tue 24/12/2024

Visual Arts Reviews

Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize 2013, National Portrait Gallery

Florence Hallett

The precise nature of the photographic portrait has always been contested, and this year’s Taylor Wessing Prize only fuels the debate. While historically photographers have questioned the portrait’s ability to go beyond physical fact to reveal a subject’s character, this exhibition of shortlisted entries challenges the notion that a portrait should tell us about its subject at all, while also raising questions about the ethics of picture-taking.

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Painting Now: Five Contemporary Artists, Tate Britain

Fisun Güner

A chronological hang of its permanent collection instead of the once so modish thematic one, a show devoted entirely to contemporary painting, which was not at all modish until quite recently – things are definitely astir at Tate Britain.

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Georgians Revealed, British Library

Jasper Rees

The Georgians are in our marrow, and two of them in particular. The dawn of the age gave us Handel, who came over from Hanover with George I. Then at the sunset came the ever-exalted Jane Austen, who dedicated Emma in mock deference to the bloated Prince Regent. And in between there are all those elegant terraces in dark-brown brick, desirable survivors of the Industrial Revolution and the Luftwaffe.

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Masterpieces of Chinese Painting 700-1900, Victoria & Albert Museum

Marina Vaizey

Masterpieces of Chinese Painting 700-1900 is just what it says: a spectacular collection of nearly 80 banners, handscrolls, hanging scrolls and fans, gathered from major collections in China and Japan – many of which have never travelled west before – as well as the United States and Europe. 

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Louise Bourgeois, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art

Caroline Boyle

There’s a giant spider in the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art’s new exhibition of Louise Bourgeois. Her trademark spider and the fact that she lived to 98 – working into her final days – are probably two of the best-known things about her.

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Turner Prize 2013, Ebrington Barracks, Derry-Londonderry

Fisun Güner

This year, if you don’t live in Ireland, you’ll have to take a plane or a boat to see the Turner Prize exhibition. But the effort will be nicely rewarded, for Derry (or Londonderry/Doire – wherever your affiliations take you) is a beautiful city, and it’s also the first UK City of Culture, so there’s plenty going on.

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The Male Nude, Wallace Collection

Sarah Kent

It is amazing how perceptions and attitudes change. Think of a nude and the chances are you will imagine a naked woman since, nowadays, the female body virtually monopolises the genre; naked men scarcely make an appearance in mainstream culture. This changed briefly in the 1970s, when American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe brought the male nude into focus with countless images celebrating masculine beauty.

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Daumier: Visions of Paris, Royal Academy

Fisun Güner

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 not escape moral censure. Far from it. Then as now we had the virtuous and the feckless poor, and it was the love of gin that often bought the latter down.

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Whistler and the Thames: An American in London, Dulwich Picture Gallery

Marina Vaizey

Dulwich Picture Gallery, the oldest publicly accessible painting collection in England, is hardly on the bank of the Thames, but its compilation of prints, drawings, watercolours and paintings by James McNeill Whistler (1834-1902) concentrates on his absorption with London’s river.

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The Young Dürer: Drawing the Figure, Courtauld Gallery

Florence Hallett

It surely takes courage to conceive an exhibition around a single, slightly obscure work by an artist whose oeuvre boasts an array of crowd-pleasers. Rather than gathering together the greatest hits, the Courtauld Gallery’s new exhibition takes as its starting point a single sheet of paper; on one side is a finely wrought figure from the parable of the Wise and the Foolish Virgins, while on the verso are studies of Dürer’s left leg.

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