Visual Arts Reviews
Mughal India: Art, Culture and Empire, British LibraryFriday, 16 November 2012
A photograph from 1858 shows a feeble and frail octogenarian who happens to be the last Mughal emperor. Bahadur Shah II (pictured below right), reclining in his wretched prison in Delhi, awaiting trial, is about to be exiled to Burma. Many of his family and his retinue would be summarily executed, the civilian population murdered, and a number of the great Mughal monuments of Old Delhi ruined. Read more... |
A Bigger Splash: Painting After Performance, Tate ModernThursday, 15 November 2012
A Bigger Splash... opens with Hans Namuth’s famous 1951 film of Jackson Pollock balletically dripping, flicking and pouring paint onto the canvas at his feet. Beneath the screen a long, scroll-like painting by Pollock lies on the gallery floor. The arrangement implies that this could be the painting the artist is creating on film while, subliminally, another message is being conveyed. Read more... |
Light from the Middle East: New Photography, Victoria & Albert MuseumWednesday, 14 November 2012
This compilation of nearly 90 photographs by 30 photographers from 13 different countries of the Middle East is literally and metaphorically illuminating. The Paris-based Iranian photographer Abbas puts it thus: “I write with light.” Read more... |
The Northern Renaissance: Dürer to Holbein, The Queen's GalleryFriday, 09 November 2012
In what ways was the Northern Renaissance distinct from the Italian one? When we look at a painting by Holbein we’re struck by the painting’s rich surface: we admire the finely delineated weave of a Turkish rug, the individual hairs of fur lining a heavy coat, the intricate calligraphy of musical notation in an open hymn book. Since all is sumptuous surface and detail, our eyes feast upon the mass, weight and texture of objects firmly rooting us to the material world. Read more... |
Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize 2012, National Portrait GalleryThursday, 08 November 2012
The Taylor Wessing Photographic… well, you get the drift. It's quite a long title for what is now one of the most fascinating and wide-ranging exhibitions of photographs mounted in London, and which goes out on tour nationally next year. Read more... |
Seduced by Art: Photography Past and Present, National GalleryFriday, 02 November 2012
"From today, painting is dead" was the forlorn conclusion of French painter Paul Delaroche on seeing a photograph for the first time in 1839. His gloomy prediction was premature, of course; more than 170 years on, the battle for supremacy is still raging. Read more... |
Peter Lely: A Lyrical Vision, Courtauld GalleryTuesday, 30 October 2012
Sensing economic opportunity, the Dutch artist Peter Lely (1618-1680) emigrated in his early twenties to London, and was thus the right man in the right place. After the early death of Sir Anthony van Dyck, followed by the Englishman William Dobson, Lely cleverly and charmingly utilised disarming ambition to open up a career for himself and become in due course the most successful painter of his time. Read more... |
Kafou: Haiti, Art and Vodou, Nottingham ContemporaryThursday, 25 October 2012
I’ve rarely come across an exhibition as loaded with context as this one. Voodoo – or Vodou, as the show has it – is a massively complex and contested phenomenon, from the pin-sticking and zombies of legend and fantasy to the no-less colourful reality. Haitian history is tragic and dramatic, fraught with misinformation stemming from the country’s creation in an 18th century slave revolt. Read more... |
Painting the Queen: A Portrait of Her Majesty, BBC FourWednesday, 24 October 2012
Has there ever been a successful portrait of the Queen? Not a photograph - there are been plenty of those (with its delicious air of ambivalence, Thomas Struth’s portrait of the Queen with Prince Philip stiffly occupying two ends of a sofa at Windsor Castle, is among the best) but a painted portrait. Read more... |
Hollywood Costume, Victoria & Albert MuseumSunday, 21 October 2012
Going to the movies will never be quite the same again, as the Victoria & Albert illuminates the work of the costume designers for anybody who has ever been seduced by the world of the cinema, which I guess means all of us. This anthology is a trip down memory lane, from Charlie Chaplin’s tramp to John Wayne’s cowboys and gunslingers. Read more... |
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