Visual arts
Sarah Kent
When Berthe Morisot organised the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874, along with Monet, Degas, Renoir and co, she’d already exhibited at the Paris Salon for a decade – since she was 23. That’s not bad for someone refused entry to art school because she was a woman!Luckily, Berthe and her sister Edma had parents wealthy enough to employ artists like the renowned landscape painter Camille Corot to give them private lessons. They even had their own studio and, judging by the landscape included in the Dulwich Picture Gallery’s (DPG) show, Edma was rather good; but as was expected of an upper Read more ...
Sarah Kent
What a feast! Congratulations are due to the National Gallery for its latest blockbuster After Impressionism: Inventing Modern Art. Such a superb collection of modern masters is unlikely to be assembled again under one roof, so this is a once-in-a-lifetime, must-see exhibition.Room after fabulous room is hung with a hundred artworks, mostly paintings, on walls painted navy blue. This daring decision works well for most artists, the exception being Van Gogh whose landscapes die against the dark background. Luckily the dark blue offsets the cream wallpaper and pale pink blouse of Van Gogh’s Read more ...
Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou
A small cottage vanishes into a surrounding bay, its walls apparitional against pale waters. In the background, a pier juts out into the ocean, equidistant to sea-green hills and a brown strip of land. The tide gently meets the shoreline, white on blue-grey wash. All is quiet, all is still, as nature slowly erodes every last trace of man.This is Wilhelmina Barns-Graham’s White Cottage, Cornwall, 1944, one of the earliest works from her residence in St Ives. Though representational and naturalistic in style, White Cottage, Cornwall, captures Barns-Graham’s gradual turn towards a more Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Despite the fact that it’s a cruel depiction of an aging woman, I have always loved Quinten Massys’ The Ugly Duchess (pictured below, left). The Flemish artist invites us to laugh at an old dear who, in the hope of attracting a suitor, has tucked her hair into a horned headdress and decked herself in a décolleté gown that exposes her wrinkled cleavage. Even in 1513, her ridiculous outfit would have been outmoded. In her hand she holds a rosebud, suggestive of amorous intent; the implication is that this misguided soul has donned her youthful finery in an attempt to regain her lost allure and Read more ...
Mike Nelson: Extinction Beckons, Hayward Gallery review - spooky installations by a master of detail
Sarah Kent
Entry to Mike Nelson’s Hayward Gallery exhibition is through what feels like the store room of a reclamation yard. Row upon row of Dexion shelving is piled high with salvaged building materials including old doors, ancient floorboards and wrought iron gates, while even more gates and doors are leant against the walls.It’s all a bit too neat and tidy for a real junk yard, though; and my heart sank. Please don’t let this retrospective be a sanitised version of Nelson’s installations, because without the right degree of tackiness, they simply wouldn’t work. I needn’t have worried, though; from Read more ...
Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou
It’s 1986, and a young Sonia Boyce (main picture) speaks to poet and sculptor, Pitika Ntuli, about the "perpetual struggle to be heard and appreciated" as a Black woman who is an artist. "I’m here, you can’t wish me away," she responds with characteristic verve and fight. Cut to 2023, to the UK debut of Boyce’s award-winning Venice Biennale installation Feeling Her Way, and the same concerns about visibility, audibility and laudability remain at the fore of her work – but with a golden, gleeful difference.Spread across five adjoining rooms in the Turner Contemporary, Feeling Her Way Read more ...
Sarah Kent
I once gave Peter Doig a tutorial, when he was a student at Chelsea College of Art. He had little to say about his strange images and I came away feeling I’d seen something unique, but was unable to tell if he was a very good painter or a very bad one. He now enjoys international success and his paintings sell for millions of pounds yet, judging by his Courtauld Gallery exhibition, my ambivalence was well founded. The show contains a sublimely beautiful painting and two very bad ones. The Alpinist 2019-22 (pictured right) is Doig at his very best. A lone skier trudges up a snow covered Read more ...
Sarah Kent
It’s not often that an exhibition makes me cry, but then it’s not often that a show reveals the degree to which we have been duped. Action Gesture Paint includes the work of some 80 women, half of whom I’d never heard of. Given that I’ve been a critic for over 40 years and consider myself well-informed, that’s pretty mind-boggling.Where have these artists been hiding? Or, rather, who has been hiding them from us? No marks for guessing it was the male-dominated art establishment.The period covered by this revelatory Whitechapel show is 1940-1970, when Abstract Expressionism swept the globe. Read more ...
Andy Morgan
During morning and evening rush hour, Bamako seizes up under the pressure of all the cars, motorbikes, trucks and buses, bringing the three bridges over the Niger River to a standstill and testing Mali’s reputation for patience and humour to its limits. From a mere 130,000 at independence in 1960, the population of the city has now ballooned to over three million. Every week, thousands of refugees fleeing violence in the rest of the country, two thirds of which is effectively in a state of anarchy, move into crowded camps on the outskirts. It’s a miracle that the city functions at all. But it Read more ...
mark.kidel
I have wanted to visit the Musée Unterlinden in Colmar for many years: the home of Matthias Grünewald’s masterpiece, the Isenheim Altarpiece (1512-1516), one of the great works of North European religious art. The opportunity finally arose in an oblique way, as the museum has been hosting a major exhibition by the French painter Fabienne Verdier.The show was commissioned as an invitation for the artist to respond to the Grünewald and other works in a treasure trove that lies hidden away in the east of France, only just over two hours train from Paris, and yet somewhat off the beaten track. Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
A film telling just the story of photographer Nan Goldin’s campaign against Purdue Pharmacy would have been worth the ticket price alone.But Laura Poitras’s documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed offers so much more. It moves between two interlocking strands: the twin stories of Nan the activist and Nan the artist, and, fascinatingly, shows how one informed the other. Goldin grew up in New Jersey but at 14, silenced by her older sister’s death, was sent away to reforming schools and was only saved when she ended up at a hippie establishment that didn’t believe in expelling Read more ...
Alastair Davey
Treasures from the Hispanic Society Museum & Library are displayed as a monumental survey of Spanish art from Antiquity to the 20th century. The new exhibition stands as testament to the extraordinary vision of its founder, Archer M Huntington.Son of the American industrialist and railroad magnate Collis P Huntington, Archer accompanied his parents’ trips to the continent, finding sanctuary in European museums from the age of 12. He wrote of his visit to the Louvre in 1882, "I knew nothing about pictures, but I knew instinctively that I was in a new world." His interest soon outgrew just Read more ...