Visual Arts Reviews
Edinburgh Art Festival: Scotland to outer spaceSaturday, 16 August 2014
Like a canny political campaigner, the Edinburgh Art Festival offers “something for everyone”. In this singular year for Scotland, the festival weaves together strands concerning the independence referendum, the Commonwealth and the centenery of the beginning of the First World War. It also provides an introduction to a host of other ideas and artistic worlds. Read more...
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The Beauty of Anatomy, BBC FourWednesday, 13 August 2014
If the idealised human body forms the heart of the classical tradition in Western art, the close study of nature is its lifeblood. It is inevitable then that artists have sought better to understand anatomy, and there are many examples of artists whose knowledge of the human body was more than skin deep. Read more... |
Ryoji Ikeda: spectra, Victoria Tower GardensSaturday, 09 August 2014
The extraordinary beams of light shooting miles into the air from Victoria Tower Gardens may be the most viewed piece of conceptual art ever. Spectra, visible from high points miles away like Primrose Hill, is the extraordinary work of Paris-based artist and composer Ryoji Ikeda, and is produced by art facilitators Artangel. |
Art of China, BBC FourThursday, 31 July 2014
If, like me, you switched this on feeling sheepish about your sketchy knowledge of Chinese art, you would have welcomed as a ready-made excuse the news that some monuments synonymous with Chinese culture are relatively recent discoveries. Read more... |
What Lies Beneath: The Secret Life of PaintingsWednesday, 30 July 2014
The doctoring of political images became something of a tradition in the last century, with Stalin, Hitler and Mao all airbrushing their enemies from photographs. The latest infrared technology has revealed that something similar may have happened during the English Civil War, with a portrait of Oliver Cromwell apparently having been painted over with an image of the Parliamentarian Sir Arthur Hesilrige, who fell out with Cromwell when he became Lord Protector in 1653. Read more... |
First World War Galleries, Imperial War MuseumTuesday, 22 July 2014
The Imperial War Museum is one of the most extraordinary museums in the world. Its contents and presentation triumph over the three words of its title, each usually causing dread rather than enthusiasm: imperial (discredited unless to do with Roman history); war (just horrible, and we shouldn’t do it); and museum (well, isn’t that mausoleum?) Read more... |
Malevich, Tate ModernThursday, 17 July 2014
The year 1915 was a big one for Kazimir Malevich, as it was for the course of modern art. It was the year the Black Square was first exhibited (June 1915 is the likeliest date of the painting’s execution, though Malevich himself dated it to 1913, insisting it derived from his designs for Futurist opera Victory Over the Sun). Read more... |
Virginia Woolf: Art, Life and Vision, National Portrait GalleryTuesday, 15 July 2014
Do we need more? Over the past 60 years thousands of books and bibliographies about Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) and the group of friends, lovers, spouses, partners, children, and houses with which she is associated, have been published, not to mention movies and plays and a more hidden mountain of academic dissertations. Read more... |
Mondrian, Turner Contemporary/ Tate LiverpoolSunday, 13 July 2014
It’s 70 years since Mondrian died in New York, leaving unfinished his last painting, Victory Boogie-Woogie, an ebullient title quite at odds with the buttoned-up asceticism we normally associate with this artist. The Courtauld Gallery showed a small survey two years ago, which paired his flat grid compositions with the paintings and white reliefs of Ben Nicholson, focusing only on his two years in London (1938 to 1940). Read more... |
The Golden Cockerel, Diaghilev Festival, London ColiseumThursday, 10 July 2014
Rimsky-Korsakov’s bizarre final fantasy, puffing up Pushkin's short verse-tale to unorthodox proportions, has done better in Britain than any of his other operatic fairy-tales. That probably has something to do with its appearance in Paris, six years after the composer’s death in 1908, courtesy of a brave new experiment marshalled by that chameleonic impresario Sergei Diaghilev. Read more... |
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