portraits
Julia Margaret Cameron, Victoria & Albert Museum / Science MuseumMonday, 30 November 2015
Reputations and popularity rise and fall and rise again in cycles, and so with the redoubtable Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–1879). Now considered one of the finest photographers ever, she was an amateur gifted with incredible tenacity, intellectual... Read more... |
Portraits from the 2015 Taylor Wessing PrizeSaturday, 14 November 2015
At first glance David Stewart’s Five Girls 2014, the winning entry in this year’s Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize, is a very ordinary scene. Five young women sit behind a table, obligatory mobile phones within reach and lying amongst the... Read more... |
Jean-Etienne Liotard, Royal AcademySunday, 25 October 2015
Unswervingly confident, relaxed and assured, the élite of the 18th century are currently arrayed on the walls of the Royal Academy, gazing down at us with the utmost assurance of their unassailable place in the world, bright eyed and dressed to... Read more... |
Giacometti, National Portrait GallerySunday, 18 October 2015
Any number of puzzling and fantastical stories were told by Alberto Giacometti in the construction of a personal mythology that helped secure his reputation as an archetypal artist of the avant-garde. Less heroic than the oft-quoted accounts of his... Read more... |
Frank Auerbach, Tate BritainSaturday, 10 October 2015
A finely honed and spacious selection dating from the 1950s to now, looks in acute focus at the work – a scatter of drawings, a print, but almost entirely paintings – of Frank Auerbach, (b 1931). An only child, he came without his family, from... Read more... |
Goya: The Portraits, National GalleryWednesday, 07 October 2015
The brute nature of man in times of war, religious persecution and hypocrisy, and the destructive power of superstition. Francisco de Goya’s fame today largely rests on such themes, and they go a long way to explain just why he’s often considered... Read more... |
Drawing in Silver and Gold: Leonardo to Jasper Johns, British MuseumThursday, 17 September 2015
Unlike Venice, where colour reigned supreme among artists such as Titian and Veronese, Florence was the city where drawing – disegno – was held up as the cornerstone of the artist’s education. Think of the well-defined musculature of Michelangelo’s... Read more... |
Out of Chaos: Ben Uri - 100 Years in London, Somerset HouseThursday, 16 July 2015
The exhibition Out of Chaos is a powerful dose of specific human experience, here presented almost exclusively in the form of portraits and group scenes. The selection comes almost entirely from the more than 1,300 works of art owned by Ben Uri... Read more... |
Gallery: Christina Broom's Soldiers and SuffragettesSaturday, 20 June 2015
There were female pioneers of photography before Christina Broom, most notably Julia Margaret Cameron. And others have hidden their light under a bigger bushel: Vivian Meier's body of work remained stashed away only to be discovered after her death... Read more... |
Cornelius Johnson, National Portrait GallerySaturday, 02 May 2015
It’s far too easy to think about the history of art as a series of class acts, with one superlative achievement following another. Exhibitions tend to encourage this view, and the notion of a superstar artist is key to persuading us that the latest... Read more... |
YZ Kami, Gagosian GalleryTuesday, 14 April 2015
The Iranian-born New York resident painter YZ Kami, now in his mid-fifties, continually plays with our hunger to look at “reality” while being seduced by abstraction and repetition. In 17 canvases, painted over the past two years, Kami explores two... Read more... |
Wellington: Triumphs, Politics and Passions, National Portrait GallerySunday, 22 March 2015
One masterpiece and two superb portraits both dominate and sum up in vivid fashion the complex personality, long life and astonishing trajectory of the first Duke of WellingtonThere were something like 200 portraits done in his lifetime. The... Read more... |
