Tate Britain
fisun.guner
When did Big Ideas make a comeback at the Turner Prize? Did they ever go away? In its 30-year history it seems that everything that wasn’t painting has been labelled “conceptual art”. But we know that labels can be very misleading, and the “conceptual” in “conceptual art” obviously need not apply. Walking through the mind-maze of this year’s exhibition of four shortlisted artists, particularly the work of Dublin-born Duncan Campbell, one feels at the mercy of a lot of portentous theorising. But that’s probably because Campbell seems to dominate the exhibition with a film, It for Others, Read more ...
fisun.guner
There is early Turner; there is late Turner. Early Turner is very much of his time: a history and landscape painter in the first half of the 19th century, looking back to the classicism of Claude and the Dutch Golden Age tradition of sombre marine painting; late Turner is outside time, or at least outside his own time. In his final decade, Turner paints his way to the future, gravitating towards formlessness and abstraction. And in these luminous late canvases, where colour-suffused light dissolves form, we find a path to Monet, Rothko, all those American colour field painters, even Twombly. Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Presenter Alastair Sooke looked alarmingly fit, careering round the British countryside and the streets of Paris on his bicycle, talking all the while (and never out of breath) as he described the artistic trajectory of John Constable. In the opening sequence he set the scene, biking straight across – and not at the traffic lights, either – the Cromwell Road to get to the main entrance of the Victoria and Albert Museum; the film is timed to preview the major show “Constable: The Making of a Master” that there opens on September 20. That museum has the largest collection of Constable, which Read more ...
Sarah Kent
I agreed with some reluctance to review British Folk Art, since I anticipated an overdose of quaint charm, naive whimsy and endearing eccentricity. You know the kind of thing – fire screens embroidered with overblown flowers and paintings of fat porkers, faithful dogs or stallions galloping like rocking horses.I needn’t have worried; some naive paintings are included along with embroidery samplers and patchwork quilts, but predictable items like these are offset by a stunning array of ship’s figureheads and trade signs including a cobbler’s boot (pictured below), a locksmith’s padlock and key Read more ...
fisun.guner
Lord, I confess I have never seen Kenneth Clark’s epic 13-part series Civilisation. Not in its entirety at any rate – only snippets on YouTube, and, more recently, excerpts at Tate Britain’s current exhibition, where highlights from his many televisual essays from the Sixties are being screened on multiple monitors, the earlier ones, in black and white, presented rather in the style of a carefully rehearsed, stiffly enacted avuncular chat in front of a favourite painting or sculpture. But having read him, including the book based on that acclaimed 1969 series, I can vouch that his plummy Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The revamping of Tate Britain has produced such an atmosphere of understated elegance that one hardly dares breathe for fear of displacing a particle of dust. An air of suffocating sterility has seeped into the displays, which are so tastefully arranged that even the most passionate works are drained of emotion; and without a ripple of feeling ruffling the exquisite calm of these genteel waters, British art appears unrelentingly polite – and provincial.Thank heavens for Phyllida Barlow who manages, single-handedly, to energise the space by filling the Duveen galleries with an installation Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The first room of Ruin Lust is a knockout. Three large-scale pictures indicate the enduring fascination that ruins have held for artists over the centuries. John Martin’s apocalyptic view of Vesuvius smothering Pompeii in a vast cloud of volcanic ash (main picture) is like a vision of Hell. The engulfing dust storm is shaped like a fiery grotto – seductive yet repellent. In its fleshy recesses, the erupting volcano appears like a fire-spurting nipple, while the flames reflected in the water tinge the sea blood red, making it impossible to distinguish the actual waves from the lava swamping Read more ...
fisun.guner
A chronological hang of its permanent collection instead of the once so modish thematic one, a show devoted entirely to contemporary painting, which was not at all modish until quite recently – things are definitely astir at Tate Britain. Next week, the gallery will be unveiling its new Millbank entrance, restaurant and café, as part of the final stage of its two-year refurbishment and Painting Now is, I suppose one can say, one of the shows designed to re-establish Tate Britain’s prestige and increase its footfall, since it probably still suffers something of the frumpy sister syndrome next Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Seeing the statue of Saddam Hussein toppled in Baghdad in April 2003, I felt a rush of euphoria despite deep reservations about the American invasion. My (misplaced) optimism was shared by the Iraqi student, Ayass Mohammed. ’“Suddenly I felt freedom,” he told reporters; for him the fall of the statue symbolised the end of tyranny and the arrival of hope. The destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan (pictured right) by the Afghan Taliban two years earlier was a similarly emotive affair. In the west, it provoked a wave of disgust; citing the historical and artistic importance of the Read more ...
fisun.guner
It’s part of the Lowry myth – the myth of many famous artists, in fact, whether or not it actually happens to be true – that he’s never been taken seriously as an artist by critics or by cognoscenti. Even the co-curator of this exhibition, T.J Clark says more or less the same. Lowry isn’t taken seriously, Clark has said, because anyone dealing with working-class life in class-ridden Britain can’t be taken seriously. Perhaps we might qualify this by adding that anyone dealing with working-class life from within it can’t be taken that seriously. Perhaps.Throughout the Twenties and Thirties Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Patrick Caulfield (1936-2005) is the greatest late 20th-century British painter the international art world has never heard of. This quietly magnificent exhibition of about 35 paintings, most of them very large, may at last bring about a satisfactory reversal of fortune. Although some of the paintings are 50 years old, they could have been painted tomorrow. Their style, wit, irony and melancholy, tempered by contradictory moods of quiet cynicism and sensual pleasure in the observed world, seem utterly contemporary.The images are theme and variations: flatly painted blocks of bold colour – Read more ...
fisun.guner
“Is David Shrigley an artist?,” a journalist asked at Tate Britain’s Turner Prize shortlist announcement this morning. Well, many would say so, though The Arts Desk critic Judith Flanders had her own reservations after seeing his Hayward Gallery show, Brain Activity, for which he was nominated. “Just because the work’s funny, doesn’t mean it’s not serious”, was the short-shrift response of Tate Britain director and chair of judges Penelope Curtis. Her reply showed how seriously she was prepared to take the question.Some people were thrilled by these interactions, some decidedly Read more ...