Royal Academy
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... |
Ai Weiwei, Royal AcademyTuesday, 29 September 2015
Ai Weiwei’s first major survey in the UK is a better looking exhibition than I had anticipated, but what it gains in looks it sadly lacks in substance – backstory and information not being quite the same. It’s visually satisfying, since Ai initially... Read more... |
Joseph Cornell: Wanderlust, Royal AcademySunday, 12 July 2015
Whimsical, twee, sentimental. For those who love Joseph Cornell’s boxes, it’s hard to imagine that there are those who just don’t. “What? You mean you don’t like Cornell’s boxes because you think they’re whimsical? Twee? Sentimental?”These rare... Read more... |
Richard Diebenkorn, Royal AcademyMonday, 16 March 2015
Made an Honorary Royal Academician just a few months before he died, in 1993, it’s taken till now for a posthumous Royal Academy survey to finally bring one of the absolute greats of American postwar painting to a UK audience. Of course, for those... Read more... |
Rubens and His Legacy, Royal AcademySunday, 25 January 2015
What does it mean to be a great artist? Is it enough for your work to be admired, studied, emulated and quoted by contemporaries and subsequent generations, or is the value of art judged by a more complex set of criteria? By considering the extent... Read more... |
Imagine... Anselm Kiefer, BBC OneTuesday, 18 November 2014
Anselm Kiefer reminds me a bit of someone I once worked for. Totally unpredictable, and possessed of a formidable intelligence and creativity, his mental leaps can be bewilderingly hard to follow, leading occasionally to truly breathtaking results,... Read more... |
Allen Jones, Royal AcademyThursday, 13 November 2014
There’s no escaping it; Hat Stand, 1969, is a beastly object. The blank-faced mannequin is too literal to succeed as a sculpture, and the conceit is too nasty to be ignored. Her position – holding up her hands to receive our hats – recalls the... Read more... |
Giovanni Battista Moroni, Royal AcademyWednesday, 29 October 2014
Written in the 16th century, Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists continues to underpin our understanding of the Renaissance, and its author is blamed, often with some justification, for a multitude of art historical anomalies. But there can be... Read more... |
Anselm Kiefer, Royal AcademySunday, 05 October 2014
And so, I finally come to write of Anselm Kiefer, and with something of a heavy heart, as heavy, I’d vouch, as one of his load-bearing canvases. In 2007, I was left breathless by the German artist’s new paintings at the White Cube gallery in... Read more... |
Renaissance Impressions, Royal AcademyTuesday, 18 March 2014
Georg Baselitz might seem an unlikely connoisseur of 16th-century prints, but since the Sixties the controversial German artist has amassed a collection of chiaroscuro woodcuts to rival that of any museum. His interest in Renaissance prints emerged... Read more... |
Daumier: Visions of Paris, Royal AcademySunday, 27 October 2013
From Hogarth through to Gillray and Cruikshank, it was Georgian England that gave rise to a graphic tradition of satire. The powerful were lampooned and the pretensions and avarice of the upper and aspiring classes duly ridiculed. But the poor did... Read more... |
Australia, Royal AcademyWednesday, 18 September 2013
In The Importance of Being Earnest, first performed in 1895, Oscar Wilde wittily quipped that Algernon must choose between “this world, the next and Australia”. At a time when it took weeks to reach the other side of the globe most Britons, if they... Read more... |
