painting
Delacroix and the Rise of Modern Art, National GalleryWednesday, 17 February 2016
Art exhibitions hardly seem comparable with battery farming, and yet just as our insatiable appetite for cheap meat gives rise to some troubling consequences, so too does the demand for definitive exhibitions that require vulnerable works of art to... Read more... |
Bruegel in Black and White: Three Grisailles Reunited, Courtauld GalleryMonday, 08 February 2016
Now that Renaissance altarpieces live for the most part in museums and not churches, our experience of them is, quite literally, flat. Once, the winged altarpieces so popular in northern Europe, comprising a central panel flanked by two moveable “... Read more... |
Best of 2015: ArtMonday, 28 December 2015
From weaselly shyster to spineless drip, the biographies of Goya’s subjects are often superfluous: exactly what he thought of each of his subjects is jaw-droppingly evident in each and every portrait he painted. Quite how Goya got away with it is a... Read more... |
Jean-Etienne Liotard, Royal AcademySunday, 25 October 2015
Unswervingly confident, relaxed and assured, the élite of the 18th century are currently arrayed on the walls of the Royal Academy, gazing down at us with the utmost assurance of their unassailable place in the world, bright eyed and dressed to... Read more... |
Peter Lanyon, Courtauld GalleryFriday, 16 October 2015
Free as air, but there was a very heavy price to pay for his ecstatic exploration of the sky by the Cornwall painter Peter Lanyon, who died in 1964, aged just 46, as a result of injuries received in a gliding accident. The Courtauld Gallery is... Read more... |
Frank Auerbach, Tate BritainSaturday, 10 October 2015
A finely honed and spacious selection dating from the 1950s to now, looks in acute focus at the work – a scatter of drawings, a print, but almost entirely paintings – of Frank Auerbach, (b 1931). An only child, he came without his family, from... Read more... |
Goya: The Portraits, National GalleryWednesday, 07 October 2015
The brute nature of man in times of war, religious persecution and hypocrisy, and the destructive power of superstition. Francisco de Goya’s fame today largely rests on such themes, and they go a long way to explain just why he’s often considered... Read more... |
The Gap: Selected Abstract Art from Belgium, Parasol UnitMonday, 14 September 2015
From its title, you could be misled into dismissing this show as narrow and self-referential: a small exhibition in a small gallery curated by a Belgian artist concerned only with his own countrymen. In fact, it is something of a survey, featuring... Read more... |
Out of Chaos: Ben Uri - 100 Years in London, Somerset HouseThursday, 16 July 2015
The exhibition Out of Chaos is a powerful dose of specific human experience, here presented almost exclusively in the form of portraits and group scenes. The selection comes almost entirely from the more than 1,300 works of art owned by Ben Uri... Read more... |
Richard Dadd: The Art of Bedlam, Watts GalleryFriday, 26 June 2015
The Watts Gallery in rural Surrey is a very genteel setting for a show by a figure who for most of his life was denied polite society. Richard Dadd spent 42 years in mental hospitals, first at Bethlem, then Broadmoor. As one can infer, he was... Read more... |
Philip Guston, Timothy Taylor GallerySunday, 21 June 2015
Light. Light banishes the shadows where monsters lurk and where ghosts rattle their chains. “Give me some light, away!” cries the usurping king in Hamlet as his murderous deed is exposed by the trickery of art. What guilt plagues and seizes his... Read more... |
Bridget Riley: The Curve Paintings 1961-2014, De La Warr PavilionWednesday, 17 June 2015
If they remember the 1960s at all, the ageing population of Bexhill-on-Sea will remember Bridget Riley for her black and white experiments in perception. The iconic results of this line of enquiry can still result in a “happening” for the eyeballs.... Read more... |
