Visual Arts Reviews
David Hockney: A Bigger Picture, Royal AcademyWednesday, 18 January 2012
These are, we are told, David Hockney's landscape works, and in that they depict the outdoors - early Grand Canyons and LA scenes, Yorkshire from the Nineties to now - that is correct. As a description, however, it comes nowhere near encapsulating the mystical, profound, plain beautiful pictures presented at the Royal Academy. Read more...
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Scott’s Last Expedition, Natural History MuseumWednesday, 18 January 2012
It’s safe to say that the diary of Tryggve Gran does not capture the mood of this centenary exhibition. “This life is of little interest," he wrote; "one day is just as monotonous as the next.” Gran was the Norwegian hired by Captain Scott to teach his men to ski and was in the party which discovered the frozen bodies of Scott, Edward Wilson and "Birdie" Bowers. Read more... |
2011: Where the Hell Was Now?Monday, 02 January 2012
2011 was a year when now was difficult to find. The YBA/heroic monetarist era was definitively over – though Tracey Emin was accorded a far better retrospective than she deserved at the Hayward (see image below right). Read more... |
2011: The British Are ClimbingSaturday, 31 December 2011
My Top 10 movies of 2011, in order, are: Mysteries of Lisbon, Melancholia, Meek’s Cutoff, A Dangerous Method, Aurora, Hugo, The Princess of Montpensier, City of Life and Death, The Descendants, Midnight in Paris. Read more... |
2011: From Russia - With Love?Saturday, 31 December 2011
It took a relatively little-noticed television documentary, Vlad’s Army, broadcast in Channel 4’s Unreported World strand to confirm that theartsdesk has a readership in Russia. Peter Oborne’s film (the presenter pictured below) caught the pro-Kremlin youth movement, the Nashi, with its defences down, and the result depicted, no holds barred, how politics works there today. Read more... |
2011: Car parks, Curtains and ConsidineThursday, 29 December 2011
In a year when eyes turned to London for the riots, the budget cuts and the hacked phones, there seemed to be a fair amount of middle England portrayed by British creatives. Alecky Blythe and Adam Cork’s London Road at the National retold 2006’s Ipswich murders as a darkly comical contemporary musical, with middle-aged gardening competitions and dull community-centre realism success. Read more... |
2011: Unlovely Love Stories and Unerotic Erotic TalesWednesday, 28 December 2011
While I'm still learning to disentangle my mezzo from my Meistersinger, I enjoyed a lot of the opera on offer in London this year, especially at English National Opera. Parsifal was perfect and Rameau's Castor and Pollux, while probably a little too Germanic in direction with its dancing amputated legs and unerotic nudity, was wonderfully sung. Read more... |
2011: Belgian Surrealism, Austrian Angst and a Dane in a MadhouseMonday, 26 December 2011
Last year, like every year, is a bit of a blur. I saw a lot, but all the good stuff seems to have clustered near the end. Maybe an end-of-year cultural bloat has finally settled. Anyway, to help jog the memory, I think I should start bottom-up. Read more... |
The Mystery of Appearance, Haunch of VenisonMonday, 19 December 2011
Here be wonderful images, in an anthology of two score of paintings and drawings from the 1950s through the mid-Nineties by 10 artists whose shared interests only sharpen their individuality. Francis Bacon is the autodidact in the group, which includes two Berliners – Frank Auerbach and Lucian Freud – who came to England as children. David Hockney is the witty, adventurous northerner who has now returned, mostly, to Yorkshire from a life lived between London and Los Angeles. Read more... |
Lygia Pape: Magnetised Space, Serpentine GalleryWednesday, 14 December 2011
The Serpentine’s north gallery has been transformed into a magical space (main picture). Strung from floor to ceiling of the darkened room, shafts of copper wire glimmer in subdued lighting like sunbeams, or the searchlights that scanned the night sky for enemy aircraft during World War Two. Read more... |
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