Post-Impressionism
After Impressionism: Inventing Modern Art, National Gallery review - an impressive tour de forceSaturday, 25 March 2023What a feast! Congratulations are due to the National Gallery for its latest blockbuster After Impressionism: Inventing Modern Art. Such a superb collection of modern masters is unlikely to be assembled again under one roof, so this is a once-in-a-... Read more... |
Camille Laurens: Little Dancer Aged Fourteen review - the story of a sculptureSunday, 05 July 2020Edgar Degas is famous for his depictions of ballet dancers. His drawings, paintings and sculptures of young girls clad in the uniform of the dance are signs of an artistic obsession that spanned a remarkable artistic career. One work in particular... Read more... |
Gauguin Portraits, National Gallery review - me, myself and ITuesday, 08 October 2019“Gauguin was undoubtedly self-obsessed” begins the National Gallery’s latest dead cert blockbuster, as it cheerfully hijacks a de facto series begun next door at the National Portrait Gallery. Unlike Picasso and Cézanne, Gauguin is not known for his... Read more... |
Van Gogh and Britain, Tate Britain review - tenuous but still persuasiveWednesday, 27 March 2019Soon after his death, Van Gogh’s reputation as a tragic genius was secured. Little has changed in the meantime, and he has continued to be understood as fatally unbalanced, ruled by instinct not intellect. Van Gogh’s characterisation of himself as a... Read more... |
Roderic O’Conor and the Moderns, National Gallery of Ireland review - experiments in Pont-AvenWednesday, 01 August 2018In the autumn of 1892 Émile Bernard wrote home to his mother that, following the summer decampment to Pont-Aven of artists visiting from Paris and further afield, there remained "some artists here, two of them talented and copying each other. One... Read more... |
Cézanne Portraits, National Portrait Gallery review - eye-opening and heart-breakingMonday, 30 October 2017Some 50 portraits by Paul Cézanne – almost a third of all those the artist painted that have survived – are on view in this quietly sensational exhibition. Eye-opening and heart-breaking, it examines his art exclusively in the context of his... Read more... |
Delacroix and the Rise of Modern Art, National GalleryWednesday, 17 February 2016Art 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... |
Painting the Modern Garden, Royal AcademySunday, 31 January 2016Painting the Modern Garden explores the interstices between nature and ourselves as revealed in the cultivation of gardens, that most delightful and frustrating of occupations, and an almost obsessive subject for many artists. About 150 paintings... Read more... |
Emily Carr, Dulwich Picture GalleryWednesday, 12 November 2014Walking into this exhibition is a bit like walking into a great forest. The dark green walls are hung all around with paintings of trees; we look up through branches that spiral dizzyingly skyward, while the upwards sweep of vast trunks seem... Read more... |
The Fall of the House of Usher, Welsh National OperaSaturday, 21 June 2014The Fall of the House of Usher is one of Edgar Allan Poe’s mistier tales, and although it has been turned into opera a few times, there are obvious difficulties. Debussy struggled for a decade to materialise a drama out of its haunting, neurotic... Read more... |
Collecting Gauguin, Courtauld GallerySunday, 07 July 2013A one-room display at the Courtauld of seven paintings, a wall of woodcuts, some drawings and a sculpture by the passionate and volatile Gauguin: for all its modesty, this is a staggeringly powerful show, replete with exotic dreams and embodying the... Read more... |
theartsdesk in Philadelphia: In the house of an American MediciSunday, 19 August 2012MoMa and the Met, the Whitney and the Guggenheim – all very fine, but if you crave something different when in NYC, it’s worth braving Penn Station’s circles of hell to get a train to Philadelphia (takes just over an hour) to visit the mind-boggling... Read more... |
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