Visual arts
theartsdesk in New York: A Rooftop Ramble in the High Line ParkSunday, 28 August 2011
The High Line Park on the far west side of Manhattan, built on an old elevated train track, is a unique combination of everything New Yorkers love - fabulous views, a piece of history, a traffic-free zone (no dogs, skateboards or bicycles), unusual... Read more... |
theartsdesk in Reykjavík: Fanfare for the Harpa Concert HallSunday, 28 August 2011
After three days' motoring and clambering around the most awesome natural landscapes I've ever seen, how could a mere concert hall in a city the size of Cambridge begin to compare? Well, it helped that the façades in which that great visionary... Read more... |
Edinburgh Art Festival: A Festival woven together by the city itselfFriday, 26 August 2011
A few days visiting the Edinburgh Art Festival and the city itself becomes the encircling gallery. Under great canvases of lowering grey cloud, plunging up and down the different levels of the Old Town and the New, things unfold against the intense... Read more... |
Where Graffiti is a Rarefied ArtThursday, 25 August 2011
Monaco, dormitory town of the discreetly super-rich, isn’t the most obvious place to find a major exhibition of street art, the subject on which many recent commenters on theartsdesk are impassioned. The pavements of this city within a principality... Read more... |
Women War Artists, Imperial War Museum, LondonTuesday, 23 August 2011
The sturdy, healthy, almost glowing attractiveness of Ruby Loftus, her reddish curls partly tamed by a green hair net, her face punctuated by bright-red lipstick characteristic of the 1940s, her blue overall neatly complementing her red shirt, and... Read more... |
Extract: Stealing RembrandtsTuesday, 23 August 2011
On October 10, 1994, a burglar with a sledgehammer smashed a window at the Rembrandt House Museum and stole a single painting, Man with a Beard (1647). The work had once been considered a Rembrandt, but is now attributed to an unidentified student... Read more... |
theartsdesk in Tbilisi: The Dilemma over Georgian ArchitectureSaturday, 20 August 2011
In Tbilisi, Georgia, artists and art historians are calling for the Government to stop destroying their classic Old Town with its winding streets and wooden balconies. New organisations have been formed, exhibitions held to publicise this creeping... Read more... |
Graffiti Gallery: Crack & Shine InternationalFriday, 19 August 2011
It’s not the first time we have showcased the work of Will Robson-Scott. Nearly two years ago we published a set of images from Crack & Shine, a portfolio which documented the nocturnal habits of a set of London street artists. Crack & Shine... Read more... |
Stanley Spencer and The English Garden, Compton VerneyThursday, 18 August 2011
In his later years, Stanley Spencer cut quite a figure in his native village of Cookham in Berkshire: he would often be seen pushing his rickety pram, with its battered umbrella, paints and canvas, and a hand-painted sign requesting all curious... Read more... |
My Summer Reading: Playwright Alfred UhryThursday, 18 August 2011
Alfred Uhry, now 74, may boast the greatest ratio of accolades to output of just about any American playwright, having copped two Tony Awards and a Pulitzer Prize across merely a handful of works and an Academy Award for the film version of his best... Read more... |
Don McCullin, Tate BritainTuesday, 16 August 2011
Photography isn’t looking, it’s feeling. If you can’t feel what you’re looking at, then you’re never going to get others to feel anything when they look at your pictures. Thus Don McCullin, quoted on the information board of a new display at Tate... Read more... |
Royal Manuscripts: The Genius of Illumination, British LibrarySaturday, 13 August 2011A unique treasure trove of medieval and Renaissance manuscriptsassembled by English kings and queens over 700 years.The works on display include colourful histories and genealogies, Bibles and Psalters, scienti fic works and accounts of coronations... Read more... |
