This must be the first time a black artist has been honoured with a retrospective that fills the main galleries of the Royal Academy. Celebrating Kerry James Marshall’s 70th birthday, The Histories occupies these grand rooms with such joyous ease and aplomb that it makes one forget how rare it is for blackness to be given centre stage.“I’m trying to establish a phenomenal presence that is unequivocally black and beautiful,” explains Marshall. “What I’m trying to do in my work is establish presence with a capital P.” And boy does he succeed! Gallery after gallery is filled with pictures that Read more ...

When he was a callow youth of 18, German artist Anselm Keifer got a travel grant to follow in the footsteps of his idol, Vincent van Gogh. Some sixty years later, work by the two artists has been brought together at the Royal Academy in a show that highlights Van Gogh’s influence on his acolyte and invites you to compare and contrast.In the intervening years, Keifer has gained a huge international reputation with gargantuan paintings, sculptures and installations. His obsession with Van Gogh led him, in 1992, to move to the south of France where he transformed a former silk factory and the Read more ...

Michael Craig-Martin was the most playful and provocative of the conceptual artists. His early sculptures are like visual puns, a play on the laws of nature. On the Table, 1970 (pictured below right), for instance, appears to defy gravity. Four buckets filled with water stand on a table; so far so ordinary. But the table has no legs and is suspended from the ceiling by ropes and pulleys.Normal relationships are reversed; by acting as a counter balance, the buckets hold up the table rather than the other way round. On the Shelf, 1970, consists of 15 milk bottles lined up on a shelf tilted at a Read more ...

Ukraine’s history is complex and often bitter. The territory has been endlessly fought over, divided, annexed and occupied. From 1917-20 it enjoyed a brief period of independence before being swallowed up once more by the Soviet Union after a vicious three year war – an example that Vladimir Putin is copying with his monstrous invasion.Now Ukrainians are being forced to fight, once more, for independence is an appropriate time to reveal that many artists of the so-called Russian avant-garde were actually from Ukraine. Famous pioneers of abstract art such as Kasimir Malevich, Vladimir Tatlin, Read more ...

In Titian’s painting Diana and Actaeon,1559, a cluster of naked beauties bathes beside a stream. Scarcely visible in the right hand corner is a black woman helping the goddess hide her nudity from Acteon who has stumbled into her private glade. The servant’s clothing and dark skin contrast with the pearly pink flesh of the nymphs – so much so that she almost merges with the tree trunk behind her, as though she were just part of the scenery.In her intaglio version of Titian’s painting, Barbara Walker bleaches out everyone except the black woman, whom she lovingly highlights in pencil. This Read more ...

One of the most cherished memories of my 40 plus years as an art critic is of easing my way between Marina Abramović and her partner Ulay. They were standing either side of a doorway at Documenta in Kassel, Germany, leaving just enough room for people to squeeze through, trying not to touch their naked bodies.That was in 1977; Imponderabilia (pictured below right) is now being performed again at the Royal Academy by young artists trained for the purpose by Abramovic. For me, this induces a strong sense of déja vu; and although the feeling may be inevitable in a retrospective, it’s Read more ...

Whether you believe that Ellen Brammar’s play, Modest, newly arrived in London from Hull Truck Theatre, succeeds or not, rather depends on your criteria for evaluating theatre. On storytelling, character development and nuance, it is two and a half hours that goes nowhere. On representation, audience appeal and addressing past injustices, well, the reaction in the house to this Middle Child and Milk Presents collaboration will confirm that the job is done.Elizabeth Thompson’s The Roll Call was the sensation of the Royal Academy’s 1874 Summer Exhibition. Owing something to Gustave Courbet and Read more ...

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 ...

The Royal Academy’s Making Modernism is a welcome introduction to seven women painters working in Germany at the beginning of the last century. It wouldn’t surprise me if you’d never heard of Gabriele Münter, Marianne Werefkin and Paula Modersohn-Becker even though they enjoyed international reputations during their lives, since their male counterparts (Kandinsky, Klee, Jawlensky and Macke) are not well known here either.Käthe Kollwitz may be a more familiar name; her harrowing prints and drawings are so powerful they knock the spots off everything else here. One of her most famous etchings, Read more ...

South African artist William Kentridge appears on video in his studio, twice. On the right he sits scribbling, waiting for an idea to surface. Meanwhile his alter ego stands impatiently by, trying to peek at his other half’s notes and, desperate for enlightenment, even reads a recipe out loud. The artist, it seems, doesn’t have a clue; he is as much in the dark as everyone else. A Lesson in Lethargy, 2010 offers a brief moment of humour in this relentlessly dark exhibition.Born in Johannesburg in 1955, Kentridge grew up under apartheid and the large charcoal drawings that open the Royal Read more ...

I’ve always been bemused by the American painter, Milton Avery. Not having seen enough of his paintings together, I couldn’t gauge if they are quirkily naive – lodged in a cul de sac aside from the mainstream – or hyper-sophisticated harbingers of things to come.The Royal Academy’s retrospective, the first of its kind in Europe, reveals that, in a way, he was both. He went from being an impressionist whose landscapes look positively 19th century to making glorious abstractions that anticipate the colour field paintings of Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman. But it was a long haul.Avery was Read more ...

Francis Bacon Man and Beast fills most of the main galleries at the Royal Academy. Thankfully, five of the rooms are empty. The exhibition is such a dispiriting experience, I’d have been hollering like a howler monkey if there’d been any more. And as it was, I came out feeling emotionally numb.It’s not what Bacon intended. He hoped his paintings would “unlock the valves of feeling and therefore return the onlooker to life more violently.” Maybe you need a penchant for violence to respond as he hoped since, for him, living life violently was the norm. When his military father discovered his Read more ...