Visual arts
theartsdesk in New York: The Armory Show at 100Sunday, 22 December 2013
Walk up Central Park West, past the Dakota building and all those plush-looking podiatrists’ offices with their gold plaques, and just before you get to the Museum of Natural History you’ll find the New-York Historical Society and Museum at 77th... Read more... |
Yuletide Scenes 4: Nursery (Christmas Stockings)Sunday, 22 December 2013
Even by his own eerie-peculiar standards, this is a perturbingly odd painting by that gifted English eccentric Stanley Spencer. It’s the night before Christmas and Christmas stockings hang from each bed frame: in this case, long rubber boots and... Read more... |
Tony Blair by Alastair AdamsSunday, 22 December 2013
“Repellent” is one word I’ve heard to describe Alastair Adams’ new portrait of Tony Blair, but I don’t know if that’s a reaction to the painting or the subject. In either case, I can’t say I share that gut-reaction. Most of the portraits in the... Read more... |
Yuletide Scenes 3: Winter SeaSaturday, 21 December 2013
There’s movement towards a walk after lunch, but by the time everyone’s hummed and hawed about where they might go, rubbed their bellies after one too many forcemeat balls and argued about who put the Guardian Quiz where, it’s already dark and there... Read more... |
Yuletide Scenes 2: The Adoration of the KingsFriday, 20 December 2013
Jan Gossaert’s The Adoration of the Kings, painted in 1510-15, is a sumptuous, richly detailed and even, to us today, slightly hilarious painting. It’s the large central panel of a Flemish altarpiece which includes practically every motif of the... Read more... |
Yuletide Scenes 1: A Scene on the Ice near a TownThursday, 19 December 2013
The term “snow day” may have been coined with the most recent spate of cold winters in mind, encapsulating the modern-day, not to mention British, consequences of winter weather, but Hendrick Avercamp’s Seventeenth-century “snow day”, painted in... Read more... |
Matisse: The Essence of Line, Marlborough Fine ArtMonday, 09 December 2013
The photographs of Henri Matisse at work show, over the years, a sober, suited, bearded and dignified figure; there is also a charming series of Matisse in a white coat, as though he were a doctor, sitting in his studio and thoughtfully examining in... Read more... |
'I photographed Nelson Mandela'Friday, 06 December 2013
In 1997 I was in South Africa working on Truth and Lies, my book about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, when the New York Times Magazine said that they were doing a major feature on Mandela. He’d been in office for three years. The... Read more... |
Pauline Boty: Pop Artist and Woman, Pallant House GalleryWednesday, 04 December 2013
This exhibition makes me very sad. And not just because the subject of this long overdue survey died at the age of 28, and so left behind a body of work that stretches to only two very small galleries in the current exhibition, but because it does... Read more... |
Turner Prize 2013: Laure Prouvost's work is visually seductive, funny and cleverTuesday, 03 December 2013
According to one broadsheet, Laure Prouvost was a “rank outsider” and the money was on comic doodler David Shrigley and the elusive Tino Seghal, he of those ghastly, utterly patronising performances designed to jolt the guileless gallery-goer from... Read more... |
Art and poetry: the image makersSunday, 01 December 2013
When it comes to a blank page, artists and poets lead different kinds of lives and leave different kinds of marks. One for the eye, one for the ear, but both dependant on the thrill of recognition. The word, like paint, can be worked and reworked... Read more... |
Jake and Dinos Chapman: Come and See, Serpentine Sackler GalleryThursday, 28 November 2013
Since “puerile” is an accusation often levelled at them, I often wonder what a grown-up Jake and Dinos Chapman would look like. What would they have to do to enact the transformation? And what would emerge on the other side?I shake my head at such... Read more... |
