painters
Mark Sheerin
MK Gallery has a knack for showcasing mid-career artists before any other public space and this is Ellen Altfest’s first survey in the UK. There are 22 paintings here which, given their demands on her time, represent a significant proportion of the 44-year old’s output to date. Most of the pieces come from private collections, representing her commercial success with White Cube. And while the blue chip gallery showed her in the modest setting of Hoxton Square, these works couldn’t be further from the epic installations which appear to characterise the gallery’s new space in Bermondsey. Read more ...
Florence Hallett
The grand but domestic setting of Hertford House, home of the Wallace Collection, makes a fitting backdrop to an exhibition of paintings by Joshua Reynolds. The Marquesses of Hertford acquired some 25 paintings by Reynolds in the artist's lifetime, and after it, and the 12 that remain in the collection form the focus of this exhibition. Not only does the Wallace Collection give an impression of the way that paintings were collected and viewed in the 18th century and beyond, but in its wealth of Old Master and 18th-century French paintings, for example, it shares characteristics with Reynolds' Read more ...
fisun.guner
Made an Honorary Royal Academician just a few months before he died, in 1993, it’s taken till now for a posthumous Royal Academy survey to finally bring one of the absolute greats of American postwar painting to a UK audience. Of course, for those with long memories, there was the Whitechapel Gallery exhibition of 1991, but though it provided the impetus for the belated honour, it seemed to do little to bring the paintings of Richard Diebenkorn into the public realm.Diebenkorn, who spent most of his life in California, finally settling in Santa Monica in the mid-Sixties where he began his Read more ...
Sarah Kent
"My fatherland is South Africa, my mother tongue is Afrikaans, my surname is French, I don’t speak French. My mother always wanted me to go to Paris. She thought art was French because of Picasso. I thought art was American because of Artforum... I live in Amsterdam and have a Dutch passport. Sometimes I think I’m not a real artist because I’m too half-hearted and I never quite know where I am." (Marlene Dumas)Marlene Dumas is an artist alright; one of the best. If her paintings weren’t so exceptionally beautiful, this mid-career retrospective would feel overwhelmingly melancholic. This is Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The ebullient presenter, writer and director Waldemar Januszczak opens his enthusiastic and proselytising hour-long film on Sir Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) by reading out a series of disparaging quotes from other artists. William Blake thought Rubens’s shadows looked like excrement, that Rubens was a fool and his paintings were slobberings. Picasso thought Rubens was gifted but unusually nasty, whilst Thomas Eakins also thought him the nastiest painter, and Byron referred to his infernal glare of colours. Januszczak can even be pretty disparaging himself, discussing Read more ...
fisun.guner
We commemorated the centenary of the start of the First World War and we celebrated the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The year also marked a 70th anniversary for the D-Day landings. So it was oddly fitting that the London art calendar was most notable for the invasion of heavyweight Germans; namely, four postwar artists whose sense of the weight of German history is writ large in their work.There was Georg Baselitz with new self-portrait paintings at the Gagosian, early prints and drawings at the British Museum and a loan of his extensive German Renaissance print collection Read more ...
fisun.guner
Since David Hockney entered his eighth decade (he is now 77), we seem to have witnessed an accelerated output of major exhibitions, biographies and documentaries. The public appetite has never tired of this most tireless of artists, but it’s an interest that’s been given fresh impetus by the exuberance and vivacity of his epic series of paintings of the Yorkshire Wolds. Bruno Wollheim’s TV documentary, Hockney: A Bigger Picture (2009), was a look at this recent period of renewed vigour and creativity, while Randall Wright’s cinema-released second film of the artist – the first, David Hockney Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The chatty, loquacious, exuberant Simon Schama, whose seminal 1987 book on Holland in the 17th century, The Embarrassment of Riches, transformed the anglophone’s understanding of the Dutch Republic, describes himself as historian, writer, art critic, cook, BBC presenter. He is also the University Professor of History and Art History at Columbia, and has written 14 substantial and even significant books. On several of his subjects, from British art, slavery in America and landscape in culture to the history of the Jews, he has presented popular television series. The energy and curiosity is Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Last year, the German artist Georg Baselitz told Der Spiegel: “Women don't paint very well. It's a fact,” citing as evidence the failure of works by female artists to sell for the massive sums raised by their male counterparts. The amusing punchline to that story is that shortly afterwards a Berthe Morisot painting sold at auction for more than double the amount ever achieved by Baselitz himself. But be honest - come on, use your fingers - how many women artists can you think of? Because however much Baselitz’s misogyny appals you, the prospect of not one, but three programmes dedicated to Read more ...
fisun.guner
It’s part of the Lowry myth – the myth of many famous artists, in fact, whether or not it actually happens to be true – that he’s never been taken seriously as an artist by critics or by cognoscenti. Even the co-curator of this exhibition, T.J Clark says more or less the same. Lowry isn’t taken seriously, Clark has said, because anyone dealing with working-class life in class-ridden Britain can’t be taken seriously. Perhaps we might qualify this by adding that anyone dealing with working-class life from within it can’t be taken that seriously. Perhaps.Throughout the Twenties and Thirties Read more ...
josh.spero
He was uncompromising, honest, personal. He didn't like doing what he was told. He never followed fashion. Is this an accurate picture of Lucian Freud, or is it a description of almost every great artist who ever lived? The intensely banal voiceover for Lucian Freud: Painted Life on BBC Two which contained these insights (at least in the rough cut I viewed) made it seem like a painter out on his own, stringent in his artistic pursuit, was something we had never seen before. Thankfully the talking heads, intimates of Freud, created a properly personal portrait.The tension between the Read more ...
fisun.guner
Yayoi Kusama, one of Japan’s best-known living artists, has spent the past 34 years as a voluntary in-patient in a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo. Now 82, she was part of the New York avant-garde art scene of the Sixties, making work that anticipated both Andy Warhol’s repeated-motif “Cow Wallpaper” and Claes Oldenburg’s soft sculptures. Her nude happenings included orgies and naked gay weddings, over which she presided fully clothed like a psychedelic high priestess.Showing just how adept she was at garnering publicity, in 1968 Kusama wrote and distributed Open Letter to My Hero Richard M Read more ...