Abstract Expressionism
Gary Naylor
Like fellow New Yorker, Lee Miller, Lee Krasner changed her given name, the better to be accepted into what she called "The Boys Club" of 20th century Modern Art. Like Miller, she was known more for her working and romantic partnership with a major artist – for Man Ray, read Jackson Pollock. And like Miller, Lee Krasner is now belatedly acknowledged as a major artist in her own right – though she does not have a solo Tate show, as Miller does this Autumn (at least not yet). We open on her working in her Long Island studio, surrounded by her paintings, canvases that you can’t quite place – Read more ...
mark.kidel
The vast and various spaces of Frank Gehry’s monumental Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris suit the needs of the thrilling Mark Rothko exhibition now inhabiting its labyrinthine multi-storey suite of galleries.Some of the 115 works on display require a kind of intimacy – enclosed spaces with the feel of a chapel rather than the classsic antiseptic white cube – and others benefit from wider vistas, in which his relentless explorations can breathe, standing alone while being connected with other works from the same period. With help from the artist’s son Christopher Rothko, the curator Suzanne Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Either side of a doorway, framing a view of Turner’s The Evening Star, c. 1830 (Main picture), Sean Scully’s Landline Star, 2017, and Landline Pool, 2018, frankly acknowledge their roots. Abstract as they are, Scully’s horizontal bands of colour read as landscapes – or rather seascapes – in which the meeting points of earth and sea, sea and sky provide a compositional and conceptual scaffold. This exhibition of new work by Sean Scully is the latest in a series of encounters between contemporary artists and works in the National Gallery. Irish-born Scully pays homage to paintings he Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
“Oh say, can you see, by the dawn’s early light” was a vision of the American flag, that star-spangled banner, riding proud from Francis Scott Key’s patriotic poem of 1814 based on an episode in the War of 1812. His sentiments were decades later rather improbably set to the tune of a popular drinking song from a London gentlemen’s club, metamorphosing into the official American national anthem by Act of Congress in 1931 – you couldn’t make it up.That was just one of the unexpected facts in Waldemar Januszczak’s three-part foray into the special nature, as he sees it, of American art: as in Read more ...
Marianka Swain
The band’s back together. Alfred Molina plays Rothko for the third time in Michael Grandage’s revisiting of John Logan’s richly textured two-hander, first seen at the Donmar in 2009 and then bypassing the West End for Broadway. Another excellent Alfred – Alfred Enoch, of the Harry Potter films and American TV series How to Get Away with Murder – succeeds Eddie Redmayne as Rothko’s assistant, forming a compelling duo in this 90-minute meditation on the nature, process and purpose of art.We’re in Rothko’s New York studio in the late 1950s, where he’s working on a major commission: grand murals Read more ...
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 ...
mark.kidel
When the French painter Fabienne Verdier told me she’d been invited to explore the relationship between painting and music at the world-famous Juilliard School in New York, I knew straight away that this unusual residency should be documented.Fabienne is an adventurer. In her early 20s, she had courageously embarked on a journey of discovery. She was one of the very first French art students to go on an exchange programme to China, only a few years after the end of the Cultural Revolution. She had a really difficult time there, as she looked for a traditional calligrapher with whom she could Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
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 relax and enjoy this total immersion, for colour and gesture can never have been combined to such memorable effect. Nurtured by the melting pot of New York, this was the first homegrown group of American artists, its activities destined to put New York on the international culture map, wresting the crown of art capital from Paris.The diversity of Read more ...
Florence Hallett
There’s no sign of Oldenburg, Warhol or Lichtenstein and British pioneers Eduardo Paolozzi and Peter Blake are notably absent from this gritty vision of Pop art. Only in the final room do we come face-to-face with a Campbell’s Tomato Soup tin, the comforting bright colours and clean, supermarket-aisle lines blackened, singed and fragmented as if salvaged from some unimaginable disaster. Made by Russian duo Komar and Melamid in response to the state-sanctioned destruction of their 1974 self-portraits as Stalin and Lenin, this unaccountably shocking image is one of a series of paintings Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Pop went the easel, and more, as we were offered a worldwide tour – New York, LA, London, Paris, Shanghai – of the art phenomenon of the past 50 years (still going strong worldwide). We were led by a wide-eyed interlocutor, the bright-eyed and bushy-tailed Alastair Sooke, to the throbbing beat of – what else? – pop music, Elvis and much else besides.Sooke protested a bit too much, doing down the previous big deal in modern art, Abstract Expressionism, in order to enhance the revolutionary nature of Pop in its fascination and appropriation of the tropes of advertising and consumerism. He Read more ...
fisun.guner
Light. Light banishes the shadows where monsters lurk and where ghosts rattle their chains. “Give me some light, away!” cries the usurping king in Hamlet as his murderous deed is exposed by the trickery of art. What guilt plagues and seizes his conscience, and yet Claudius, conflicted, cannot pray. He must, therefore, remain a captive among the ghosts and the monsters where no light may fall.What did light mean for Philip Guston? Not what it means for most painters, nor for those seeking the redemptive light. The naked light bulb that pops up in so many of his paintings is both the Read more ...
mark.hudson
Alan Davie, who died on Saturday aged 93, was one of the great 20th-century British artists, a life-long maverick whose explosive canvases cut a swathe through the provincial aridity of the postwar art scene. The first British – probably the first European – artist to become aware of Pollock’s innovations and take on the challenge of “action painting”, the quietly spoken but formidable Scot forged his own expressive path that was less an imitation of Pollock more, as fellow artist Peter Doig put it recently, “like an expanded Paul Klee… but much more physical, much more visceral.”At the time Read more ...