Visual arts
Florence Hallett
Captured in monochromes ranging from the most delicate honeyed golds to robust gradations of aubergine and deep brown, the earliest photographs still provoke a shiver of surprise and excitement. Even now, their very existence seems miraculous, and the blur of a face, or the lost swish of a horse’s tail signifies the photographer’s pitched battle with time, never quite managing to make it stop altogether. And with their chemical concoctions, their images emerging gradually, apparently from within the paper itself, it is no wonder that from the outset the photographer’s art was cloaked in the Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Russia’s national gallery, the Tretyakov, bears the name of its founder Pavel Tretyakov, the 19th-century merchant who bequeathed his huge collection of Russian art to the city of Moscow in 1892. His bust stands proudly overseeing the entrance to the gallery’s old building, a fine, purpose-built example of early Russian 20th-century architecture.But the Tretyakov has a new wing, dating from the mid-1980s and less architecturally august, that is far less known (and much less visited), which houses its collection of Russian and Soviet art of the 20th century. If any figure deserved a memorial Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The Whitworth Art Gallery was showered with meteors in a spectacle devised by the artist Cornelia Parker on its reopening weekend – appropriately Valentine’s Day. The £15m project (architects MUMA) has doubled the exhibition spaces, reclaimed the Victorian Grand Hall from offices, added state-of-the-art on-site storage and more space for conservators. Here is public art with sculpture and installations on the building itself, and in the surrounding park – landscape art not only in its park setting but within new gardens, and with the building providing wrap-around scenic views. There Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Sotto Voce is a collection of white paintings, sculptures and reliefs made by European, British and North and South American artists from the 1930s to 1970s. An accompanying book explains why this non-colour has appealed to so many artists in so many countries over such a long period of time.At first, everything looks much the same – a collection of rather featureless white abstracts. But stick around and your eye quickly becomes attuned to the nuances in the work. Take Günther Uecker. Like many in the exhibition, the German artist chose to work in white as both an aesthetic choice and a Read more ...
Florence Hallett
The title has it about right: no matter what it is they are busily acquiring, collectors seem to be an obsessive bunch, and their obsessions can achieve quite magnificent proportions. The stereotyped image of the collector as a socially challenged monomaniac doesn’t really fit with the popular understanding of the artistic temperament, though. All that beavering away, categorising and ordering things seems so regimented, blinkered and above all uncreative, and yet the two occupations are intimately linked, the Renaissance sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti the first in a long line of artist-collectors Read more ...
Sarah Kent
A Bloodhound Mark 2 surface-to-air missile points to the sky from the terrace outside the Hayward Gallery. From 1963–1990, the missiles were stationed along the east coast, from Humberside to the Thames, to intercept Soviet planes coming to drop atom bombs on Britain.It's a chilling reminder of the Cold War and the nagging undertow of fear it engendered; it is also a timely reminder that, in recent weeks, Russian fighter jets have been intruding on our air space to give us the jitters and ratchet up tensions.The title of the exhibition, History is Now could not be brought into sharper focus; Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Oh, Dr Pozzi! This gorgeous man is garbed in a red wool, full-length robe, almost completely obscuring his elegantly gleaming white shirt. The shirt collar frames his face, casting light, and its frilled cuffs emphasise his improbably long-fingered hands in a lively gesture. The most fashionable gynaecologist in Paris, a pioneering doctor, around whom rumours swirled of decadence and legendary love-making – Sarah Bernhardt was rumoured to be a long-time mistress – he is the subject of a masterly full-length portrait by the precocious, formidably talented John Singer Sargent (1856-1925 Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
If you bought a Beatles album in the Sixties, chances are you also bought The Mersey Sound, that best-selling collection of poems by the Liverpool poets Brian Patten, Roger McGough and Adrian Henri. It was launched at the Cavern Club in 1967 to musical accompaniment. Their poems felt new, accessible and exciting. "Love is feeling cold in the back of vans," wrote Henri, "Love is a fanclub with only two fans / Love is walking holding paintstained hands / Love is /."But though he was best known as a poet, Henri was primarily a painter, as well as a collage-maker and performance artist. He taught Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Christian Marclay is best known as the author of Video Quartet, 2002 the most exciting artist’s video ever made. The four-screen extravaganza juxtaposes more than 700 clips from Hollywood movies of people singing, dancing and playing instruments not to mention screaming, whistling or smashing crockery. Formally tight, it starts with an orchestra tuning up and, after a glorious crescendo of brass bands, Scottish pipers and Hendrix guitar riffs, ends with a door slamming shut followed by blissful silence.Can the former DJ hope to maintain this level of excellence? At White Cube Bermondsey Read more ...
Florence Hallett
It seems only right that Sir Anthony Van Dyck’s last Self-portrait, 1640-1 (pictured below right), saved for the nation last year as a result of a very public campaign, should now embark on a tour of the country as much in recognition of the 10,000 or so individuals who contributed to its purchase fund, as of its significance to British portraiture. And so it is that Van Dyck’s deceptively simple painting finds itself in Margate with an entire exhibition assembled around it, marking a turning-point, a moment of genesis even, in the history of artists' self-portraits in Britain.The narrative Read more ...
Sarah Kent
"My fatherland is South Africa, my mother tongue is Afrikaans, my surname is French, I don’t speak French. My mother always wanted me to go to Paris. She thought art was French because of Picasso. I thought art was American because of Artforum... I live in Amsterdam and have a Dutch passport. Sometimes I think I’m not a real artist because I’m too half-hearted and I never quite know where I am." (Marlene Dumas)Marlene Dumas is an artist alright; one of the best. If her paintings weren’t so exceptionally beautiful, this mid-career retrospective would feel overwhelmingly melancholic. This is Read more ...
Florence Hallett
What does it mean to be a great artist? Is it enough for your work to be admired, studied, emulated and quoted by contemporaries and subsequent generations, or is the value of art judged by a more complex set of criteria? By considering the extent of Rubens’ influence on artists from Rembrandt to Klimt, the Royal Academy is having a go at skinning a very old and troublesome cat: the elevation of Rubens from gifted confectioner to worthy Old Master.In examining why Rubens should be given a place at art’s top table his work is explored thematically and compared with paintings, prints and Read more ...