Visual arts
David Kettle
Sometimes it’s visual art with a sonic slant; sometimes it’s music with a visual slant. Glasgow’s Sonica – created by producers Cryptic, now in its third year and bigger than ever – feels like a thoroughly modern festival, defying genre boundaries and instead focusing squarely on the intersection of the sonic and the visual. That might make some of its offerings hard to categorise, but there’s nothing wrong with that.A couple of the opening weekend’s events, however, felt far more straightforward in their melding of sound and vision. In the appropriate surroundings of Glasgow’s ultra-modern Read more ...
fisun.guner
Any exhibition of Sol LeWitt’s work raises an interesting question. Why go and see it if it’s the idea that’s the most important aspect of the work? In his 1967 essay, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art”, he clearly outlined the predominance of the idea over material form, which may seem an obvious statement to make about conceptual art (the label’s on the tin) but LeWitt went further. “All of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair,” he wrote. “The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.”This was not only an affront to traditional notions of art Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
This was the fifth and last in a series of hour-long programmes amounting to a vivid, varied and extraordinarily lively history of Britain. Although ostensibly a history of portraiture, the images have been hooks for Simon Schama, that most ubiquitous historian who bears a rather charming resemblance to Tigger – very bouncy, very chatty, very enthusiastic, a little self-regarding – to subtly engage us in a journey through the political and social landmarks of British history. In this one, titled “The Face in the Mirror”, we did indeed bounce through nearly eight centuries of British artists Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Unswervingly confident, relaxed and assured, the élite of the 18th century are currently arrayed on the walls of the Royal Academy, gazing down at us with the utmost assurance of their unassailable place in the world, bright eyed and dressed to match. The swirls of public reputation are unpredictable: here is a revelation, the art of one of the most successful and highly prized portraitists of his day, Jean-Etienne Liotard (1702-1789), now almost completely unknown except to specialists.A Huguenot, born in the independent Protestant city state of Geneva, he trained in Paris, and went on to Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
What a woman. Does the news that Kate Winslet is to play the polymath Lee Miller in a Hollywood biopic mean a kind of sanctified apotheosis of Miller's quite extraordinary life? The story is so dramatic it transcends any fiction. Her path was controversial, imaginative, accomplished, and in many ways profoundly sad, an emotional roller-coaster. But the legacy is astonishing, as more and more of her achievement as a photographer is revealed.Lee Miller (1907-1977) is shown here with many previously unpublished photographs. Her commissions for Vogue, as both feature writer and a photographer of Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Any number of puzzling and fantastical stories were told by Alberto Giacometti in the construction of a personal mythology that helped secure his reputation as an archetypal artist of the avant-garde. Less heroic than the oft-quoted accounts of his transformative, visionary experiences, the story of his return to Paris after the Second World War is no less poignant, nor significant for all that. Having stowed his most recent works under the floorboards, Giacometti left his studio in 1941 returning four years later to find it – miraculously – just as he had left it. Due less to some Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Free as air, but there was a very heavy price to pay for his ecstatic exploration of the sky by the Cornwall painter Peter Lanyon, who died in 1964, aged just 46, as a result of injuries received in a gliding accident. The Courtauld Gallery is known for its series of original, incisive, acute and intense exhibitions taking a sharply focused view of one aspect of an artist’s work. Often these provide a revelation and so it is here.For Lanyon, who has fallen out of fashion as have several other significant figures of his generation of British artists, this is a very welcome examination of Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Yves Klein staged a photo of himself, in November 1960, swallow-diving into the air from a first floor window, arms outstretched like a bird. Leap into the Void was faked – the friends waiting with a tarpaulin on the pavement below were montaged out of the final picture – but such was the appetite for heroism that the image soon became emblematic of the superhero risking all for his art. Why this fascination with artists who take risks in and for their art? In his book Man’s Rage for Chaos Morse Peckham argues that art provides an arena in which to experience risk at arm's length. The Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The first thing you encounter is a ballot box bolted to the lid of a school desk; what or whom you might be voting for – apart from the hope of change – is not specified. In the eyes of Jimmie Durham, change is badly needed; in fact, most of the premises on which western society is built could do with a radical rethink. Judging by the state of the box, though – the lid looks as if it has been prized open and bolted down many times – fair and free elections seem unlikely. Mostly probably, the outcome would be rigged.Nearby is a revolving door that returns you (rather like a rigged election) to Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
A finely honed and spacious selection dating from the 1950s to now, looks in acute focus at the work – a scatter of drawings, a print, but almost entirely paintings – of Frank Auerbach, (b 1931). An only child, he came without his family, from Berlin to England in 1939. His parents were murdered in the Holocaust. He is now one of the most remarkable painters of our time.Work chosen by the artist himself is arranged in six galleries each spanning a decade: each image is a commanding presence, and the paintings range in size, scale and subject matter from the substantial to domestic intimacy. Read more ...
fisun.guner
The brute nature of man in times of war, religious persecution and hypocrisy, and the destructive power of superstition. Francisco de Goya’s fame today largely rests on such themes, and they go a long way to explain just why he’s often considered the first modern artist. But Goya was also a remarkable portraitist, an official painter to the Spanish court, and one of art's great sensualists. And though we don’t have the famous nude and clothed Maja, which hang side-by-side in the Prado, the National Gallery’s thrillingly seductive exhibition attests to his renown as a master of the Read more ...
fisun.guner
What’s going on? It seems the Turner Prize judges not only ran out of Scots to nominate this year, but actual artists. The socially enterprising architect-design collective Assemble don’t even call themselves artists so what must they make of the novelty of being shortlisted for the UK’s premier contemporary art prize? I’ve no doubt they’re delighted, especially since they appear favourites to win, but what a turn up. Perhaps far more of a novelty though, is the lack of Glasgow School of Art alumni. Scotland’s art colleges throw up Turner Prize winners and nominees as predictably as the Read more ...