sat 17/05/2025

Visual arts

Art Gallery: The Worlds of Mervyn Peake

Peake's 'The Mad Hatter's Tea Party', 1945

Best known for the Gormenghast Trilogy, Mervyn Peake, who died in 1968 and whose centenary is celebrated this year, was also an artist, an illustrator and a poet. As well as illustrating his own fiction (images 5-9), some of his finest drawings were...

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The Worlds of Mervyn Peake, British Library

Best known as the creator of the Gormenghast trilogy, Mervyn P eake was also an accomplished painter, playwright, illustrator and poet. Using materials from the British Library’s collections, including the rece ntly acquired Peake archive, this...

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Twombly and Poussin: Arcadian Painters, Dulwich Picture Gallery

Twombly's 'Hero and Leandro (After Christopher Marlowe)' takes as its theme the classical legend of the doomed lovers

Some years ago the Dulwich Picture Gallery invited Howard Hodgkin to exhibit alongside the Old Masters in their collection. I am not a fan of this vastly overrated artist, but even a diehard enthusiast must have found the juxtaposition cruel. How...

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Eyewitness: Hungarian Photography in the 20th Century, Royal Academy

A subtly haunting and brilliantly composed photograph by André Kertész lives on as a wistfully memorable image of exile: in Lost Cloud, 1937, a small, isolated cloud drifts we know not where next to a New York skyscraper. Kertész is one of the...

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theartsdesk in Folkestone: Art Echoes by the Seaside

The locals are understandably proud of Folkestone; Everywhere Means Something to Someone is an idiosyncratic guidebook offering an insider’s view of the town that bears witness to the depth of people’s attachment to it. Put together for the ...

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Fake or Fortune?, Episodes 1 & 2, BBC One

Fake or Fortune? on BBC One, with Fiona Bruce and art dealer and sleuth Philip Mould, ought to have been called CSI: Cork Street for its blend of fine art and forensic science. They were trying to resolve whether a Monet was in fact a Monet, using a...

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Birmingham - Home of Metal

This site has never acknowledged a distinction between high and popular culture. Nor, it seems, does the city of Birmingham. Currently bidding for UK City of Culture 2013, it is also promoting itself as the "Home of (Heavy) Metal". This summer, at...

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Marcel van Eeden, Sprueth Magers London

An article in this week's New Yorker bemoans the death of drawing in art. Why has the emphasis on craft, Adam Gopnik writes, been replaced by concept? He has evidently not seen the fantastic noirish drawings of Marcel van Eeden at Sprueth Magers in...

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Marcel van Eeden: November 22, 1948, Spruth Magers Gallery

A series of new drawings by the Dutch artist which reveal an on going exploration of the concept of narration through the lives of a range of semi-fictional characters. Until 13 August http://www.spruethmagers.com /exhibitions/289

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Toulouse-Lautrec and Jane Avril: Beyond the Moulin Rouge, Courtauld Gallery

As one of the stars of the Moulin Rouge, she was variously known by the nicknames "La Mélinite", "Jane la Folle", and "L’Etrange". The first was after a brand of explosive, the other two attesting to a little craziness. Jane Avril’s eccentric dance...

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Folkstone Triennial 2011: A Million Miles From Home

Works by international contemporary artists who have developed new works for Folkstone's streets, squares, beaches and historic building s. Artists include Cornelia Parker, Martin Creed, Spencer Finch and Hamis h Fulton. Until September 25 http://...

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The Vorticists: Manifesto for a Modern World, Tate Britain

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska's phallic head of American poet Ezra Pound

Who were the Vorticists? Were they significant? Were they any good? And does this little-known British avant-garde movement – if it can be called anything as cohesive - really deserve a major survey at Tate Britain? Many of the group’s paintings...

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