painters
fisun.guner
Some years ago the Dulwich Picture Gallery invited Howard Hodgkin to exhibit alongside the Old Masters in their collection. I am not a fan of this vastly overrated artist, but even a diehard enthusiast must have found the juxtaposition cruel. How could Hodgkin’s crudely daubed, splishy-sploshy canvases (I exempt from the description a few works painted at the highpoint of his career in the mid-Seventies) bear scrutiny against works by Rubens or Rembrandt? They couldn’t, and the exhibition was a car crash. So how will an artist whose works appear similarly unrestrained and unstructured fare in Read more ...
josh.spero
Fake or Fortune? on BBC One, with Fiona Bruce and art dealer and sleuth Philip Mould, ought to have been called CSI: Cork Street for its blend of fine art and forensic science. They were trying to resolve whether a Monet was in fact a Monet, using a 240 million-pixel camera, Monet's own accountbook (which Fiona Bruce ran her ungloved fingers across) and plenty of ominous music. Next up: who killed Marat in David's picture?The mystery of fakes, forgeries and misattributions becomes ever more fascinating as pictures fetch greater prices at auction; Monet's record stands at £41 million. The Read more ...
fisun.guner
As one of the stars of the Moulin Rouge, she was variously known by the nicknames "La Mélinite", "Jane la Folle", and "L’Etrange". The first was after a brand of explosive, the other two attesting to a little craziness. Jane Avril’s eccentric dance movements evoked the involuntary spasms of female hysteria patients. But while photographs exaggerate her childlike demeanour (she wears her hair in ringlets and poses in a range of shepherdess bonnets, a look popular in 19th-century music hall), as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s muse, she was transformed into a somewhat haunted figure far older than Read more ...
fisun.guner
Who were the Vorticists? Were they significant? Were they any good? And does this little-known British avant-garde movement – if it can be called anything as cohesive - really deserve a major survey at Tate Britain? Many of the group’s paintings never survived the First World War, and nor did one of its most talented supporters, the precocious French sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska; two of the most talented artists who did – David Bomberg and Jacob Epstein – were never signatories to its manifesto, and Epstein, for one, distanced himself; and, in its short life, there was only one Read more ...
fisun.guner
By anyone’s standards this is an obscure year for the Turner Prize shortlist: you should consider yourself a contemporary art aficionado if you’ve heard of even one of the artists. And if this is indeed the case, that artist is likely to be George Shaw; in recent years his work has featured regularly in group displays at Tate Britain. Shaw, a Coventry-born painter, was nominated for his Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art show, The Sly and Unseen Day. A pared-down version of this exhibition has now travelled to London, where it is beautifully and very simply hung in just one gallery space, at Read more ...
josh.spero
Richard Nagy's gallery has said that they don't want millions of people rushing to see their show of Egon Schiele's drawings of women - it's only a small second-floor space on New Bond Street after all, and 50 fragile pictures crowd the walls. But don't let that dissuade you from seeing one of the shows of the year.Schiele instantly summons up consumptive young women, déshabillées, angular, all the colours of livid bruises. His pencil marks are as sharp as the malnourished women's ribs. This show, however, shows why he was able to turn tawdry subject material into transporting art.
The Read more ...
judith.flanders
Max Bill might be the missing link in modern art. He died only in 1994, yet he studied at the Bauhaus in Dessau in the 1920s, taught by Josef Albers, László Moholy-Nagy, Paul Klee and Kandinsky. It is hard to imagine that someone who was working at full strength less than 20 years ago could have a past that is so strongly entwined with these legendary names – hard to imagine, that is, until one looks at the work displayed in this fine retrospective, which even so manages to encompass only five decades of a nearly seven-decade-long career.A Swiss artist (he was one of the few, or perhaps Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Half of Wales is visible from the blustery summit. “Of all the hills which I saw in Wales,” recalled George Borrow, author of the prolix Victorian classic Wild Wales, “none made a greater impression upon me.” He was not alone. Arenig Fawr, a southern outcrop of Snowdonia, was also the entry point for British art into Post-Impressionism. This at any rate was the claim of a scenic documentary which joined Augustus John and his young protégé James Dickson Innes on their productive two-year sojourn at the foot of the mountain.It’s a mountain in the Welsh sense of the word mynydd, being at 854 m/2 Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The story of the Pitmen Painters, a group of Northumbrian miners who decided to study art appreciation in their spare time and developed into a group of untrained but powerfully expressive artists, has been documented in a book by William Feaver and a play by Lee Hall. Robson Green's particular interest in the story stems from the fact that he's a miner's son, brought up in Dudley, a few miles south of the pitmen's hometown of Ashington.Green may be a successful actor, but he's no art critic - "I would actually think, why is he showing us this?" he said, confronted with a slide of Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The opening of Turner Contemporary is being heralded as one of the most important cultural events of the year. Described as "a national and international venue in the regions" the gallery, it is hoped, will attract visitors from London and abroad and transform Margate’s flagging fortunes by stimulating new businesses such as commercial galleries, as well as cafés, restaurants and bars.I hope they are right, but the opening exhibition is such a low-key affair that I can’t imagine visitors flocking to see it. Regeneration is clearly the name of the game, though. The train passes by the ruins of Read more ...
fisun.guner
A cult suggests unhealthy worship, and there’s more than a whiff of that in the heady decadence of the V&A’s latest art and design blockbuster, The Cult of Beauty. This is an exhibition which examines how the influence of a small clique of artists grew to inspire ideas not only about soft furnishings and the House Beautiful, but to influence a whole way of life, teaching the aspiring Victorian bohemian how, in the words of Oscar Wilde, “to live up to the beauty of one’s teapot”. And as one might expect, the exhibition is beautifully designed, in a way that suggests you might have stumbled Read more ...
judith.flanders
Chantal Joffe first came to attention in the 1990s with a series of paintings reproducing pornographic images, using a typically thick, impastoed paint and heavy brushstroke to depict hard-core acts in a defiantly flat, emotionless tone. Since then she has moved on, first to paintings reproducing fashion photographs, and now, in her new show, to images that re-imagine 19th-century aspects of femininity and femaleness in a 20th-century mash-up of psychology, anthropology and literary and art history. This sounds, unfortunately, rather less appealing than it is, for the images themselves mostly Read more ...