Visual arts
Sarah Kent
The Pop Art collages of Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi and, more recently, the wayward sculptures and installations of artists like Phyllida Barlow would be unthinkable without the inspirational presence in Britain of Kurt Schwitters. Yet the German emigré is hardly a household name.The Tate exhibition Schwitters in Britain hopes to put that right by showing the full range of his work. These include reliefs and collages made from detritus picked up off the street; oddball sculptures fashioned from plaster, wood, stone, metal or bone; grotto-like installations that crept across walls Read more ...
Steven Gambardella
Central to this thoughtful show is not really the use of light in art per se but how light appropriately serves a post-minimalist shift from the work of art to the environment itself. For the most part, the works here endeavour to shape the space around us or invoke a response on a physiological level.The lower gallery’s main room is dominated by Cerith Wyn-Evans’s S=U=P=E=R=S=T=R=U=C=T=U=R=E ("Trace me back to some loud, shallow, chill, underlying motives overspil..."), 2010, made up of floor-to-ceiling columns of incandescent lights which “breathe” by slowly glowing bright and dimming, Read more ...
fisun.guner
While any Manet survey, however compromised by a lack of significant loans, must be considered "an event", this is not quite the exhibition one might have hoped to see of a great artist. Taking up one vast floor of the Royal Academy with just over 50 paintings (and some not very good pastels), many of which are unfinished and must have been judged unsatisfactory by the artist himself, it is far too thinly spread to be the touted blockbuster it seeks to sell itself as. And since there are quite a few indifferent paintings, one feels slightly sad that anyone coming fresh to this bold and Read more ...
fisun.guner
We love the snow but hate the cold, and for almost 300 years Northern European winters were bitterly, catastrophically cold. Crops failed, there were famine riots and people died of hypothermia during the Little Ice Age. From the 16th to the 19th centuries, no population suffered at the hands of Old Man Winter quite as much as those in the Low Countries. Winters were long, life was harsh, but in Brussels Pieter Bruegel the Elder was singlehandedly inventing the winter landscape of our imaginations.Bruegel painted Hunters in the Snow in 1565, during the coldest winter for a century. At first Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Crime fiction once lured you in with lurid covers acting like a B-movie poster or fairground barker, selling the promise of thrills within. The British Library’s new exhibition is disappointingly light on such disreputable fare, and much too brief. But within its self-imposed limits it manages to indicate the genre’s range, and illuminate some forgotten corners.The small, alphabetically themed gallery includes a couple of the treasures otherwise locked in the Library’s archive. The neat, unmarked text of Conan Doyle’s manuscript for a late Holmes story, “The Adventure of the Retired Colourman Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Michael Winner was always proud to call himself a film director but his filmography is notably short of quality moments. The likes of I'll Never Forget What's'isname and Hannibal Brooks in the 1960s, pointless remakes of The Big Sleep and The Wicked Lady, a questionable foray into theatrical adaptation with A Chorus of Disapproval, Lia Williams' reluctant turn as a vengeful killer in Dirty Weekend or his last film Parting Shots - these will not be remembered fondly (or even at all). Death Wish (starring Charles Bronson, pictured below) and its several offshoots, at least in the cinema, is Read more ...
fisun.guner
“The new job of art is to sit on a wall and get more expensive,” the late Robert Hughes once said. In a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal, gallerist and dealer Larry Gagosian was particularly revealing. “I wish I was in luxury goods,” he confessed, “because then I could just call the factory and say, ‘I need 10,000 more of whatever’” – though he did add that he couldn’t, because “then it’s not art, it’s something else.”Meanwhile, the influential American critic Dave Hickey recently announced that he was walking away from the art world because editors and critics had become a “ Read more ...
fisun.guner
The London Art Fair may not have the international heft or VIP glamour of Frieze, but for 25 years it’s been the place to see and buy the best of British modern art. While the main fair features 100 established galleries – including Browse and Derby, specialists in mid twentieth-century British figurative art, and Pangolin, one of the few galleries in the UK dedicated to sculpture – there are two curated sections that are worth spending time in: Art Projects provides a compelling snapshot of contemporary art now, while the Catlin Guide features a selection of the UK’s brightest graduates.Both Read more ...
fisun.guner
The first thing to say about Paul Elmsley’s portrait of the Duchess of Cambridge, which was unveiled yesterday at the National Portrait Gallery, is that it looks rather better in real life than it does in reproduction. That doesn’t make it a great painting, but nor is it a risible one. The soft-focused, Vaseline-smeared visage, framed by that undulating cascade of buoyant hair (it’s unfortunate how much this makes her look as if she's taking part in an ad campaign for shampoo) is more convincingly defined and skilfully modelled than it is when you see it on the screen.Certainly, there’s a Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
For a man immortalised by his wails of rainy misery from the moors of Withnail and I, you would expect Richard E Grant to be very happy on the Riviera. He is, with the suave aristo manner of the Englishman abroad. Which is fitting for The Riviera: A History in Pictures, because the Riviera practically belonged to the Brits - we hivernots, winter escapers from northern cold - before the French realised it was there at all. And it came to their attention because artists from the Impressionists onwards went there.I’m not sure that A History in Pictures quite knows what it is aiming for: Grant is Read more ...
fisun.guner
That ultimate art rocker David Bowie is 66 today. The Victoria & Albert Museum is opening with a major survey of Bowie the style icon this spring. What’s more, he’s just released a new single, with an album following in March. Fittingly, for an art school idol, he once wrote a song about his favourite artist Andy Warhol (“Andy Warhol looks a scream / Hang him on my wall / Andy Warhol, Silver Screen / Can't tell them apart at all”). It got a typically blank response when Bowie played it to its subject – not even a “Gee, David”. Still, although it's not a patch on "Space Oddity", it's a Read more ...