sat 16/11/2024

portraits

A Gothic homage to late fashion icon

The portrait brings out the 'gothic quality' in Isabella Blow's personality, say the artists

A grisly "shadow portrait" of the late fashion muse and stylist Isabella Blow goes on show today at the National Portrait Gallery. Crafted from taxidermied animals, including a raven, a species of rat linked to the black death and a snake, as well...

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Man with a Blue Scarf: On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud

Visit the room in the Louvre where the Mona Lisa hangs, and all you will be able to see is a glass-covered rectangle and hundreds of camera phones held high. Certainly you will be unable to examine the woman in the picture, or contemplate the work...

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Camille Silvy: Photographer of Modern Life, 1834-1910, National Portrait Gallery

Camille Silvy may be the least recognised of all the great photographic innovators of the 19th century. After a decade of almost ceaseless technical innovation, and astonishing output as the society portrait-photographer of the 1860s, he abruptly...

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Alice Neel: Painted Truths, Whitechapel Gallery

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...

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BP Portrait Award 2010, National Portrait Gallery

'Lila Pearl' by Thea Penna: 'a disarming and entirely empathetic portrait'

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...

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The Stones in Exile: an Imagine Special, BBC One

Aptly, this new documentary about how the Rolling Stones fled from England to the South of France to record Exile on Main Street was premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, with a supernaturally healthy-looking Mick Jagger on hand to give it a...

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Fashion pop ups in unlikely places

The first floor at Browns: 40 Years of Fashion Innovation

While wandering back from a meeting with a hedgie on Haymarket, I noticed a banner emblazoned with the logo of Browns, clothes shop to the well heeled (to mix metaphors), above the entrance to what appeared to be a building site. It was indeed a...

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Bridget Riley: From Life, National Portrait Gallery

Bridget Riley: 'Boy with curly hair', early 1950s (red conté crayon on paper)

Forget about art “being about the idea” for a moment. Drawing from life is still considered by many to be the litmus test for proper artistic skill, or at least the foundation from which great art can arise. And so the enquiry, “But can he really...

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