Van Gogh
Sarah Kent
When he was a callow youth of 18, German artist Anselm Keifer got a travel grant to follow in the footsteps of his idol, Vincent van Gogh. Some sixty years later, work by the two artists has been brought together at the Royal Academy in a show that highlights Van Gogh’s influence on his acolyte and invites you to compare and contrast.In the intervening years, Keifer has gained a huge international reputation with gargantuan paintings, sculptures and installations. His obsession with Van Gogh led him, in 1992, to move to the south of France where he transformed a former silk factory and the Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Van Gogh: Poets & Lovers includes many of his best known pictures and, amazingly, it is the first exhibition the National Gallery has devoted to this much loved artist. Focusing mainly on paintings and drawings made in the two years he lived in Provence (1888-1890), it charts the emotional highs and lows of his stay in the Yellow House in Arles, and the times he spent in hospital after numerous breakdowns.From the incredibly touching and lucid Self-Portrait of 1889 (pictured right), you wouldn’t know he’d just left the psychiatric hospital in St Rémy after recovering from two major Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Presenter Waldemar Januszczak suffers from something very like Robert Peston Syndrome, which makes him bellow at the camera and distort words as if they’re chewing gum he’s peeling off the sole of his shoe. Nonetheless he has a knack for finding fresh and revealing angles on art history, as he aims to do in this new series.Vincent Van Gogh’s painting Self-portrait with Bandaged Ear is frequently taken to be the pitiable proof of the artist’s hopeless derangement, another step along the road to his eventual suicide by gunshot, but Januszczak gradually revealed a more nuanced and much more Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Vincent van Gogh (b. 1853) could be difficult, truculent and unconventional. He battled with mental illness and wrestled with questions of religion throughout his life. But on good form he was personable. He was said to be an excellent imitator with a wry sense of humour, and was a loyal (if often fierce) friend and family relation. The Noordbrabants Museum's new exhibition seeks to humanise the artist and people his world. It comprises paintings, drawings and personal documents spread across three main rooms that are either by van Gogh or people close to him, and shed light on his life. Here Read more ...
Matt Wolf
It's all go – no, make that Van Gogh – when it comes to the Dutch post-Impressionist of late. Opening the same week as the Tate Britain's blockbuster exhibition about his years in London comes the artist-turned-filmmaker Julian Schnabel's biopic of the tragically short-lived artist, for which its star Willem Dafoe was an unexpected Oscar nominee last month for best actor. Ravishing to the eye as one might expect, and acted with a near-ferocious empathy by Dafoe (who, thank heavens, doesn't worry about an accent), the film as a whole is sure to divide opinion. Shot with a Read more ...
Katherine Waters
In the autumn of 1892 Émile Bernard wrote home to his mother that, following the summer decampment to Pont-Aven of artists visiting from Paris and further afield, there remained "some artists here, two of them talented and copying each other. One mainly copies the other." Most likely he was writing about Irish painter Roderic O’Conor and the younger Swiss artist Cuno Amiet who stayed on in the Breton village long after the summer’s artistic cavalcade had left.There are indeed striking similarities and borrowings between O’Conor’s and Amiet’s canvases, but what the National Gallery of Ireland’ Read more ...
theartsdesk
Yesterday the record for the most expensive painting ever sold was broken. At Christie's in New York Leonardo da Vinci's Salvator Mundi the hammer was knocked down on a price of $450 million. It's a lot of money, period, and even more for a painting which some doubt is by Leonardo at all. One doubter insists that Leonardo the great scientist would have refracted the light through the orb in Christ's hands. That won't bother the buyer, whose identity is unknown.Salvator Mundi soars to the top of the list of the 75 most expensive paintings sold in the last 30 years. The recent Leonardo Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Loving Vincent was clearly a labour of love for all concerned, so I hope it doesn't seem churlish to wish that a Van Gogh biopic some seven or more years in the planning had spent more time at the drawing board. By that I don't mean yet further devotion to an already-painstaking emphasis on visuals that attempt to recreate the artist's own palette in filmmaking terms. The fact is, no amount of eye-catching amplitude can overcome consistently tin-eared writing, and by the point someone posed the onscreen question, "Did you know he was a genius?", I was primed to drain my own face of Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Painting the Modern Garden explores the interstices between nature and ourselves as revealed in the cultivation of gardens, that most delightful and frustrating of occupations, and an almost obsessive subject for many artists. About 150 paintings from the 1860s to the 1920s, gathered together from private and public collections in North America and Europe are on view, amplified by letters, plans, documents, photographs and illustrated books on horticulture.The exhibition embraces not only artists’ responses to gardens from the late 19th century to the early 20th century, but obliquely the new Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
John Bunyan’s Christian, hero of The Pilgrim’s Progress, may have been putting his feet up in the Celestial City for the better part of 350 years, but for Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Pilgrim it has been a rather different story. Languishing in the Slough of Despond after an unsuccessful first run at the Royal Opera in the 1950s, the composer’s lavish “Morality” The Pilgrim’s Progress, with its patchwork biblical libretto, vast forces and uniquely blended combination of opera and oratorio, has never since established a secure place in the repertoire.A new production at English National Opera – Read more ...
Steven Gambardella
They’re all here - well, most of them - the superstars of official art history. You would never get all these artists in one show if it were a painting exhibition, and it’s thrilling to see them cheek-by-jowl on the gallery walls. Drawing is widely seen as a secondary art, relegated to preparation and research for bigger works. So, of course, the majority of works in the show are studies for bigger projects from paintings to architecture.As such, Mantegna’s tormented Christ is rendered over and over on both sides of the paper, hunched in pain as the artist attempts to balance human suffering Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The Doctor Who crew are fond of their encounters with historical characters. In his time, and let's face it he has infinite supplies of it, the Doc has rubbed shoulders with Shakespeare, Charles Dickens and Agatha Christie, and recently weathered the Blitz with Winston Churchill. For this one, "Vincent and the Doctor", le Docteur voyaged back to 19th-century Provence to straighten out a puzzling temporal kink.While visiting the Van Gogh exhibition at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, where art historian Dr Black (Bill Nighy) was holding forth about the marvels of the tormented Dutch genius, the Read more ...