painting
Brighton Festival 2018 PreviewWednesday, 02 May 2018
This weekend sees the Brighton Festival 2018 kick off. Anyone visiting the city on Saturday 5 May would find this hard to miss as the famous Children’s Parade makes its way around the streets, a joyous dash of colour and creativity. This year’s... Read more... |
Martin Gayford: Modernists & Mavericks review - people, places and paintSunday, 22 April 2018
Back in the early Sixties Lucian Freud was living in Clarendon Crescent, a condemned row of houses in Paddington which were gradually being demolished around him. The neighbourhood was uncompromisingly working class and to his glee his neighbours... Read more... |
Picasso 1932: Love Fame Tragedy, Tate Modern review - a diary in paint?Thursday, 22 March 2018
Painted in ice-cream shades punctuated with vivid red, the series of portraits made by Picasso in the early weeks of 1932 are as dreamy as love letters. His mistress Marie-Thérèse Walther – we assume it is she – lies adrift in post-coital languor,... Read more... |
Come to Dust: Glenn Brown, Gagosian Gallery review - seductive and disturbingMonday, 29 January 2018
When I began studying art history, my Bible was Ernst Gombrich’s The Story of Art. The reproductions are mostly in black and white and, thumbing through my dusty old copy, I find a photograph of the Jesuit church in Rome, whose ceiling was... Read more... |
Selma Parlour: Upright Animal, Pi Artworks review - incandescent coloursThursday, 18 January 2018
In the dark days of January, white cube galleries are luminous spaces. This is especially true of Pi Artworks right now: the Fitzrovia gallery is showing an incandescent array of 23 paintings by Selma Parlour. Taken in at once and at first sight,... Read more... |
Rose Wylie: Quack Quack, Serpentine Gallery - anarchy at 83Friday, 01 December 2017
Three years ago Rose Wylie won the prestigious John Moore’s Painting Prize. She was 80 years old and had been painting away in relative obscurity for many decades. You might suppose, then, that the prize was given in recognition of past... Read more... |
Modigliani, Tate Modern review - the pitfalls of excessFriday, 24 November 2017
Modigliani was an addict. Booze, fags, absinthe, hash, cocaine, women. He lived fast, died young, cherished an idea of what an artist should be and pursued it to his death. His nickname, Modi, played on the idea of the artiste maudit – the... Read more... |
Lake Keitele: A Vision of Finland review, National Gallery - light-filled northern vistasSaturday, 18 November 2017
Finland is celebrating its centenary this year and the National Gallery's exhibition of four paintings by Akseli Gallen-Kalela (1865-1931) of a very large lake in central Finland is a beguiling glimpse of the passion its inhabitants attach to its... Read more... |
The Most Expensive Paintings Ever SoldThursday, 16 November 2017
Yesterday the record for the most expensive painting ever sold was broken. At Christie's in New York Leonardo da Vinci's Salvator Mundi the hammer was knocked down on a price of $450 million. It's a lot of money, period, and even more for a painting... Read more... |
Sargent, Dulwich Picture Gallery review - wonders in watercolourThursday, 29 June 2017
This sparkling display of some four score watercolours from the first decade of the last century throw an unfamiliar light on the artistry of John Singer Sargent (1856-1925), the last great swagger portrait painter in the western tradition. None... Read more... |
Fahrelnissa Zeid, Tate Modern review - rediscovering a forgotten geniusFriday, 16 June 2017
I can’t pretend to like the work of Fahrelnissa Zeid, but she was clearly an exceptional woman and deserves to be honoured with a retrospective. She led a privileged life that spanned most of the 20th century; born in Istanbul in 1901 into a... Read more... |
Canaletto & the Art of Venice, The Queen's Gallery - previewTuesday, 16 May 2017
Even today, the perception of Venice as a city only half-rooted in mundane reality owes a great deal to Canaletto (1697-1768), an artist who made his name producing paintings for English tourists visiting Italy in the 18th century. Recognisable... Read more... |
