Visual arts
Thomas H. Green
Marcus Coates (b. 1968) is an artist who specialises in projects that involve the natural world. Graduating from the Royal Academy School in the early Nineties, by the millennium he was attracting attention for filmed art events that were both eccentric and thought-provoking. These included Goshawk (1999), wherein Coates was suspended in a pine tree so that he might view the world as a bird of prey, the self-explanatory Sparrow Hawk Bait (1999), where he ran through a wood with his head covered in dead birds, and Indigenous British Mammals (2000), which saw him partially buried in wild Read more ...
fisun.guner
We think we know it when we see it. But how, pray, do we define beauty? The ancient Greeks thought they had the measure of it. In the 4th century BC, the “chief forms of beauty,” according to Aristotle, were “order, symmetry and clear delineation.” A century earlier, during the golden age of Athens, Polykleitos, one of the ancient world’s greatest sculptors, set out the precise ratios for the ideal male form in a treatise he called The Canon. And a century before him, Pythagoras instructed that it was numbers that revealed the hidden order of the world – a perfection revealed through an Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
One masterpiece and two superb portraits both dominate and sum up in vivid fashion the complex personality, long life and astonishing trajectory of the first Duke of WellingtonThere were something like 200 portraits done in his lifetime. The haunting Goya portrait of 1812-1814 (main picture), altered several times to allow for more decorations on his uniform, was painted in Madrid when the British occupied the Spanish capital at the end of the horrible five-year slog of the Peninsula War. As the general once said, “Nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won” – and Read more ...
Florence Hallett
The grand but domestic setting of Hertford House, home of the Wallace Collection, makes a fitting backdrop to an exhibition of paintings by Joshua Reynolds. The Marquesses of Hertford acquired some 25 paintings by Reynolds in the artist's lifetime, and after it, and the 12 that remain in the collection form the focus of this exhibition. Not only does the Wallace Collection give an impression of the way that paintings were collected and viewed in the 18th century and beyond, but in its wealth of Old Master and 18th-century French paintings, for example, it shares characteristics with Reynolds' Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Alexander McQueen designed some dresses to die for. Dominating a wood-panelled room dedicated to Romantic Nationalism, in acknowledgement of his Scottish origins, is a crimson cape worn over a simple white dress. The high collar, puffed sleeves and long train lend the shimmering red taffeta a baronial splendour perfect for dramatic entrances.Nearby is a white tulle dress whose bodice is encrusted with tiny red beads, worn beneath a red silk taffeta jacket layered into exaggerated folds reminiscent of coral. One could imagine sporting these garments with great pleasure, knowing that they made Read more ...
fisun.guner
Made an Honorary Royal Academician just a few months before he died, in 1993, it’s taken till now for a posthumous Royal Academy survey to finally bring one of the absolute greats of American postwar painting to a UK audience. Of course, for those with long memories, there was the Whitechapel Gallery exhibition of 1991, but though it provided the impetus for the belated honour, it seemed to do little to bring the paintings of Richard Diebenkorn into the public realm.Diebenkorn, who spent most of his life in California, finally settling in Santa Monica in the mid-Sixties where he began his Read more ...
fisun.guner
The unveiling of the Fourth Plinth has, since his election to office, been an opportunity for Mayor Boris Johnson to work the press pen with a comic turn. So, the commission, sponsored by the mayoral office, gets a media-chummy spokesperson whose art critiques add a note of gaiety to proceedings, even if they’re self-evidently at odds with what the artist had in mind. See them as an ongoing election campaign. Hans Haacke’s Gift Horse, which was unveiled yesterday, is a larger than life-size bronze skeleton of a horse, modelled on an anatomic etching by George Stubbs, the 18th-century Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Here is an exhibition that tells us how something we now take totally for granted actually came about: how our love affair with the Impressionists was masterminded by an art dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel (1831-1922). He was a prime mover in inventing the way art is dealt with by commercial galleries and even museums, and is credited as the inventor of the modern art market.It is to Durand-Ruel, we discover, that we owe the parade of public retrospective monographic exhibitions devoted to single artists and accompanied by catalogues, publicity, private views, critics, and general furore and hubbub Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The sea is the theme uniting Simon Faithfull’s mid-career retrospective. It makes the port of Calais the perfect host for this splendid exhibition and, to put you in the mood, ideally you should make the crossing by boat. Faithfull spent six days going back and forth, back and forth on the P&O ferry between Dover and Calais. He passed the time – one and a half hours each way – sketching on his iPhone things that caught his eye, including a luggage trolley, a man reading (pictured below right), a waiting lifeboat, docking in Calais. More than 50 of these delightful drawings are on show; Read more ...
Florence Hallett
The sight of two old women fighting in the street would probably meet with roughly the same response from passers-by whether it happened today or 200 years ago – a queasy mixture of dismay, embarrassment and amusement. To get close to Goya’s drawing of two ancient crones locked in a wrestlers’ embrace, their toothless faces both grimly determined, is to experience those uneasy sensations just as he surely did. As so often in this exhibition, in a fanciful moment you can almost feel the presence of the artist at your side, conjured up through the vivacity and pertinence of his observations.Old Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Recent attitudes to Victorian Britain have changed radically. The popular view used to be of a period filled with a kind of smug imperial confidence, underwritten by the increasing wealth of the industrial age. This ingrained assumption was perhaps epitomised by Lytton Strachey’s 1918 Eminent Victorians, which saw the eminences as bungling hypocrites. And although secret lives might have been as wild as may be, one characteristic myth was that even piano legs had to be obscured with frilly covers for decency. This simplistic summary was leavened by acknowledging geniuses from Read more ...
fisun.guner
So, Picasso’s last words turned out not to be, “Drink to me. Drink to my health. You know I can’t drink anymore” – yes, those famous last words that inspired a Paul McCartney dirge – but were, according to this TV biography looking at Picasso’s women and how each significant relationship informed the direction of his work, “Get me some pencils”. A more prosaic request, certainly, but he died in bed, aged 93, his pencils delivered and drawing to the last. It was a good and fitting end.It was, however, an unpromising beginning, for when Picasso entered this world it was feared he was still born Read more ...