Visual arts
Sarah Kent
It is amazing how perceptions and attitudes change. Think of a nude and the chances are you will imagine a naked woman since, nowadays, the female body virtually monopolises the genre; naked men scarcely make an appearance in mainstream culture. This changed briefly in the 1970s, when American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe brought the male nude into focus with countless images celebrating masculine beauty. After his death in 1989, though, the naked male returned to the closet, relegated to porn movies and gay magazines.In 17th and 18th century France, the reverse was true. The male Read more ...
fisun.guner
From Hogarth through to Gillray and Cruikshank, it was Georgian England that gave rise to a graphic tradition of satire. The powerful were lampooned and the pretensions and avarice of the upper and aspiring classes duly ridiculed. But the poor did not escape moral censure. Far from it. Then as now we had the virtuous and the feckless poor, and it was the love of gin that often bought the latter down.But as biting caricature in England waned, giving way to the more genteel illustrations of the Victorian era, one figure in France was to dominate the form: Honoré Daumier, whom Baudelaire – that Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Dulwich Picture Gallery, the oldest publicly accessible painting collection in England, is hardly on the bank of the Thames, but its compilation of prints, drawings, watercolours and paintings by James McNeill Whistler (1834-1902) concentrates on his absorption with London’s river. The shifting light of sky and water, not to mention working dockside life, which obsessed him during his lifelong residence in the city provides not only an overview of Whistler’s evolution as an artist but an evocation of the working life of the river which is long gone. He was fascinated by the hotch-potch, the Read more ...
fisun.guner
Sir Anthony Caro, who died on Wednesday of a heart attack aged 89, was an artist who remained not only active but inventive to the last. In the past year alone he had three major exhibitions: a distilled retrospective at the Museo Correr in Venice (until 27 October), an exhilarating outdoor exhibition of mega-scale sculptures spanning four decades at Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, as well as recent work at the Gagosian gallery in London, the last a series of huge working models planned for an even bigger public art project that would have proceeded down New York’s Park Avenue. Unfortunately, Read more ...
Florence Hallett
It surely takes courage to conceive an exhibition around a single, slightly obscure work by an artist whose oeuvre boasts an array of crowd-pleasers. Rather than gathering together the greatest hits, the Courtauld Gallery’s new exhibition takes as its starting point a single sheet of paper; on one side is a finely wrought figure from the parable of the Wise and the Foolish Virgins, while on the verso are studies of Dürer’s left leg.That these very different drawings occupy the same sheet of paper is at the heart of this exhibition, and that the sheet is from the Courtauld’s own collection Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
At the beginning of the 17th century an anonymous Anglo-Netherlandish artist produced an elaborate procession portrait of the septuagenarian Virgin Queen, tactfully portrayed as though several decades younger, when she had succeeded to the throne in her mid-twenties. Elizabeth I is held aloft under an embroidered canopy and surrounded by Knights of the Garter, courtiers, members of the royal household, and aristocrats. Some of her 50-strong personal bodyguards, the Gentleman Pensioners, also appear; the ladies of the court follow, and privileged citizens observe the retinue from the Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Seeing the statue of Saddam Hussein toppled in Baghdad in April 2003, I felt a rush of euphoria despite deep reservations about the American invasion. My (misplaced) optimism was shared by the Iraqi student, Ayass Mohammed. ’“Suddenly I felt freedom,” he told reporters; for him the fall of the statue symbolised the end of tyranny and the arrival of hope. The destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan (pictured right) by the Afghan Taliban two years earlier was a similarly emotive affair. In the west, it provoked a wave of disgust; citing the historical and artistic importance of the Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
"The objects in pictures look out at us serene or severe, tense or relaxed, comforting or forbidding, suffering or smiling." Thus said Paul Klee (1879-1940) in a lecture on modern art in 1924. It is an entirely accurate description of his own work, drawing as it does on dream and nightmare, fairytales and apocalyptic visions, not to mention landscape, portrait, architecture, aquatic scenes, the world around him and abstract imaginings: the whole gamut.Klee was an acute annotator of the natural world, and turned his superb powers of observation just as much to human behaviour to give oblique Read more ...
Sarah Kent
American ladies, in the 18th and 19th centuries, passed their time in fashionable pursuits such as embroidering samplers and cutting out portraits of family and friends. Harking back to those days, Kara Walker has covered three walls of the Camden Arts Centre with a panoramic installation of cut-paper silhouettes, which she calls Auntie Walker’s Wall Samplers (main picture and below right: Auntie Walker’s Wall Sampler for Savages). Instead of sharing genteel pleasantries, though, she dishes the dirt on the plantation-owning white elite. Her top-hatted gents and southern belles may dance Read more ...
Sarah Kent
In the 25 years she has spent taking photographs, Dayanita Singh has accumulated a huge body of evocative and memorable images. For instance, there’s the girl lying face down on a bed (main picture), dressed in what looks like her school uniform. She lies awkwardly, her legs stretched diagonally across to the edge of the mattress, presumably so that her shoes won’t dirty the sheets. Why didn’t she take her shoes off?Propped up on one arm on a bedspread decorated with leaping fish, in Zeiss Ikon (1996) (pictured right) a beautiful young woman gazes thoughtfully to camera. She would probably Read more ...
fisun.guner
“We should pity the age which finds its reflection in this ‘art’”, wrote one critic in 1911, after seeing too many Vienna Secession paintings. From the quotation marks, we see the despairing critic was attacking the art rather than the age. Nonetheless one is inclined to agree: with the Hapsburg Empire on the brink of collapse, with war on the horizon, and Vienna itself a hotbed of neuroses and anti-Semitism, we should indeed pity the age, and the society and the artists that reflected it.Its bared row of tombstone teeth exactly resembles the killer-trap mouth of a de Kooning womanIt is a Read more ...
fisun.guner
I read someone recently describe Sarah Lucas’s sculptures as “aggressive”. Perhaps being greeted by a roomful of huge plaster cocks, mechanised wanking arms and greasy doner kebabs with two fried eggs in an abject arrangement of the female sex can feel a little confrontational, but aggressive? There’s surely something deflecting and bluntly one-note when it comes to the merely aggressive. “Aggressive” rarely lets other emotions in, and Lucas’s work is a many shaded affair.There’s lots of humour for a start. And like all the best humour, at least British humour, behind the slapstick there's Read more ...