portraits
Adam Sweeting
Aptly, this new documentary about how the Rolling Stones fled from England to the South of France to record Exile on Main Street was premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, with a supernaturally healthy-looking Mick Jagger on hand to give it a promotional shove. Jagger (along with Keith Richards and Charlie Watts) produced the film, working closely alongside director Stephen Kijak to knit together an evocative and emotional portrait of "the greatest rock'n'roll band in the world", at what many would argue was their peak.The fact that the project is an authorised job from the heart of the Read more ...
josh.spero
The first floor at Browns: 40 Years of Fashion Innovation
While wandering back from a meeting with a hedgie on Haymarket, I noticed a banner emblazoned with the logo of Browns, clothes shop to the well heeled (to mix metaphors), above the entrance to what appeared to be a building site. It was indeed a building site, off Marshall St, near Carnaby St, but two floors of the new apartment block there have been taken over by a pop-up exhibition to celebrate 40 years of Browns. Browns, ever since it was taken over by Joan Burstein in 1970, has always been one seam ahead of the pinking shears, which is why a pop-up museum makes perfect sense, although the Read more ...
fisun.guner
Bridget Riley: 'Boy with curly hair', early 1950s (red conté crayon on paper)
Forget about art “being about the idea” for a moment. Drawing from life is still considered by many to be the litmus test for proper artistic skill, or at least the foundation from which great art can arise. And so the enquiry, “But can he really draw?” is still one contemporary artists are confronted with by those not shy of asking what they consider an obvious question. And it has plagued abstract and modernist artists throughout the 20th century: the ability to draw figuratively as tradition dictates is so often seen as a benchmark from which everything else can be measured. When Read more ...