fri 20/09/2024

painters

Ego: The Strange and Wonderful World of Self-Portraits, BBC Four

Laura Cumming presents 'an intelligent, probing and charming visual essay on a unique genre'

Albrecht Dürer painted himself as Jesus (pictured below). Luckily, he was blessed with the looks, the hair and the initials – echoing the geometry of his golden locks the A straddles the D in his inscribed paintings. And when this German messiah of...

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Leon Kossoff, New Works, Annely Juda Fine Art

Kossoff: 'Christ Church, Spitalfields', 1999-2000

It is one of the enduring mysteries of Leon Kossoff’s art. How does someone who uses such thick, impastoed paint and such muddy, earth-toned colours make his work so light, so delicate, so filled with grace? The more you look, the more mysterious...

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Cézanne's Card Players, Courtauld Gallery

Give me a small side order of Cézannes over a great feast of Gauguins any day. This small, perfectly formed survey will surely be noted as one of the best exhibitions this year, the type of exhibition at which the Courtauld Gallery clearly excels:...

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Thomas Lawrence: Regency Power and Brilliance, National Portrait Gallery

Thomas Lawrence was a child prodigy; from the age of 11 he supported his family by making pastel drawings of the fashionable elite who spent the season in Bath. The next step for an aspiring young artist was to learn how to paint in oils and...

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The Genius of British Art, Howard Jacobson, Channel 4

Howard Jacobson, fresh from his Booker Prize triumph, was on an admirable mission last night: to rescue the good name of the Victorians. He wanted us to stop caricaturing our 19th-century forebears as prudish, self-righteous, pompous and...

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Film: Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow

Anselm Kiefer's sculpture 'Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow': 'We see him swing huge giant concrete huts around by crane, flinging them on top of one another like they were toys'

Action-movie season ain't over quite yet, folks. Sure. OK. Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow isn't exactly your conventional salute to Armageddon. No guns, no baddies, no hot babes, no long-haired hunks. The pace is slow. The dialogue's pretty non-...

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Frieze Art Fair, Regent's Park

Damián Ortega's globe constructed from rocks of different sizes and colours at Kurimanzutto Gallery

Contemporary art can, unsurprisingly, become dated pretty quickly – the clue is in the name. Another of Damien Hirst’s mirrored cabinets of pills or of Gavin Turk’s piss-takes of Andy Warhol at the Frieze Art Fair in Regent’s Park is hardly the...

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Interview: Photographer Wolfgang Tillmans

The 2010 Brighton Photo Biennial has seen unprecedented numbers of visitors flock to the coast, and tonight will host a talk by one of the most original fine-art photographers working in Britain today. Wolfgang Tillmans will explore his unique and...

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Turner Prize 2010, Tate Britain

There may be some who feel this year’s shortlist for the Turner Prize has done little to forge ahead with anything new, innovative and different. And then there may be others who will welcome the rather more established artists on this year’s list,...

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The Genius of British Art, David Starkey, Channel 4

Forgetting the rest of art history, David Starkey cunningly tries to convince us that the Tudors invented the portrait

“Henry VIII is the only king whose shape we remember,” David Starkey tells us in the first of a new series of “polemical essays” on British art. To demonstrate, he reduces the king’s form to its bare Cubist geometry. He sketches a trapezoid for the...

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Salvator Rosa: Bandits, Wilderness and Magic, Dulwich Picture Gallery

Salvator Rosa's self-portrait 'Philosophy' provides 'a glimpse of the self-promotional flair that would spark a personality cult'

Mount Vesuvius blew its top in 1631, spewing molten lava into the sea and filling the air with ash clouds that reached as far as Constantinople. The eruption and accompanying earthquakes killed 3,000 people and caused widespread devastation, all of...

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Treasures from Budapest: European Masterpieces from Leonardo to Schiele, Royal Academy

'Sleeping Girl': 'A smile plays on her lips as if she is dreaming of a lover, whose scent, perhaps, she can still smell'

Treasures from Budapest – phew! It’s overwhelming. One staggers out quite cross-eyed and wobbly-kneed. There are over 200 works, for heaven’s sake. And so many Virgins: sweet-faced Italian Madonnas, austere Eastern European Madonnas, pallid German...

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