painting
Sarah Kent
The Bloomsbury group’s habit of non-binary bed-hopping has frequently attracted more attention than the artworks they produced. But in their Vanessa Bell retrospective, the MK Gallery has steered blissfully clear of salacious tittle tattle. Thankfully, this allows one to focus on Bell’s paintings and designs rather than her complicated domestic life.The first picture you encounter was painted during a family holiday in Cornwall and dates back to 1900, the year before Bell became a student at the Royal Academy. Two thatched cottages cling to a steep slope by the sea. Punctuated only by the Read more ...
Sarah Kent
In September 1899, Claude Monet booked into a room at the Savoy Hotel. From there he had a good view of Waterloo Bridge and the south bank beyond. Setting up his easel on a balcony, he began a series of paintings of the river and the buildings on its banks. So entranced was he by the river that, over the next three years, he came back twice to continue working on a series that would mushroom to over 100 canvases.Waterloo Bridge, Overcast 1903 (main picture) shows the bridge packed with pedestrians and horse-drawn, double decker buses picked out in flicks of yellow and red. Making their way Read more ...
Art, Theatre Royal Bath review - Yasmina Reza's smash hit back on tour 30 years after Paris premiere
Gary Naylor
For men, navigating through life whilst maintaining strong friendships is not easy (I’m sure the same can be said for women, but Yasmina Reza’s multi-award winning play, revived on its 30th anniversary, is most definitely about men). What brings blokes together – work, sports, pubs – is seldom founded on deep emotional connections, though it can be and sometimes does morph into that. Consequently in most cases, it doesn’t need much to upset the applecart, with a trivial contretemps blowing up unexpectedly.For longstanding pals, Serge, Marc and Yvan, that ‘not much’ is a painting Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Whether you believe that Ellen Brammar’s play, Modest, newly arrived in London from Hull Truck Theatre, succeeds or not, rather depends on your criteria for evaluating theatre. On storytelling, character development and nuance, it is two and a half hours that goes nowhere. On representation, audience appeal and addressing past injustices, well, the reaction in the house to this Middle Child and Milk Presents collaboration will confirm that the job is done.Elizabeth Thompson’s The Roll Call was the sensation of the Royal Academy’s 1874 Summer Exhibition. Owing something to Gustave Courbet and Read more ...
Paul Rider
Donna Fleming’s exhibition at the Pie Factory Gallery in Margate is called Apocalypse, which is confusing because it has nothing to do with the end of the world. Fleming does not even watch the news because she “does not want to think about miserable things”. Instead the title refers back to the Greek word that apocalypse is derived from, apokalypsis, which means uncovering.At first it’s not exactly clear what is being uncovered. There’s a lot to take in. There is six years’ worth of work in the show and Fleming is prolific, working in a wild array of different media. She trained at the RCA Read more ...
Saskia Baron
This rather disappointing documentary about the great American painter Edward Hopper (1882-1967) has such a dry parade of experts and such a slow linear narrative that it leaves plenty of time to be frustrated by all that’s been left out.Made by the veteran arts documentarian Phil Grabsky for the Exhibition on Screen series, the film features undated on-camera interviews with Hopper and his wife. How difficult would it have been to caption them with a date and a source? And despite following a conventional chronological structure – birth to death – we don’t get much sense of when Hopper Read more ...
Sarah Kent
There stands Lucian Freud in Reflection with Two Children (Self-portrait), 1965 (main picture) towering over you, peering mercilessly down. Is that a look of scorn on his face or merely one of detachment? His two kids seem to be squirming and giggling beneath their father’s unblinking stare. Who wouldn’t be, especially when the huge lamps hanging overhead are reminiscent of an interrogation chamber? All the better to see you with, my dear.Portraits, or rather paintings of people, were Lucian Freud’s speciality. He spent 70 years relentlessly scrutinising his own and his sitter’s faces and Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Across the pond Winslow Homer is a household name; in his day, he was regarded as the greatest living American painter. He was renowned especially for his seascapes and his most famous painting, The Gulf Stream, 1899/1906 (main picture) features in the National Gallery’s retrospective.A small boat with a broken mast bobs about on stormy waters, at the mercy of the waves. Clinging to the deck is a lone sailor, a black man desperately scanning the horizon for help. He needs it; the sail lies in a useless heap and nothing else is on board beside a few sugarcanes. As if to emphasise the extremity Read more ...
Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou
“Is she at a pivotal point in her life but unable to pivot…?” Eve, the young heroine of Chloë Ashby’s dazzling debut novel, Wet Paint, asks this question standing in front of Édouard Manet’s painting "A Bar at the Folies-Bergère" (1882). Yet she could easily be asking herself the same question.Unable to “pivot” in life, but at a pivotal stage, Eve goes from job to job, is thrown out of her flat, becomes increasingly reckless and then spirals downwards in an effort to stave off the memories of the past. Initially, art – the viewing and co-creation of it – keeps her afloat, but past traumas Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Francis Bacon Man and Beast fills most of the main galleries at the Royal Academy. Thankfully, five of the rooms are empty. The exhibition is such a dispiriting experience, I’d have been hollering like a howler monkey if there’d been any more. And as it was, I came out feeling emotionally numb.It’s not what Bacon intended. He hoped his paintings would “unlock the valves of feeling and therefore return the onlooker to life more violently.” Maybe you need a penchant for violence to respond as he hoped since, for him, living life violently was the norm. When his military father discovered his Read more ...
Sarah Kent
It’s been described as “the most improbable story that has ever happened in the art market”, and The Lost Leonardo reveals every twist and turn of this extraordinary tale. In New Orleans in 2005, a badly-damaged painting (pictured below left) sold at auction for $1,175. It was listed as a copy of a Leonardo da Vinci, but the buyers – dealer Robert Simon and Alexander Parish, who searches for overlooked masterpieces – believed it might be the real thing, a painting known as Salvator Mundi (Saviour of the World) by the Renaissance master himself.Even Parish admits the idea was ludicrous. “ Read more ...
Charlie Stone
"Trompe-l’œil," explains the director of the Institut de Peinture in Brussels, “is the meeting of a painting and a gaze, conceived for a particular point of view, and defined by the effect it is supposed to produce”. In layman’s terms, it is the art of decorative painting, the technique of creating an optical illusion whereby a surface appears three-dimensional. It’s also the subject of this book. Painting Time, Maylis de Kerangal’s latest novel, translated by Jessica Moore, is an ode to that somewhat overlooked side of the artist’s craft, a determined evocation of the skill, dedication and Read more ...