20th century
'Before punk, there was Rauschenberg'Tuesday, 29 November 2016
In this cut and paste world, we have become used to a multiplicity of images: screens, words and pictures from across the globe and across history flicker through our field of vision, competing for our attention with the natural world, the urban... Read more... |
Total Immersion: Richard Rodney Bennett, BarbicanMonday, 28 November 2016
Send in the paradoxes. Richard Rodney Bennett (1936-2012) had been so obsessed as a young man by music of the avant-garde, he would hitch-hike to Darmstadt to be in the same room as his (then) idols Berio, Maderna, and Boulez. He and Cornelius... Read more... |
Intrigue: James Ensor by Luc Tuymans, Royal AcademyTuesday, 08 November 2016
James Ensor? Who he? A marvellous Anglo-Belgian artist (1860-1949) little known outside Belgium, whose masterpiece, The Entry of Christ into Brussels in 1889, 1888, is a trophy painting at the Getty, California. It is present here in his own print... Read more... |
Paul Nash, Tate BritainMonday, 31 October 2016
In Monster Field, 1938, fallen trees appear like the fossilised remains of giant creatures from prehistory. With great horse-like heads, and branches like a tangle of tentacles and legs, Paul Nash’s series of paintings and photographs serve as... Read more... |
Picasso Portraits, National Portrait GalleryThursday, 06 October 2016
There’s something familiar about those dark, piercing eyes, but the impenetrable, mask-like countenance of Picasso’s Self-Portrait with Palette, 1906, is ultimately unknowable. In fact, the painting serves as something of a rebuke: we think we know... Read more... |
Stravinsky: Myths and Rituals 4, Philharmonia, Salonen, RFHMonday, 26 September 2016
Stravinsky's music, chameleonic yet always itself, offers so many lines of thought. One struck me immediately with the descending, even harp notes and tender, veiled strings at the start of his 1947 ballet Orpheus last night: the inexorable beat of... Read more... |
Abstract Expressionism, Royal AcademySaturday, 24 September 2016
Gorgeous, sumptuous, thrilling: here comes Abstract Expressionism riding into town, the first major overview in London since its own contemporary heyday in the 1950s. A clunky, unappealing label for such fabulously appealing stuff, it's best just to... Read more... |
William Kentridge: Thick Time, Whitechapel GalleryFriday, 23 September 2016
Of all the mesmerising images in William Kentridge’s major Whitechapel show, the one that lingers most, perhaps, is that of the artist himself, now turned 60, hunched and thoughtful, wandering through the studio in Johannesburg where he lives and... Read more... |
Gaga for Dada: The Original Art Rebels, BBC FourThursday, 22 September 2016
If you’ve had half an eye on BBC Four’s conceptual art week, you’ll have noticed that the old stuff is where it’s at, with Duchamp’s urinal making not one but two appearances, equalled only by Martin Creed, that other well-known, conceptual stalwart... Read more... |
NEON: The Charged Line, Grundy Art Gallery, BlackpoolThursday, 08 September 2016
Neon was once the triumphant glowing symbol of commerce and capitalism. In the 1930s the distinctive tube lighting gleamed above broadway theatres and on prominent billboards in the world’s great metropolises from New York to Paris. These glory days... Read more... |
DVD/Blu-ray: On the Black HillThursday, 08 September 2016
Bruce Chatwin’s sense of place stayed slippery. If he had roots, they were in the Black Mountains across the Welsh border, a fond childhood memory he deepened for his third book with the rich anecdotes buried in old newspapers. The tale this... Read more... |
Owen Wingrave, British Youth Opera, Peacock TheatreWednesday, 07 September 2016
Owen Wingrave is the Britten opera that always comes with a caveat, an apology. Dramatically flawed (a problem partially, but by no means entirely, accounted for by its genesis as a television opera) and musically uneven, it has nevertheless emerged... Read more... |
