wed 18/12/2024

pop art

British Design 1948 - 2012: Innovation in the Modern Age, Victoria & Albert Museum

The V&A has played a blinder. This extraordinary, exciting and unexpected exhibition provides endless trips down memory lane for many and will be a revelation for others. Ignore the clunky title, moving us from the postwar Olympics of 1948 to...

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Peter Blake revisits Sgt Pepper

The veteran of UK pop art Sir Peter Blake has updated his iconic sleeve for The Beatles' Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band on the occasion of his 80th birthday."It's a cross I bear, it's an albatross I have to deal with," he told BBC...

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Richard Hamilton, 1922-2011

At 89, Hamilton was still a subversive – perhaps the last of his kind

Hard on the heels of the death of Lucian Freud comes the departure of another British art great, an artist who was Freud’s exact contemporary but who seems to belong in a different aesthetic universe – Richard Hamilton. While he was the more...

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CD: Baxter Dury – Happy Soup

First things first. Baxter Dury is the son of Ian Dury and from the moment Happy Soup kicks in with his cockney monotone on the ska-flecked "Isabel" there is no court in the land that would deny the vocal DNA. But that does not mean that Dury Junior...

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Government Art Collection: At Work, Whitechapel Gallery

It owns almost twice as many artworks as the Arts Council, and two-thirds of its 13,500-strong hoard is on display at any given time, yet it’s a collection the public never usually gets to see. Since its foundation in 1898, the Government Art...

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Jean-Marc Bustamante, Timothy Taylor Gallery

Jean-Marc Bustamante: 'Cardinal' (2010)

Who or what is Jean-Marc Bustamante? This, surely, is the question we are supposed to ask of this artist of the affectless, who has skated in his three-decade-long career across the genres – first photography, then Minimalist sculpture, then a...

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Preserve Paolozzi!

One small section of Paolozzi's mosaic

Some of London's most public, but probably least noticed, art is under threat: part of Eduardo Paolozzi's technicolour mosaics throughout Tottenham Court Road Tube station may have to be removed because of the station's massive Crossrail-led...

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Art Gallery: The Museum of Everything

'Squirrels who smoke cigars, squabble and get up to mischief are among the many, some might say macabre, delights of Walter Potter’s world'

Whether you think the weird world of Walter Potter is cute or creepy, there’s little doubt that the Victorian taxidermist, and creator of humorous tableaux in which fluffy creatures enact human scenarios, has acquired some standing in the art...

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Serge Gainsbourg vs The Anglo-Saxons

The arrival of Gainsbourg: Vie Héroique in British cinemas this week – under its Anglo-Saxon title Gainsbourg – assumes that distributors think there’s an audience. Even so, Gainsbourg hardly has the appeal of a Johnny Cash biopic. Or even an Ike...

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The xx, Somerset House

I don't know exactly what they do in the music classes at Putney’s Elliott School, but it seems to do the trick. Fleetwood Mac's Peter Green went there 50 years ago and now, after admittedly a bit of a lull, the school is positively spitting stars...

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Stuart Semple, Morton Metropolis

Sincerity is not a quality the contemporary art world seems to value: the masking of emotions under layers of irony is where we stand. But while Damien Hirst paints from a cynical palette, British Pop Artist Stuart Semple's Nineties-inflected...

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Modern Masters: Warhol, BBC One

Alastair Sooke ponders the inescapable coolness of Andy Warhol

I wondered how long it would be before Andy Warhol’s "15 minute" quote came up. From the whizzy, flash-bang opening credits  I knew it wouldn’t be long. I was right: but less than seven minutes? Less than five?  I didn’t time it, since I was still...

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