painters
sue.steward
The 2010 Brighton Photo Biennial has seen unprecedented numbers of visitors flock to the coast, and tonight will host a talk by one of the most original fine-art photographers working in Britain today. Wolfgang Tillmans will explore his unique and hugely influential approach to photography and the relationship between contemporary art and documentary and will undoubtedly cite his latest projects, the refreshing summer exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery and the recently launched, more audacious event at Liverpool’s Walker Art Gallery.It’s easier to imagine a Tillmans show in the city’s Read more ...
fisun.guner
There may be some who feel this year’s shortlist for the Turner Prize has done little to forge ahead with anything new, innovative and different. And then there may be others who will welcome the rather more established artists on this year’s list, that is those who have continued to steadily develop their practice for well over a decade, with no great surprises, such as Angela de La Cruz and Dexter Dalwood.With the obvious proviso that, old or new, the work must be interesting, engaging and intelligent, I see no problem in tending towards the latter camp. In any case, a relentless drive Read more ...
fisun.guner
“Henry VIII is the only king whose shape we remember,” David Starkey tells us in the first of a new series of “polemical essays” on British art. To demonstrate, he reduces the king’s form to its bare Cubist geometry. He sketches a trapezoid for the chest – an impressive 54 inches in life, as attested by his made-to-measure suit of armour; two “chicken-wing” triangles for the puffed sleeves; two simple parallel lines for the wide-apart legs. Oh, and a small, inverted triangle for the codpiece. This last addition, as originally drawn-in for comedic value by the Tudor historian G R Elton, and Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Mount Vesuvius blew its top in 1631, spewing molten lava into the sea and filling the air with ash clouds that reached as far as Constantinople. The eruption and accompanying earthquakes killed 3,000 people and caused widespread devastation, all of which made a lasting impression on the 16–year-old Salvator Rosa. As an artist he was to specialise in darkly tempestuous landscapes filled with menace in which small figures are dwarfed by towering cliffs, or beset by bandits, while storm clouds gather over ruined buildings and blasted trees.In his lifetime Rosa became a cult figure, as seemingly Read more ...
fisun.guner
Treasures from Budapest – phew! It’s overwhelming. One staggers out quite cross-eyed and wobbly-kneed. There are over 200 works, for heaven’s sake. And so many Virgins: sweet-faced Italian Madonnas, austere Eastern European Madonnas, pallid German ones. There’s a tiny, exquisite yet unfinished Raphael Madonna, known as The Esterházy Madonna, since much of the collection of Old Masters shown here was amassed by Prince Nikolaus II Esterházy. Oh, and there’s the stubby-nosed, chinless Viennese one by an unknown altar-piece painter (such an arrestingly odd face; are her eyes actually going in the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Our culture is hungry for stories of buried treasure, for the lost archive. So when something of startling value is brought blinking into the light after many years, it answers a romantic urge. Of course it doesn’t happen much any more, not in a digitised e-culture in which, like Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, you really can put a girdle round the Earth in no time at all. Something interesting has just cropped up in Italy, mind.An artist called Pordenone Montanari put his house in Piedmont on sale. The name won’t mean anything. Montanari, now in his seventies, had been exhibited Read more ...
fisun.guner
There’s a little-known side to the 19th-century American artist John Singer Sargent, and it is as far removed from the razzle-dazzle of his glittering career as a high-society portraitist as you can imagine. The artist who was famously described by Rodin as “the Van Dyck of our times” started his career emulating that great master of the seas, J M W Turner. He diligently honed his craft by painting dramatic seascapes, gentle coastlines and noble fishing folk. And if the 20-year-old Sargent couldn’t quite manage the roiling waves and lowering skies with quite the same level of brilliance as Read more ...
fisun.guner
What a troubled life Alice Neel led. The death of her first child, a daughter, who died of diphtheria in 1928 just before her first birthday; another daughter lost to her estranged husband’s family in Cuba two years later (as an adult and a mother herself, the daughter, Isabetta, committed suicide); life as a single mother raising two later sons on welfare in the slum district of New York's Spanish Harlem; and a neglected but always diligent artist for much of the rest of it, only achieving fame and acclaim towards the end.And yet we find her, in variously dated archive footage featured Read more ...
fisun.guner
He may be a writer, a director, an actor, a historian, and, of course, a former member of Monty Python, yet rather than being a Renaissance man, Terry Jones is clearly a mediaevalist at heart. We know this not only because he has written well-received books on Chaucer and medieval history, but an amiable half hour spent in his company at the National Gallery shows us just where his sensibilities lie. He was the first guest in a series inviting celebs to talk about their favourite artworks and Tim Marlow, whose televisual style is so effortlessly smooth and mellow that you might mistake him Read more ...
judith.flanders
When is a fake a forgery? When is it a mistake? And when is it simply not what it appears? The National Gallery’s second summer exhibition to focus on its own collection here examines the questions of attribution, using the latest scientific resources to back up – or contradict – tradition, connoisseurship and curatorial decisions, good and bad. The gallery is putting its own mistakes on show, and over the 170-plus years of its existence, there have been more than a few. Yet the exhibition, however openly acknowledging its errors, neglects to give historical context, so it is unclear Read more ...
fisun.guner
Last month, the National Portrait Gallery unveiled a huge, new portrait of Anna Wintour. Painted by Alex Katz, the celebrated New York Pop portraitist, American Vogue’s scary editor-in-chief is shown with famous helmet bob intact, but minus her trademark dark glasses. The picture depicts Wintour, whose icy blue stare could run a chill through you (she's known as Nuclear Wintour), against a sunny yellow backdrop – which looks like an attempt to raise the temperature of that icicle glare. You pass it as you enter this year’s BP Portrait Award. I’m thinking of that picture because, in Read more ...
mark.hudson
Terry Setch can lay claim to being the most underrated artist in Britain. Not that the Cardiff-based Londoner has been entirely neglected: acclaimed as one of Britain’s most powerful painters by his contemporary John Hoyland, he’s been garlanded with awards, granted a retrospective at The Serpentine and was recently made an RA. Yet Setch (born 1936) has still had nothing like the recognition he deserves as one of Britain’s most intelligent and inventive painters. And the crime for which he’s been sentenced to this relative obscurity: simply, not being based in London, but in Wales.If the Read more ...