Visual arts
Marina Vaizey
Turner and the Elements is a visual joy and an intellectual pleasure. The backbone of the selection is Turner’s genuine engagement with the scientists of the day. The argument is that he amalgamated the traditional segregation of the elements – earth, air, fire and water – into a fusion of all four; that technically, instead of schematic compositions divided into discernable sections and monocular viewpoints, he painted, so to speak, from the centre out.Turner first briefly came to Margate as an 11-year-old London schoolboy. Then as now sea air was considered a good thing. In the Read more ...
fisun.guner
In one small room of the Freud Museum, which was once the home of Sigmund in the last year of his life, are the works Jane McAdam Freud made in the final months of her father’s life. Below an imposing photograph of Freud the elder, the progenitor of the clan, are two detailed, tender sketches of Lucian in profile. In the right sketch the dying artist stares resolutely ahead, his gaze, coupled with the firm set of his jaw, capturing a sense of absolute stillness. The left sketch shows the artist now more gaunt, eyes closed, in death, we imagine, or possibly just asleep. Perhaps much more Read more ...
Justin Quirk
In popular myth, Margaret Thatcher reportedly said that any man still travelling by bus after the age of 30 could consider himself a failure. The quote is almost certainly apocryphal, but it stuck in the public consciousness because it sounded like the kind of thing that an arch-conservative would say; cars were the preserve of the rich and successful, whereas buses were how the poor, the failed and the antisocial travelled around the city.If there’s any truth in that distinction, then it damns an awful lot of people in London. Every weekday, over 6,800 buses carry around six million people Read more ...
theartsdesk
The latest in the live events staged by theartsdesk aims to shed light on controversies and myths about the value and purpose of contemporary visual art. Taking place at the heart of the London Art Fair, where more than 100 galleries will present work this week, this double debate, chaired by our visual arts critic Fisun Güner, is the place to come and ask the tough questions about the relationship between artist and viewer.But What Does It Mean? considers how much we should take into account an artist’s intention. Is the viewer’s response more important than what, if anything, the artist Read more ...
josh.spero
These are, we are told, David Hockney's landscape works, and in that they depict the outdoors - early Grand Canyons and LA scenes, Yorkshire from the Nineties to now - that is correct. As a description, however, it comes nowhere near encapsulating the mystical, profound, plain beautiful pictures presented at the Royal Academy.The first paintings you encounter are both announcements of intention and tentative conclusions. These are seasonal versions of Three Trees Near Thixendale (2007-8), each nearly two metres by five, across eight canvases, capturing with elegant swoops bare purple-black Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s safe to say that the diary of Tryggve Gran does not capture the mood of this centenary exhibition. “This life is of little interest," he wrote; "one day is just as monotonous as the next.” Gran was the Norwegian hired by Captain Scott to teach his men to ski and was in the party which discovered the frozen bodies of Scott, Edward Wilson and "Birdie" Bowers. On the sledge which Scott and his exhausted men had hauled through nearly 1,000 miles, they found 30 pounds of geological specimens. Gran hazarded a sceptical note: “I think they might have saved themselves the weight.”Some of those Read more ...