born in Arezzo, lived in Florence), who, in his 1550 biographical three-volume Lives of the Artists, set out the case for the innovative supremacy of contemporary Italian art – the Renaissance. Vasari indeed was the Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
When it got too hard to ship the original American edition across the Atlantic during the Great War, British Vogue appeared as a sister publication in the Condé Nast empire. The first issue in September 1916 announced in its editorial: “The time has come, designers say, to talk of many things – of shoes and furs and lingerie, and if one flares or clings… and whether hats have wings… Really and truly, such amazing things are going to happen to you that you never would believe them, unless you saw them in Vogue.” It must have been an extraordinary affirmation of dreams and aspirations, of the Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Dulwich Picture Gallery, the oldest public painting gallery anywhere with one of the world’s finest collections of Old Masters, has in recent years built up a deserved reputation for bringing to the British audience unfamiliar aspects of well known painters, along with reappraisals and new discoveries. Their latest show is the first-ever exhibition outside of Norway for that country's landscape painter Nikolai Astrup (1880-1928). The son of an ascetic Lutheran pastor, Astrup was sickly even as a child, living in a damp and cold wooden parsonage in a rigorous climate. Often bedridden, the Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The individual colleges of the University of Cambridge can call, when needed, on an astonishing international network of alumni for expert advice, consultation and financial support. Such is the backing for an exquisite new public gallery on the site of Edwardian stables in the grounds of Downing College there.Now open to the public, the Heong Gallery is, as far as this reviewer can tell, unique in the university’s rich provision of arts and sciences museums. There are nine major such public institutions at Cambridge, among them the Botanic Gardens, museums of zoology, classical archaeology, Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Now that Renaissance altarpieces live for the most part in museums and not churches, our experience of them is, quite literally, flat. Once, the winged altarpieces so popular in northern Europe, comprising a central panel flanked by two moveable “doors”, would have changed appearance according to the Church calendar, the wings left closed during Lent to be opened again at Easter when the glorious colours of its central image would once again be revealed.To create maximum theatrical effect, the reverse sides of the panels were often decorated in grisaille – as black and white painting was Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Painting the Modern Garden explores the interstices between nature and ourselves as revealed in the cultivation of gardens, that most delightful and frustrating of occupations, and an almost obsessive subject for many artists. About 150 paintings from the 1860s to the 1920s, gathered together from private and public collections in North America and Europe are on view, amplified by letters, plans, documents, photographs and illustrated books on horticulture.The exhibition embraces not only artists’ responses to gardens from the late 19th century to the early 20th century, but obliquely the new Read more ...
Sarah Kent
One of the great joys of being a critic is discovering someone remarkable you’ve never heard of before. By the time he died in 2013 aged 90, the American photographer Saul Leiter had gained a degree of recognition, but it had been slow in coming and only now is his work gaining an international reputation. His contemporary, Robert Frank, became internationally famous – mainly as the result of his seminal book The Americans, 1958; but while he was given a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York in 1962, Leiter had to make do with inclusion in group shows. Both Read more ...