history of art
Marina Vaizey
The ebullient presenter, writer and director Waldemar Januszczak opens his enthusiastic and proselytising hour-long film on Sir Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) by reading out a series of disparaging quotes from other artists. William Blake thought Rubens’s shadows looked like excrement, that Rubens was a fool and his paintings were slobberings. Picasso thought Rubens was gifted but unusually nasty, whilst Thomas Eakins also thought him the nastiest painter, and Byron referred to his infernal glare of colours. Januszczak can even be pretty disparaging himself, discussing Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Anselm Kiefer reminds me a bit of someone I once worked for. Totally unpredictable, and possessed of a formidable intelligence and creativity, his mental leaps can be bewilderingly hard to follow, leading occasionally to truly breathtaking results, but crashing and burning just as often. Everyone else, like me, or in Kiefer’s case his long-suffering assistant Tony, not to mention poor old Alan Yentob, has to trot along behind, barely able to keep up with the barrage of ideas, questions and orders, let alone judge whether any of it is any good.Early on, Yentob was struggling to keep abreast of Read more ...
Florence Hallett
It is hard to know whether the thematic and stylistic threads running through this year’s Taylor Wessing Prize are evidence of some general shift in approach, or simply reflect the judges’ tastes. In any case, where last year’s shortlist featured stark portraits highlighting the tricky power relationships between photographer and subject, this year’s competition tends towards something gentler and more empathetic – an altogether homelier sort of photography. Submitted by over 1,700 photographers from all over the world, including amateurs, students and well-known professionals, many of the Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The chatty, loquacious, exuberant Simon Schama, whose seminal 1987 book on Holland in the 17th century, The Embarrassment of Riches, transformed the anglophone’s understanding of the Dutch Republic, describes himself as historian, writer, art critic, cook, BBC presenter. He is also the University Professor of History and Art History at Columbia, and has written 14 substantial and even significant books. On several of his subjects, from British art, slavery in America and landscape in culture to the history of the Jews, he has presented popular television series. The energy and curiosity is Read more ...
Florence Hallett
It could be an aircraft, hastily covered with some very inadequate wrappings and squeezed into the great hangar of the Turbine Hall. Or perhaps an eccentric sort of bird, its bedraggled wings missing chunks of orange plumage, in contrast to its plush, red body. Or perhaps it is part of a stage set with extravagant swags of red fabric carefully arranged to look, fleetingly, like theatre curtains, or pieces of scenery either under construction or partially wrapped, ready to be put away.Pulled and gathered at points, the towering red central section of this vast new sculpture sometimes resembles Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
At the end of this absorbing documentary about the art – and life – of Paul Nash we visited his tombstone in a Buckinghamshire churchyard, accompanying writer and presenter Andrew Graham-Dixon as he laid sunflowers on the grave. He reminded us that Nash saw the sunflower as a symbol for the soul, turning to the sun; indeed one of his last paintings was “Solstice of the Sunflower”.The final phrase Graham-Dixon used about this highly literate and intelligent artist was that he had been haunted by life, haunted by death, and by the ghosts of war. Unusually, Nash was an official war artist in Read more ...
Florence Hallett
If, like me, you switched this on feeling sheepish about your sketchy knowledge of Chinese art, you would have welcomed as a ready-made excuse the news that some monuments synonymous with Chinese culture are relatively recent discoveries. It seems unthinkable that the terracotta army guarding the burial site of China’s first Emperor Qin Shi Huang was the stuff of legend and rumour until 1974, but it turns out that much of the 22-square-mile area occupied by the memorial is still to be explored and it could be another century before the site is fully excavated.We have all seen those eerie Read more ...
Florence Hallett
The doctoring of political images became something of a tradition in the last century, with Stalin, Hitler and Mao all airbrushing their enemies from photographs. The latest infrared technology has revealed that something similar may have happened during the English Civil War, with a portrait of Oliver Cromwell apparently having been painted over with an image of the Parliamentarian Sir Arthur Hesilrige, who fell out with Cromwell when he became Lord Protector in 1653. At first glance, the National Portrait Gallery’s Sir Arthur Hesilrige (pictured below right), inscribed with the Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Last year, the German artist Georg Baselitz told Der Spiegel: “Women don't paint very well. It's a fact,” citing as evidence the failure of works by female artists to sell for the massive sums raised by their male counterparts. The amusing punchline to that story is that shortly afterwards a Berthe Morisot painting sold at auction for more than double the amount ever achieved by Baselitz himself. But be honest - come on, use your fingers - how many women artists can you think of? Because however much Baselitz’s misogyny appals you, the prospect of not one, but three programmes dedicated to Read more ...
fisun.guner
For dull reasons to do with a dodgy digital box and a very old analogue telly, I can’t tune in to BBC Four during live transmissions, so I either catch up on iPlayer, or (lucky me as a journalist) get to see programmes early. But I’m very glad I can get it at all, for when the BBC cuts come to pass and its premier arts channel starts broadcasting archive-only material, as it proposes to do, then I think I might just stop watching telly altogether.This is because everything, but everything, that the BBC stands for is encapsulated by BBC Four’s original programming. And in the visual arts it Read more ...
Graham Fuller
If one comes away with any certainty from the New York exhibition Frans Hals at the Metropolitan Museum (until 10 October) it is that the Golden Age Dutch master (1582/3-1666) keenly understood and sympathised with his fellow human beings. Whether Hals (beloved of Courbet, Manet, Monet, Van Gogh, Whistler and Sargent) was painting drunks and prostitutes in tavern scenes, humble fisher folk, or burghers and intellectuals and their wives, he unerringly captured the essence of his sitters. There is little sentimentalisation or disparagement in his work.Painting from nature, he told the truth as Read more ...
fisun.guner
Who could argue that television isn’t a great medium for learning about art? In its pared-down, visually literate way it delivers what dull, theory-laden extrapolations often can’t (if only because artists don’t think that way when they make things, and we don’t think that way when we look at things). It can breathe renewed life and vigour into a subject we think we know well, and, as a medium for simplified, pocket-sized information, it can get straight to the heart of a matter. Perfect. Possibly. And so we come to The Impressionists: Painting and Revolution.Waldemar Januszczak gave us this Read more ...