modernism
fisun.guner
It’s the centenary of the birth of William Scott, once considered to be in the pantheon of British postwar artists. But where’s the hoopla and fanfare? Like so many British painters who had their glory years in the Fifties – before the explosion of Pop art and all that – his name no longer carries much weight. Having represented Britain in the Venice Biennale of 1958, he was left out of the Royal Academy’s ambitious survey British Art of the 20th Century some 30 years later. To what do we owe so much neglect?From the two earlier artists he took a distilled sense of domestic space and intense Read more ...
edward.seckerson
If you should take your seats prematurely in the London Coliseum you’ll find yourself confronted with a group of serving British soldiers. You’ll shift a little uneasily under their gaze. There they are, staring, smoking, loitering; there we are, on a visit to the opera. There’s a disconnect. Among those soldiers is Wozzeck (Leigh Melrose), the eponymous anti-hero of Alban Berg's operatic masterpiece. And since it's not too often that stagings of the opera actually address the issue of his profession there is an added immediacy. This is the here and now of a Britain effectively still caught Read more ...
fisun.guner
After the marvellous Great Thinkers: In Their Own Words, the BBC has once again rummaged through its documentary archives, this time to see what artists have to say for themselves. Artists are often not the most loquacious breed, which is why they communicate best in the language of images and objects. But it can certainly be instructive to get the lowdown straight from the horse’s mouth, even if it ends up being all performance and no insight.Picasso’s art is turned into performance, though one that speaks more eloquently than any spoken statement canIn this first episode of three, subtitled Read more ...
fisun.guner
Saloua Raouda Choucair began her career as a painter, initially studying under Lebanon’s two leading landscape artists, Mustafa Farroukh and Omar Onsi. In the late 1940s, she trained in the studio of Fernande Léger while studying at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Her exposure to art in her native Beirut would have given no hint of the vibrant modernism she would embrace, albeit several decades after Europe had been all aflush with the new. We see its late Middle-Eastern blossoming in the first room of this beautifully curated retrospective, which is, in fact, a world-premier for this 97- Read more ...
fisun.guner
One can immediately see the influence of Manet and Whistler, especially Whistler, the fellow American who spent most of his life in Paris and London. George Bellows, the first quintessentially American artist of the 20th century, made famous in his native country painting the heaving masses of New York City and the unrestrained violence in its unlicensed boxing clubs, looked first to his European antecedents, though he never left his native shores. In Frankie, the Organ Boy, 1907, a bright-eyed, eager-faced waif with a shock of blond hair and over-large, expressive hands emerges from the Read more ...
fisun.guner
It is often argued that Marcel Duchamp is the single most influential artist of the 20th century, and that Fountain, the porcelain urinal he signed R. Mutt and presented to the world in 1917, the single most influential artwork. But that’s not quite the whole picture. Of course, the first half of the century belongs to Picasso, and perhaps to a lesser extent that other goliath of Modernism, Matisse. We would never have had Abstract Expressionism were it not for these two vying giants of European painting. We would never have had the art world’s big leap across the Atlantic from Paris to Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
In Yo Picasso!, a self-portrait from 1901 (pictured below, Private Collection), the 19-year-old Picasso is already projecting an inimitable bravura, emphasised by his dashing orange cravat. He looks out at us with that mesmerising and legendary, unwavering and intimidating stare he made his own. Even at the time, critical responses noted his courage and confidence. He had made the first of his several moves to Paris in the spring of that year. And here Picasso undertook perhaps the most significant of his many metamorphoses. (Self-Portrait, pictured below, Private Collection)The 18 paintings Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Last weekend it was the 50th anniversary of an important event in postwar Welsh history. In early February 1963 the Welsh Language Society – Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg – protested for the first time about the right of Welsh speakers to live their lives in Welsh. At Pont Trefechan in Aberystwyth 500 people gathered on Saturday to mark the event and the same number came back on Sunday to Y Bont (The Bridge), a commemorative outdoor play devised by the Welsh-language National Theatre, Theatr Genedlaethol Cymru.The ball has been energetically pushed up the hill ever since, but some things don’t Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
For a man who lives in an agreeable region of France, Jonathan Meades grew strangely passionate in the course of this fascinating excursion around Essex. The thuggish-looking narrator travelled by small, functional Toyota rather than Magical Mystery Tour-style charabanc, though the latter would have been perfectly apt for tales of Cockneys seeking escape in the county described by one sneering commentator as "the dustbin of London".The word "Essex" arrives dragging heaps of clanking debris attached to its rear bumper, and Meades began his odyssey with an extended demolition of Essex- Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although he has been recording since 2005, it was his 2011 album, Felt, which set Nils Frahm apart from the ever-swelling tide of modern classical minimalists. It was so intimate, so subtle, it felt almost like it shouldn’t be shared. The follow up has that same sense of peeking in on some private act, but it feels less uncomfortably illicit. On Screws, Frahm’s piano is naked, with nothing intruding.Even so, the story of how this album came to be made is distracting. In a fall from his bed, Frahm broke his thumb and decided to record one composition a night over nine nights, each played with Read more ...
Louise Gray
In 1991, the Basque performance artist Esther Ferrar wrote a letter to modern music’s inventive genius, John Cage, on the future of anarchism. Ferrar’s letter – written in the year before Cage died – was in fact a reply to a question about anarchy’s prospects that the composer had thrown out to the wider world (typically, in the form of mesostic poem called “Overpopulation and Art”), and it’s true to say – as this last event in the short Cage Rattling season made clear, that two streams of anarchy were being addressed: on the one hand, the unfettered possibilities flowing from Cage’s chance Read more ...
josh.spero
Things have come to a pretty pass when the old is a breath of fresh air and the new just old hat, but the Frieze Masters art fair in Regent's Park, which closes this weekend, is just that. New sister to Frieze London, which features art since 2000, Frieze Masters is about the best of what came before. And boy is that good.If you've ever been around Frieze London, with its shiny artworks and 170 galleries and thousands of connoisseurs, collectors, rubberneckers and art-world hangers-on committing visual and aural assault on the innocent art-lover, you'll probably fear Frieze Masters as a Read more ...