British Museum
Renaissance to Goya: Prints and Drawings from Spain, British MuseumFriday, 21 September 2012
Alonso Berruguete, Vicente Carducho, Juan Antonio Conchillos y Falco and Pedro Machuca are hardly familiar names in the Anglophone art world, but their drawings are on view in a revelatory exhibition. The British Museum is showing nearly all its... Read more... |
Shakespeare: Staging the World, British MuseumSaturday, 21 July 2012
Where on earth do you begin if all the world’s a stage? When not sifting through the entrails of dynastic English history or sunning themselves in Italy, the plays of Shakespeare really do put a girdle round the known globe. They send postcards from... Read more... |
BlackmailSaturday, 07 July 2012
The premiere of the newly restored version of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1929 silent classic Blackmail, outdoors at the British Museum, will go down as one of the defining moments of the London 2012 cultural extravaganza. This was a thrilling,... Read more... |
Art of America, BBC FourTuesday, 15 November 2011
For dull reasons to do with a dodgy digital box and a very old analogue telly, I can’t tune in to BBC Four during live transmissions, so I either catch up on iPlayer, or (lucky me as a journalist) get to see programmes early. But I’m very glad I can... Read more... |
theartsdesk Debate: Dance's Question TimeMonday, 07 November 2011
What lies ahead for dance as arts spending cuts bite? Can it survive the withdrawal of public funds that support dancers' training, choreographers' creativity, employment costs and health care? Is protest necessary? A panel of the British dance... Read more... |
Grayson Perry: The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman, British MuseumSaturday, 08 October 2011
You might think that a sharp-talking, cross-dressing potter-artist with a teddy bear obsession would present a challenge to the British public. Not a bit of it. Grayson Perry is music hall, he’s pantomime – there’s even a touch of Brideshead in... Read more... |
Devotion by Design: Italian Altarpieces Before 1500, National GallerySunday, 10 July 2011
Down the stairs the visitor enters a sequence of galleries gleaming with gold, seemingly illuminated by softly filtered evening light and flickering candles: here be a treasure house of stories in paint: saints, sinners and the narrative of the... Read more... |
Treasures of Heaven: Saints, Relics and Devotion in Medieval Europe, British MuseumWednesday, 06 July 2011
At the end of my road is a shrine dedicated to a young man murdered there more than a year ago. For the first few months lighted candles, plastic flowers, cards and poems penned by friends and relatives were left on a doorstep; now, though, a blue... Read more... |
Afghanistan: Crossroads of the Ancient World, British MuseumThursday, 10 March 2011
I’m in an exhibition of ancient artefacts from Afghanistan, all from the National Museum at Kabul, but I may well have stumbled into the wrong room at the British Museum. I could be in the BM’s Hellenic section of Greek art, or, taking a few steps... Read more... |
Modern British Sculpture, Royal AcademyFriday, 21 January 2011
Austere, elegant, impressive. Edwin Lutyens’s Whitehall Cenotaph is a thing of beauty, a monument that embodies permanence in the face of all that is impermanent, and solidity in the face of all that is ephemeral. It’s an inspired decision to bring... Read more... |
Journey Through the Afterlife: Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, British MuseumThursday, 04 November 2010
Those ancient Egyptians, they loved life! So much so that they even conceived of an afterlife that differed hardly at all from the one on Earth, only better: they didn’t get sick and they carried on just as before, to eternity – which might sound... Read more... |
The Printed Image in China, British MuseumWednesday, 12 May 2010
The British Museum’s current exhibition of 15th-century works on paper, Fra Angelico to Leonardo: Italian Renaissance Drawings, explores the increasing importance of the preparatory sketch in the development of western art. Central to that... Read more... |
