design
Sarah Kent
The Bloomsbury group’s habit of non-binary bed-hopping has frequently attracted more attention than the artworks they produced. But in their Vanessa Bell retrospective, the MK Gallery has steered blissfully clear of salacious tittle tattle. Thankfully, this allows one to focus on Bell’s paintings and designs rather than her complicated domestic life.The first picture you encounter was painted during a family holiday in Cornwall and dates back to 1900, the year before Bell became a student at the Royal Academy. Two thatched cottages cling to a steep slope by the sea. Punctuated only by the Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Iconic is a word the meaning of which is moving from the religious world into popular culture – win a reality TV show dressed as a teapot, and you can be sure that your 15 minutes of fame will be labelled iconic across social media. Not quite what Andrei Rublev had in mind 600 years ago.That said, few would deny that descriptor to the London Underground Map, not just a highly effective tool to navigate an ever-more complicated city, but perhaps the symbol of the metropolis. For something so ubiquitous and so useful, it is a surprisingly abstract work, owing more to Mondrian than Mercator Read more ...
Nick Hasted
There’s a thread of bright magic running through British cinema, from Powell and Pressburger through Nic Roeg, Derek Jarman and Lynne Ramsay, and it’s wrapped around Jarman’s last home like fisherman’s rope.His friend and collaborator Tilda Swinton called Prospect Cottage a charged place, acting as a battery for artists. It is particularly so this weekend, as the BFI’s Powell and Pressburger season sparks the first art made here since Jarman’s death in 1994. Powell + Pressburger: In Prospero’s Room draws on an obscure but profound connection. Jarman adapted Shakespeare’s The Tempest in 1979, Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Remember Gangnam Style, the music video that went viral in 2012? PSY’s cheeky lyrics and daft moves attracted 1.6 billion hits on YouTube, sparked dozens of parodies and turned the world on to K-pop. And that was just the beginning; K-pop has since mushroomed into a global phenomenon characterised by catchy tunes and fast-paced dance routines performed by beautiful young people in snappy outfits.Hallyu! The Korean Wave traces the development of K-pop from early bands like H.O.T and SEOTAIJI and Boys to K-pop idols such as BIGBANG, NCT and ATEEZ. Their success is fuelled by stunning visuals Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Isamu Noguchi may not be a household name, yet one strand of his work is incredibly familiar. In 1951 he visited a lamp factory in Gifu, a Japanese city famous for its paper lanterns. This prompted him to design the lampshades that, for decades, have adorned nearly every student’s bedsit.Strips of fine white paper made from mulberry tree bark are glued onto bamboo ribs to create a design that is amazingly versatile and comes in all shapes and sizes. Spheres are the most popular, but Noguchi also designed rectangles, cubes, pyramids, ellipses and columns alongside forms resembling pumpkins, Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
The Bauhaus school and its subsequent influence make an extraordinary story, and this film by Mat Whitecross, which has assembled a whole range of different voices and perspectives and woven them together, told it well.As a school, the Bauhaus lasted just 14 years from beginning to end. It opened in 1919 when Walter Gropius was finally able to accept an invitation to merge the art schools of Weimar and to be the principal of the “Staatliches Bauhaus”. The roll call of star teachers which Gropius attracted to Weimar was impressive right from the early years: Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
"I am amazed to be still alive. Two hours of medieval torment.” Franco Zeffirelli - who has died at the age of 96 - had spent the day having a lumbar injection to treat a sciatic nerve. You could hear the bafflement in his heavily accented English.It was a warm Roman evening in Casa Zeffirelli in September 2009. The grandest old man of the arts — who worked with Callas and von Karajan, Tennessee Williams and Toscanini, Burton and Taylor and Olivier, who had the ear of popes, princes and prime ministers — was now visibly in the deep winter of a lifespan that began in 1923. “Il maestro”, as Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Flight is a show by experimental Scottish theatre company Vox Motus, adapted from the novel Hinterland by Caroline Brothers. It’s about two Afghan child refugees making their way across Europe to the fabled land of “London” and is based very directly on her own interviews with asylum seekers as a journalist. So far, so narrartively straightforward but Flight is unlike anything most people will have seen. It is as much art installation as it is theatre, perhaps more so, yet it’s a tale beautifully, economically told and is profoundly moving.In a recent artsdesk interview Candice Edmunds, one Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Who would have known that the word “Kubrickian” only entered the Oxford English Dictionary last year? You’d have thought that one of the great film directors of the 20th century would have earned his own epithet long ago. It’s taken a long time, too, for Stanley Kubrick: The Exhibition to reach his adopted homeland, and its current berth at London’s Design Museum – so long, in fact, that you might almost begin to wonder about prophets unhonoured and all that: the show opened originally in Frankfurt in 2004 and has been travelling the world, in one iteration or another, more or less ever since Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Mary Quant first made her name in 1955 with the wildly fashionable King’s Road boutique Bazaar. Initially selling a “bouillabaisse” of stock it was not until a pair of pyjamas she made was bought by an American who said he’d copy and mass produce them that Quant began dedicating herself to her own designs. Fittingly then, the V&A’s exhibition is not so much about the clothes as the attitude – commerce topped Quant’s priorities, fashion was the means.The roughly chronological exhibition is spread over two floors. While the lower level deals with the early, post-war years when Quant’s Read more ...
Katherine Waters
When in 1800 the architect Sir John Soane bought Pitzhanger Manor for £4,500, he did so under the spell of optimism, energy and hope. The son of a bricklayer, Soane had – through a combination of talent, hard work and luck – risen through the ranks of English society to become one of the preeminent architects of his generation. His purchase of the out-of-town Pitzhanger was both a way of cementing his station and, in razing and replacing the original Georgian house with a splendid and idiosyncratic home of his own specifications, showcasing his talents and architectural vision.Since Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
“When we graduated we were seeing lot of theatre as a literary form,” explains Candice Edmunds of the theatre company Vox Motus, “But we were really excited by it as a visual form and everything we make, from our earliest scratch pieces up to Flight, has really been an experimentation into how much we can substitute dialogue and the written word for theatrical visuals.”Edmunds, together with fellow Artistic Director, Jamie Harrison, founded Vox Motus in 2004 after graduating from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. Based in Glasgow, they’ve built a hefty reputation with theatre heavily Read more ...