Visual arts
graham.rickson
It’s cold, grey and damp. Welcome to Leeds. The city centre has grown more homogenous, less distinctive since I arrived here in the 1980s, but there are still delights to be found.There’s an art gallery with a very decent collection of 20th-century British art, adjoining the Henry Moore Sculpture Institute. At the other end of the city centre, on a site once occupied by an enormous utopian housing development, sits the West Yorkshire Playhouse. The building looks more like a large branch of Tesco than a theatre, but it’s thriving, and does attract a broad audience. The lovely old City Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The Queen is the first mass-media monarch, and still probably the most ubiquitously depicted person in history. Her 60 years on the throne is only exceeded by Victoria, and her reign has coincided, of course, with photography, film and television. The profusion of royal imagery is exaggerated and exacerbated by the cult of celebrity and the new technology of the internet and social networking. This has led to an overwhelming sense that the public has the right to know the most intimate details of the lives of public figures.The Queen however has, one way or another, escaped the Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Prunella Clough, 1919–1999, was one of the most idiosyncratic and original British artists of the postwar period. Her art is reticent, shy, subtle - yet in both life and aesthetics she was a free and generous spirit. Now there is a fine selection of works large and small, but all domestic in size, on view in the West End, marking the publication of a magisterial new biography by Frances Spalding.Although Clough has been widely exhibited her art remains curiously unknown and unappreciated on a wider scale. Her peer group, including the postwar Neo-Romantics, have been positively scrutinised Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Wordsworth would not be happy. The bard of Grasmere once wrote a poem deploring the new-fangled habit of tourists wandering about the lakes with a book in hand. “A practice very common,” he harrumphed, before crossing out the whole poem. The preference, as he saw it, should be to engage directly with the landscape rather have one’s responses fed to us through the prism of literature. Writing Britain goes one better (or worse): a tour of the whole island and its islands as seen through its writers, you can travel from Daphne Du Maurier’s Cornwall to Dr Johnson’s Hebrides entirely through the Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
From Caro at Chatsworth and now de Waal at Waddesdon, the grandest of the stately homes are invigorating their historic collections with seasonings of the contemporary. Like Chatsworth, Waddesdon also has a growing permanent collection of contemporary sculpture housed in its famous gardens, from Michael Craig-Martin to Richard Long, as well as a small group of Lucian Freud indoors, including a portrait of the current Lord Rothschild.The impulse is understandable: to enliven, enhance and underline the historically frozen displays. If the intellectual aesthetic framework complements and Read more ...
theartsdesk
Collect is the international art fair for exquisitely crafted contemporary objects. Launched in 2004 by the Crafts Council, the fair represents galleries from around the world and showcases the best ceramic, glass, jewellery, textiles, wood, furniture and fine metalwork by new and established artists.National museums that have purchased work for their permanent collections include the British Museum and the V&A, but the fair is equally popular with private collectors and members of the public who get the chance to see and buy work from leading artists (pictured right: Phoenix, Halima Read more ...
fisun.guner
The Vollard Suite is Picasso’s most celebrated series of etchings. Named after Ambroise Vollard, the influential avant-garde art dealer who gave the 19-year-old Picasso his first exhibition in Paris in 1901, the series was commissioned by the dealer in 1930. For the next seven years Picasso worked on it in creative bursts, completing a series of 100 etchings. Last autumn, one of the complete set – a total of 310 were printed – was purchased by London-based private collector Hamish Parker as a gift to the British Museum.Since the series has never previously been shown in its entirety in the UK Read more ...
Sarah Kent
As an art school the Bauhaus has a reputation for being the cradle of modernism, famous for establishing an alliance between art and industry which produced enduring design classics such as Marcel Breuer’s tubular steel chairs, Josef Albers’ silver and glass fruit bowl and Marianne Brandt’s elegant globe lamps. But that is only part of the story.When the school was set up in Weimar in 1919 the image used to embody its aims and ideals owed nothing to new technology. Illustrating the prospectus was a woodcut by Lyonel Feininger (pictured below right) intended to evoke the era of great cathedral Read more ...
fisun.guner
Where’s Marcus Coates? The gangly shaman-artist was last seen communing with the dark spirit of the soon-to-be demolished Heygate Estate in the Elephant and Castle, but, hell, he’s nowhere on the Turner Prize 2012 shortlist.Coates is an artist whose profile has been steadily growing over the last decade. Last year he showed a moving work at the Serpentine Gallery in which he carried out the last wishes of patients in a hospice (one elderly gentleman said he’d always wanted to go to the Amazon, and so Coates undertook the trip on his behalf). But after seeing his latest film, Vision Quest Read more ...