Dulwich Picture Gallery
Florence Hallett
Before we consign this miserable year to history, there are a few good bits to be salvaged; in fact, for the visual arts 2016 has been marked by renewal and regeneration, with a clutch of newish museum directors getting into their stride, and spectacular events like Lumiere London, and London’s Burning bringing light in dark times. 2016 leaves an impressive legacy of museum-building, too: Tate Modern opened its much needed extension in the summer, and the new Harley Gallery at Welbeck in Nottinghamshire provides a fittingly magnificent home for the treasures of the Portland Collection.The Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Oh, those dogs: just a flick of the brush, and there they are, bursting with life. Pets, hunting dogs, companions, strays: romping on beaches, or in Dutch forests, living on farms and in imagined arcadias. Adriaen van de Velde was a 17th century master of canine depiction. His frisky creatures were bit players in hunting scenes filled with horses, carriages, people and birds ready to be let loose, all set in the verdant Dutch landscape, or by the North Sea. So clever was van de Velde at depicting domestic animals that part of his practice was to insert them into paintings by other artists. Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Nature, nationalism, folk culture: the broad themes of Norway’s visual arts map easily onto its music. That has given Leif Ove Andsnes and his colleagues plenty of leeway in planning their musical tributes to the painter Nikolai Astrup. For this, their second programme at the Dulwich Picture Gallery (which is hosting the first ever exhibition of Astrup’s work outside Norway, and the first major one worldwide) the three musicians presented a range of surprising facets of the nation’s musical psyche. We heard the folk themes, of course, but classical and even Baroque elements were also explored Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Dulwich Picture Gallery, the oldest public painting gallery anywhere with one of the world’s finest collections of Old Masters, has in recent years built up a deserved reputation for bringing to the British audience unfamiliar aspects of well known painters, along with reappraisals and new discoveries. Their latest show is the first-ever exhibition outside of Norway for that country's landscape painter Nikolai Astrup (1880-1928). The son of an ascetic Lutheran pastor, Astrup was sickly even as a child, living in a damp and cold wooden parsonage in a rigorous climate. Often bedridden, the Read more ...
theartsdesk
Walls that are floors, floors that are walls, and stairs that go up to go down: in the brain-befuddling art of MC Escher (1898-1972) the mundane everyday meets a world of paradox in which the rules of gravity, space and material reality are thrown into disarray. From his fantastical architectural spaces with flights of stairs that lead nowhere, to dazzling tessellations that fade into infinity, Escher is synonymous with queasy optical illusions that fascinate and nauseate in equal measure.Astonishingly popular, the art of Escher is some of the most widely recognised and well-loved ever made, Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Look at me, and think of England. This marvellous array of quirky, idiosyncratic watercolours by Eric Ravilious (1903-1942) from the 1930s until his premature death during wartime when his plane, on an air sea rescue mission for which he had volunteered, crashed in Iceland. It is full of memorable and haunting pictures. Drawing on a profound understanding of the history of the English watercolour and its concentration both on domesticity and majesty, Ravilious utilised the conventional response – in part the English distrust of grandeur and ambition – to produce a subtle assault on such Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Walking into this exhibition is a bit like walking into a great forest. The dark green walls are hung all around with paintings of trees; we look up through branches that spiral dizzyingly skyward, while the upwards sweep of vast trunks seem relentlessly, tangibly full of life. Some of these paintings verge on abstraction, the forms of tree trunks simplified and reduced to an arrangement of planes, with spatial recession represented entirely through colour. In others, a flurry of brushstrokes captures the energy of the forest, the wind in the leaves, the light breaking through to the velvety Read more ...
Florence Hallett
At the risk of sounding crass, I can’t help feeling that had Winifred Nicholson painted fewer flowers she might be better represented in the annals of art history. Of course, being a woman hasn’t helped, but as a woman flower painter she was ever destined for the footnotes. As is often the way with female artists, Winifred was highly regarded in her lifetime, and at the outset of her career she outsold her husband Ben Nicholson, whose reputation, posthumously, has almost entirely eclipsed her own.Next to the white reliefs and austere abstract paintings that have secured her husband's Read more ...
fisun.guner
David Hockney has been a printmaker for almost as long as he’s been a painter. From one of his earliest ventures into print, a self-portrait colour lithograph aged 16 while at Bradford College of Art (the black pudding-bowl hair emulates early hero Stanley Spencer, before Hockney went for the striking platinum-blond look), the two activities have been given equal weight throughout his career, though this, as it turns out, was mainly by accident. Being a penurious student at the Royal College of Art in 1959, and finding that he had to pay for his own painting materials, Hockney was drawn Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The very tall, skeletal and formidable Henry Tonks (1862-1937), surgeon and anatomist, became one of the most decisive, influential, scathing and inspirational teachers in the history of visual education. At the Slade, in his second career as artist and teacher, he presided over several generations of London-based artists who formed the bedrock of modernism, from the absorption of Impressionism to the various isms of the turn of the last century. He referred to this cohort of his students, here being celebrated, as “a crisis of brilliance”.It is the generation who first gaily embraced the Read more ...
josh.spero
The first room of Andy Warhol: The Portfolios at Dulwich Picture Gallery made me regret coming. The second room made me never want to leave. The first has 10 of the Flowers and 10 of the Campbell's Soup Cans, four weedy sunsets and one Marilyn in pink, purple and brown - hardly any nourishment, certainly nothing fresh. I'm a Warhol fan - 10 glowing Marilyns in a darkened room at the National Portrait Gallery is the closest I've come to a religious experience - but is there anything new to say about these overly familiar works?Luckily, there was also Birmingham Race Riot (1964) (pictured below Read more ...
fisun.guner
Last year, like every year, is a bit of a blur. I saw a lot, but all the good stuff seems to have clustered near the end. Maybe an end-of-year cultural bloat has finally settled. Anyway, to help jog the memory, I think I should start bottom-up. Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan (National Gallery, until 5 February) is a good place to kick off. It was always going to be the show that would get the most protracted drumroll, but with only nine paintings by the Renaissance Master himself and two questionable attributions, was it really all that in the flesh? Well, I can Read more ...