Visual arts
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Steven Gambardella
Rubens's gigantic masterpiece loudly contradicts the folkloric silent night. This typically muscular painting is deafening in its depiction of the commotion around the holy family when the Magi arrive to offer gifts to the divine king of Christian belief. The enormous entourage of camels, braying donkeys, war horses, servants and soldiers, richly ornamented in oriental colour and clothing, pile up in a decrescendo behind the composition’s quiet, even vacuous, centre of gravity: a tender moment as one of the Magi (perhaps Caspar) lifts the lid on his gift of gold coins which the infant Jesus Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
In our chilled Decembers, even when snowless, winter scenes are visually synonymous with Christmas, and Henry Raeburn’s small painting of The Reverend Robert Walker, from the 1790s, skating with abstracted solemnity and perfect balance on Duddingston Loch, only a few minutes away from the National Gallery of Scotland itself, is one of the most irresistibly memorable seasonal images. Since the skating minister entered the national collection in 1949, his portrait has become immensely famous: the gallery’s most popular postcard by far, and reproduced on jewellery, keyrings, ties, scarves, Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
All roads start from Rome, and so it proves in this challenging exhibition put together from the holdings of the Royal Academy’s art collection, archives and library. It features 17th-century Italian paintings – some of the grandest by the French artists who settled in Rome, and took inspiration from the surrounding campagna – brought back to Britain by the Grand Tourists who, in the midst of their various adventures, amassed substantial art for their stately homes.The images by the likes of the two Poussins (Nicolas, and his brother-in-law Gaspard Dughet, so often confused), Claude Lorrain Read more ...
fisun.guner
The Royal Academy’s spacious white galleries at Burlington Gardens are flooded with mystic light and filled with New Age baubles. You are bathed in a trippy purple haze as you enter one gallery which contains a giant glowing pod. The translucent pod is meant to resemble an ancient monolith but instead looks more like an oversized Ikea lamp. The work derives its title, Tom Na H-iu II, from the Celtic “Tom na h-iubhraich” – a site of “spiritual transmigration”. These consist of standing stones intended to guide souls returning to earth after spending 100 years in the spirit world.The pod Read more ...
Tim Cumming
October Gallery first mounted a show of William Burroughs’ paintings in 1988, soon after the writer had published The Western Lands, the last novel in his final trilogy. More books would come – on lemurs, pirates, Madagascar, cats, dreams – but no further fiction. And with the death in 1986 of Brion Gysin, his friend and collaborator in Cut-Ups, films, arcana and performance art, Burroughs became a painter, exchanging brushes for firearms, and hung his first exhibition of shot gun art in New York and then London.Some of them are here, and they dominate the show with visceral impact. His Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Carving in Britain from 1910 to Now is an accurate but unalluring title for what is a seminal show. The Fine Art Society is one of the oldest commercial galleries in Britain, founded in 1876 and still in its original building. Due to this longevity the FAS has unusual access to private collections, and an ability to mix the historic and contemporary to fine effect. The result here showcases an original anthology, simultaneously scholarly and commercial, a mix of loans and for-sale.The collection is a striking complement to the Royal Academy’s dazzling exploration of millennia of Read more ...