Tate Modern
Shape of Light, Tate Modern review - a wasted opportunityThursday, 03 May 2018
"From today painting is dead" was the pessimistic outcry of Paul Delaroche on first seeing a photograph. Ever since its inception, photography has had a vexed but fruitful relationship with painting. Delaroche specialised in hyper-real historical... 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... |
Joan Jonas, Tate Modern review - work as elusive as it is beautifulWednesday, 21 March 2018
The American artist, Joan Jonas is one of the pioneers of performance art. Now 82, she is being honoured with a Tate Modern retrospective and Ten Days Six Nights, a festival of live art in which many of her performances are being recreated... 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... |
Red Star Over Russia, Tate Modern review – fascinating history in a nutshellWednesday, 08 November 2017
Ilya and Emilia Kabakov’s Tate Modern exhibition features an installation made in 1985 of a Moscow bedsit, its walls lined with political posters. There’s a gaping hole in the ceiling made when the occupant apparently catapulted himself through the... Read more... |
Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, Tate Modern review – funny, moving and revelatoryWednesday, 18 October 2017
The Kabakovs' exhibition made me thank my lucky stars I was not born in the Soviet Union. A recurring theme of their work is the desire to escape – from the hunger and poverty caused by incompetence and poor planning, and the doublethink required to... 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... |
Alberto Giacometti, Tate ModernSaturday, 13 May 2017
Chain-smoking and charismatic, the painter, sculptor, draughtsman and printmaker Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966) lived much of his life in Paris from his arrival there in his twenties. He was just in time for post-war cubism and pre-war surrealism,... Read more... |
Best of 2016: ArtThursday, 29 December 2016
Before we consign this miserable year to history, there are a few good bits to be salvaged; in fact, for the visual arts 2016 has been marked by renewal and regeneration, with a clutch of newish museum directors getting into their stride, and... Read more... |
Robert Rauschenberg, Tate ModernThursday, 08 December 2016
The Good American, a Texan no less, has landed at Tate Modern in style. This posthumous retrospective of the great Robert Rauschenberg includes a paint-bespattered, fully made-up bed hung vertically on the wall, and called – you guessed – Bed,1955 (... Read more... |
The Radical Eye, Tate ModernThursday, 10 November 2016
“For me photography is a journey of discovery”, says Elton John. “I buy what I like and if it's not fashionable I don’t care. The more you collect, the more sophisticated your eye becomes.” He realised he had become a serious collector when, in 1993... Read more... |
Bricks!, BBC FourWednesday, 21 September 2016
The wilder shores of contemporary visual art are now ephemeral or time-based: performance, installation, general carry-on and hubbub. But once upon a time – say, the 1960s – it was the nature of objects, pared down to essentials, and often made from... Read more... |
