mon 09/06/2025

Visual Arts Reviews

Jane McAdam Freud: Lucian Freud My Father, Freud Museum

Fisun Güner

In one small room of the Freud Museum, which was once the home of Sigmund in the last year of his life, are the works Jane McAdam Freud made in the final months of her father’s life. Below an imposing photograph of Freud the elder, the progenitor of the clan, are two detailed, tender sketches of Lucian in profile. In the right sketch the dying artist stares resolutely ahead, his gaze, coupled with the firm set of his jaw, capturing a sense of absolute stillness.

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David Hockney: A Bigger Picture, Royal Academy

Josh Spero

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.

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Scott’s Last Expedition, Natural History Museum

Jasper Rees

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.

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2011: Where the Hell Was Now?

Mark Hudson

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).

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2011: The British Are Climbing

Graham Fuller

My Top 10 movies of 2011, in order, are: Mysteries of LisbonMelancholiaMeek’s CutoffA Dangerous MethodAuroraHugoThe Princess of MontpensierCity of Life and DeathThe DescendantsMidnight in Paris.

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2011: From Russia - With Love?

Tom Birchenough

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.

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2011: Car parks, Curtains and Considine

Alice Vincent

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.

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2011: Unlovely Love Stories and Unerotic Erotic Tales

Josh Spero

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.

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2011: Belgian Surrealism, Austrian Angst and a Dane in a Madhouse

Fisun Güner

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. 

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The Mystery of Appearance, Haunch of Venison

Marina Vaizey

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.

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