painting
Katherine Waters
Modigliani was an addict. Booze, fags, absinthe, hash, cocaine, women. He lived fast, died young, cherished an idea of what an artist should be and pursued it to his death. His nickname, Modi, played on the idea of the artiste maudit – the figure of the artist as wretched, damned. His funeral was an artistic Who’s Who in Paris in 1920 but the disease that killed him – tubercular meningitis – is a disease of poverty, and his penniless death has been matched exactly a century since his nudes were exhibited in a Parisian gallery (and immediately censored) with a vast exhibition at Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Finland is celebrating its centenary this year and the National Gallery's exhibition of four paintings by Akseli Gallen-Kalela (1865-1931) of a very large lake in central Finland is a beguiling glimpse of the passion its inhabitants attach to its scenic beauty, in winter darkness and here, summer night. Finland possesses almost 190,000 lakes, depending on your definition. When flying over its vastness that calculation is profoundly believable, as the view is almost of more water than forest, in a country replete with ponds, streams, rivers – and lakes. Many of the lakes are very, very deep, Read more ...
theartsdesk
Yesterday the record for the most expensive painting ever sold was broken. At Christie's in New York Leonardo da Vinci's Salvator Mundi the hammer was knocked down on a price of $450 million. It's a lot of money, period, and even more for a painting which some doubt is by Leonardo at all. One doubter insists that Leonardo the great scientist would have refracted the light through the orb in Christ's hands. That won't bother the buyer, whose identity is unknown.Salvator Mundi soars to the top of the list of the 75 most expensive paintings sold in the last 30 years. The recent Leonardo Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
This sparkling display of some four score watercolours from the first decade of the last century throw an unfamiliar light on the artistry of John Singer Sargent (1856-1925), the last great swagger portrait painter in the western tradition. None here is a portrait in the conventional sense: rather Sargent is, so to speak, off duty, painting for himself with a glorious spontaneity, a professional on holiday. Among friends, he created images for himself in a medium that needed great skill, lent itself to experimentation, and produced immediate results. This is not a retrospective, concentrating Read more ...
Sarah Kent
I can’t pretend to like the work of Fahrelnissa Zeid, but she was clearly an exceptional woman and deserves to be honoured with a retrospective. She led a privileged life that spanned most of the 20th century; born in Istanbul in 1901 into a prominent Ottoman family, many of whom were involved in the arts, she died in 1991. Tate Modern's exhibition opens with a portrait of her grandmother painted by Zeid when she was only 14, which with its delicate touch and finely observed detail, reveals a precocious talent.She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts for Women but, when she was 19, Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Even today, the perception of Venice as a city only half-rooted in mundane reality owes a great deal to Canaletto (1697-1768), an artist who made his name producing paintings for English tourists visiting Italy in the 18th century. Recognisable views are subtly altered, the gently improving instincts of the artist shifting the scene almost imperceptibly away from real life, and into the realms of the imagination.In the days of the Grand Tour, the effect must have been even more pronounced, and Lucy Whitaker, co-curator of a new exhibition at the Queen’s Gallery, compares the paintings to Read more ...
Alison Cole
The wonderful Estorick collection, tucked away in Highbury Fields in London, is internationally renowned for its collection of modern Italian art, with a core of major Futurist works. Its new temporary exhibition focuses on one of these Futurist enfant terribles, Giacomo Balla, with a joyous assembly of works spanning the artist’s entire career (1904-51), drawn from the private collection of the fashion designer Laura Biagiotti and her husband Gianni Cigna.The show, which is the first to be dedicated to Balla’s work in Britain, features 116 works from their 300-strong collection, and includes Read more ...
Alison Cole
A lovely, scholarly and gently revelatory exhibition, Madonnas and Miracles explores a neglected area of the perennially popular and much-studied Italian Renaissance – the place of piety in the Renaissance home. We are used to admiring the great 15th- and 16th-century gilded altarpieces and religious frescoes of Italian churches, palace chapels and convents, but this exhibition – one of the main outcomes of a generous four- year European funded research project – shows how the laity experienced religion in the context of their everyday domestic lives, as well as during extraordinary Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Painted in c.1640, David Teniers the Younger’s Boy Blowing Bubbles depicts a theme that would have been entirely familiar to his wife’s great-grandfather, the founder of one of art’s most illustrious dynasties, Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c.1525-1569). Indicating the fleeting nature of life, the motif carries proverbial associations, its moral message one that in the 17th century was understood principally as memento mori. While Bruegel the Elder included depictions of proverbs in his panoramic scenes of peasant life, their meanings discussed and puzzled over by guests in the dining-rooms of Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The Other Room, dating from the late 1930s, is the largest painting in Dulwich Picture Gallery's landmark retrospective, the first show to be dedicated to Vanessa Bell since a posthumous Arts Council show in 1964. In it, three women inhabit a space crowded with sofa and armchair, flowers and a vase, a comfortable interior and yet also oddly mysterious: their body language hints at complex relationships. A great window looks out at a view of misty greens, slashes of warm pink somehow unify a complex composition.It is a quietly dazzling summary of her preoccupations as a committed, even Read more ...
Alison Cole
It may be a cliché to say that this is a “timely” exhibition, but America After the Fall invites irresistible parallels with Trump’s America of today. The exhibition showcases American painting of the 1930s, documenting the intense anxiety precipitated by the Wall Street Crash of October 1929, the rise of Fascism in Europe, and the rapid social and economic changes brought about by mechanisation, industrialisation, immigration and mass urbanisation - and the hardships experienced by those left behind.On the one hand these paintings celebrate American rural values – hard, honest work and Read more ...
Alison Cole
As the UK prepares for a particularly severe cold snap, the opening of David Hockney’s major retrospective at Tate Britain brings a welcome burst of Los Angeles light and colour and Yorkshire wit and warmth. The exhibition, which opens in the lead-up to Hockney’s 80th birthday, will be deservedly popular – for many people, Hockney’s work is simply bright and beautiful. But the show also seeks to reveal the serious and consistent nature of Hockney’s interrogation of the meaning of picture-making, and his preoccupation with the joyous and rather subversive business of “looking”.The curators Read more ...