National Gallery
The Brits Who Built the Modern World, BBC Four / The Man Who Fought the Planners, BBC FourFriday, 21 February 2014
There really was astonishing talent on display in The Brits Who Built the Modern World (*****), as full a television panorama of the work of the five architects whose careers were under examination – Richard Rogers, Norman Foster, Nicholas Grimshaw... Read more... |
Listed: 10 American paintings before PollockSunday, 16 February 2014
The National Gallery recently embarked on a first: they acquired their first American painting. Men of the Docks, 1912, (main picture) may not be George Bellows’ most famous or best-regarded work; nonetheless, it’s a gritty and beautifully observed... Read more... |
Yuletide Scenes 2: The Adoration of the KingsFriday, 20 December 2013
Jan Gossaert’s The Adoration of the Kings, painted in 1510-15, is a sumptuous, richly detailed and even, to us today, slightly hilarious painting. It’s the large central panel of a Flemish altarpiece which includes practically every motif of the... Read more... |
Yuletide Scenes 1: A Scene on the Ice near a TownThursday, 19 December 2013
The term “snow day” may have been coined with the most recent spate of cold winters in mind, encapsulating the modern-day, not to mention British, consequences of winter weather, but Hendrick Avercamp’s Seventeenth-century “snow day”, painted in... Read more... |
Facing the Modern: The Portrait in Vienna 1900, National GalleryTuesday, 08 October 2013
“We should pity the age which finds its reflection in this ‘art’”, wrote one critic in 1911, after seeing too many Vienna Secession paintings. From the quotation marks, we see the despairing critic was attacking the art rather than the age.... Read more... |
Vermeer & Music: The Art of Love and Leisure, National GalleryWednesday, 03 July 2013
Music and art have been intertwined for millennia, the static, frozen and soundless moment of paint capturing the feeling and the meaning of ephemeral time-based music. And nowhere can the act of making music have so thoroughly infiltrated a society... Read more... |
10 Questions for Artist Michael LandyMonday, 20 May 2013
Much of Michael Landy’s work concerns destruction or decay. The British artist, who recently turned 50 and is part of the YBA generation, came to prominence in 2001 with the Artangel commission Break Down, which saw all his worldly possessions... Read more... |
Federico Barocci: Brilliance and Grace, National GalleryThursday, 28 February 2013
Federico Barocci, who he? According to the National Gallery, a great Renaissance, mannerist and Baroque painter hardly known outside Italy, the National’s own Madonna of the Cat his only easel painting in a public collection in the UK... Read more... |
Through American Eyes: Frederic Church and the Landscape Oil Sketch, National GalleryFriday, 08 February 2013
Pre-Raphaelites, eat your heart out; and wherever he is, John Ruskin, once so dismissive of the artist, must be beaming with pleasure. The American landscape painter Frederic Church (1826-1900) was indeed seen as the heir to Turner, and his distinct... Read more... |
Dance: The Best of 2012Saturday, 29 December 2012
Offstage dramas made more waves than onstage, where dance-followers have much less to see, and a prospect of still less in this arid immediate future. The on-dit revolved around the Olympics ceremonies, TV dance, Michael Clark and some spectacular... Read more... |
Yuletide Scenes 5: Hunters in the SnowSunday, 23 December 2012
The great Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder was instrumental in developing landscape painting as a genre in its own right. Hunters in the Snow, 1565, is one of five surviving paintings (Bruegel painted six) in his cycle depicting The Labours... Read more... |
Yuletide Scenes 4: Mystic NativitySaturday, 22 December 2012
I’ve always loved this painting in the National Gallery by Sandro Botticelli. The jewel-like colours and exquisite clarity of detail create a consoling sense of lucidity, as though everything has been revealed to be alright.The reason for this... Read more... |
