Visual arts
Jasper Rees
Where on earth do you begin if all the world’s a stage? When not sifting through the entrails of dynastic English history or sunning themselves in Italy, the plays of Shakespeare really do put a girdle round the known globe. They send postcards from the exotic neverlands of Illyria and Bohemia, wander deep into Asia, set foot as far south as Africa, trespass up to the chilly north of Scandinavia and Scotland, and even make reference to Muscovy. And of course there are the Anthropophagi (wherever they're from). To map this world is something only the British Museum, that most capacious cabinet Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
You now have two choices when you roll down to the bottom of the Turbine Hall's slope. You can go left to the established Tate Modern collection of paintings and sculptures in white boxes, or right to a warren of performance and video art that fills two new large concrete barrel rooms - two options in gallery geometry and art practice. With the help of architects Herzog and De Meuron, Tate have incorporated the two disused oil drums into the gallery to provide a permanent platform for the immersive and interactive art forms that have come to dominate the visual arts over the past Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
There is a growing fashion for new public sculpture and anthologies of contemporary sculpture outdoors, inspiring various polemics for and against. Kew Gardens has been at it for nearly a decade: there was a triumphant Henry Moore show several years ago, followed by glass artist Dale Chihuly festooning their lakes and ponds. The current artist-in-residence, David Nash, creates works with wood from fallen trees.Kew has deliberately focused on artists accustomed to working out of doors, and although the results have been variable, the attempt has been serious and intelligent. Elsewhere, Caro at Read more ...
fisun.guner
Jenny Saville rose to art stardom under the patronage of Charles Saatchi. Fresh out of art school, she was contracted to produce work that would then be shown in his gallery. The Royal Academy’s Sensation exhibition in 1997 followed, and she became a fully paid-up member of the YBAs. Making big paintings featuring big women, in the dunnish colours of Lucian Freud – to whom, as a figurative artist, she was vaguely compared – Saville’s work has also, naturally, been seen as a feminist riposte to art history’s male gaze. Therefore, given her public profile over two decades, it might come Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Three paintings by Titian depicting stories from Ovid’s poem Metamorphoses welcome you to the National Gallery’s exhibition Metamorphosis: Titian 2012. Diana and Callisto shows Diana casting out the pregnant nymph Callisto from her company. Diana and Actaeon depicts the young Actaeon out hunting and stumbling into a sacred grotto where Diana and her nymphs are bathing; and in The Death of Actaeon, we see the goddess exacting vengeance on the intruder by turning him into a stag to be torn to pieces by his own hounds.You may remember the public appeals that helped save these splendid paintings Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Stonehenge, the monumental mystery of Britain’s past, decked out like a laundry yard with drying white vests and flowerpots scattered among its gigantic monoliths. It makes a most disconcerting image, and it is the precursive tableau that the public should not miss if they make the trek out to Salisbury Plain tonight or tomorrow for one of the Cultural Olympiad’s stranger installations. Get there before it all starts.For three nights only, the great landmark and treasure of world civilisation becomes the magisterially named Stonehenge Fire Garden, centrepiece of Salisbury Arts Festival, Read more ...
Anne Blood
In Dorothea Tanning's Victory, a piece of charred toast is mounted on a black background and framed in gold. The work comes dangerously close to pure jest but instead propels itself into a critique of female domesticity and then down a road of historical influences from Surrealism and Dada straight through to stark 1960s Minimalism. Tanning made this piece in 2005, when she was well into her nineties, and it’s a delightful example of her late work. Victory is witty and proves why collage is so exciting as a medium, its juxtapostions colliding to provide multiple meanings and paths of Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
As the clouds continue and the rain pours down, the Sackler Gallery at the Royal Academy is filled with sun-dappled scenes from France. The anthology is a potpourri of paintings culled from the remarkable collections put together by the millionaire race horse breeder and art obsessed Sterling Clark – the fortune inherited from his grandfather’s involvement with the Singer Sewing Machine company - and his French actress wife Francine. Current renovations and expansions for the Clark Institute, founded in 1955 by the couple in the university town of Williamstown, Massachusetts, and one of the Read more ...