Tate Britain
Sarah Kent
Tate Britain’s Lee Miller retrospective begins with a soft focus picture of her by New York photographer Arnold Genthe dated 1927, when she was working as a fashion model. The image is so hazy that she appears as dreamlike and insubstantial as a wraith.It exemplifies one of the hallmarks of a good model – the ability to become a screen that invites projection, rather than expressing your own personality. And in shot after shot for British and American Vogue, Miller remains an enigma – impassive and searingly beautiful. Would the exhibition bring her into sharper focus, as I hoped, or would Read more ...
Sarah Kent
It’s unusual to leave an exhibition liking an artist’s work less than when you went in, but Tate Britain’s retrospective of Edward Burra manages to achieve just this. I’ve always loved Burra’s limpid late landscapes. Layers of filmy watercolour create sweeping vistas of rolling hills and valleys whose suggestive curves create a sexual frisson.Take Valley and River, Northumberland 1972 (pictured below right), for instance. A spring emerges from a fold in green hills that resemble limbs. The landscape doubles as a body, with an inviting recess nestling between parted thighs.These pastoral Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Tate Britain is currently offering two exhibitions for the price of one. Other than being on the same bill, Edward Burra and Ithell Colquhoun having nothing in common other than being born a year apart and being oddballs – in very different ways. And since both reward focused attention, this makes for a rather exhausting outing – I’m reviewing them separately – so gird your loins.I’ve always been intrigued by Scylla (méditerranée) 1938 (pictured below right) a painting by Ithell Colquhoun that Tate Modern has shown with Surrealists such as Salvador Dali. It’s a double image that, like a “ Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The best way to experience Ed Atkins’ exhibition at Tate Britain is to start at the end by watching Nurses Come and Go, But None For Me, a film he has just completed. It lasts nearly two hours but is worth the investment since it reveals what the rest of the work tries hard to avoid openly confronting – grief.Actor Toby Jones reads from a diary kept by Atkins’ father, Philip during the months before his death from cancer in 2009. With mordant humour, he titled it Sick Notes and, by turns, the entries are sad, funny, banal or full of pain and fury. Jones’ audience is a group of young Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The railways that we built in India may be well known, but I bet you’ve never heard of the Customs Line, a hedge that stretched 2,500 miles across the subcontinent all the way from the River Indus to the border between Madras and Bengal – the distance between London and Istanbul. Comparable in scale to the great Wall of China, this 40-foot high barrier was created to prevent the smuggling of salt.Before the advent of refrigeration, salt played a crucial role in preserving food. Taxing a substance so essential for survival was a sure way of getting rich and the British East India Company was Read more ...
Sarah Kent
I thought I might never be able to say it’s been a great year for women artists, so forgive me for focusing solely on them.Things were kickstarted with a retrospective of Barbara Kruger (Serpentine Gallery) who uses words and images to illuminate the way language is (mis)used to cajole, bully, manipulate and lie. Having explored similar territory for 50 some years, you’d have thought the American artist would have run out of ideas. Not a bit of it. Dominating the central space was a huge screen showing Untitled (No Comment) (main picture) which explores the Orwellian soup of Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Tate Britain’s Now You See Us could be the most important exhibition you’ll ever see. Spanning 400 hundred years, this overview of women artists in Britain destroys the myth that female talent is an exotic anomaly.We were led to believe there’d been no great women artists until, searching the archives, female art historians were able to reveal the genius of Artemisia Gentileschi whose Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting (La Pittura), c.1638-1639 (pictured below right) kicks off this brilliant survey.How I wish I’d known of this powerful painting when I was a student at the Slade! It Read more ...
Sarah Kent
At the turn of the 20th century, London’s smart set queued up to get their portraits painted by American-born artist John Singer Sargent. Sitting for him was a performance, a way to show the world just how rich, glamorous, clever or important you were. And everything – from the pose to the hair, jewellery and clothing – was stage-managed to create the best impression.At Tate Britain, the brilliance of Sargent’s showmanship is on display from the start in his 1907 portrait of Lady Sassoon, who stands decked in an opera cape. Beside the painting is the garment itself, a gorgeous confection that Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Paul Sng’s documentary Tish is one of the best British films of 2023 – both a heartfelt tribute to the life and work of the late photographer Tish (born Patricia) Murtha and a timely reminder of the war waged on the nation’s industrial working-class by the Thatcher government and its successors. Murtha’s death in 2013 was not unrelated to that war.Her black and white documentary photos, as touching as they were trenchant, represented the politically and socially disenfranchised families of north-eastern England during the Seventies and Eighties as photographers like Dorothea Lange and Walker Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The soundtrack to Tate Britain’s seminal exhibition Women in Revolt! is a prolonged scream. On film, Gina Birch of the punk band The Raincoats gives vent to her pent-up anger and frustration by yelling at the top of her lungs for 3 minutes (main picture). And in many ways, this whole exhibition is a scream of rage.Sick of being marginalised by the male-dominated art world and tired of being treated as second class citizens in every other walk of life, in the 1970s women artists went on the offensive. They began organising, protesting and demonstrating and making work that is, in itself, Read more ...
Sarah Kent
I think of Sarah Lucas as the bad girl of British art, the one who uses her wicked sense of humour to point to rampant misogyny and call out the perpetrators. Of her generation of YBAs (Young British Artists), she has produced the edgiest, funniest and most disrespectful work.She enlarged the pages of The Sunday Sport to giant proportions, for instance, to bring home the nastiness of their attitude towards women. In Fat, Forty and Flab-ulous (pictured below) an overweight woman is derided for wanting to be sexy and desirable and in Pairfect Match readers are invited to match up women’s Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Isaac Julien was a student at St Martin’s School of Art when the Brixton riots broke out. Black youths took to the streets, frustrated by high rates of unemployment, police harassment, far-right intimidation and media hostility, and all hell was let loose.The following year, 21-year-old Colin Roach was shot at the entrance to Stoke Newington Police Station and this time Julien felt he had to respond. “I was determined,” he said, “to appropriate video art techniques and repurpose them for the street.” Made with Sankofa Film and Video Collective, Who Killed Colin Roach?, 1983 records the Read more ...