Visual arts
judith.flanders
Mikhail Fokine, choreographer to both West and East, looked forward and back, too. He studied in the old Imperial Theatre School when the tsars ruled Russia, and he was also Diaghilev’s creative genius at the Ballets Russes, moving dance into the 20th century before and after the Revolution. The Mariinsky, once his home, is a premier exponent of his multifaceted styles. Chopiniana, his 1907 “white” ballet (known in the West as Les Sylphides) (pictured right, photo V Baranovsky), can be inert, shapeless, lifeless. Indeed, it all too frequently is. Saddled with an unappealing score (Chopin Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
We are still acknowledging our 21st-century debts to the energy, curiosity, determination and passion for discovery of a host of Victorian polymaths, and here is another. Sir Charles Eastlake (1793-1865) was a painter, scholar, author, collector and translator – fluent in German, French, Italian – and the first director of the National Gallery, rising above disputes with trustees and the government to set the scene for the role it plays today.A small exhibition in Room 1 shows us Sir Charles’s travel diaries and notes, his annotated guidebook to the art collections of Venice and a half-dozen Read more ...
fisun.guner
Dalí may have the edge on Magritte for instant recognition and popularity, but how easily the Belgian beats the Spaniard as the more interesting Surrealist. Armed with his small repertoire of images – the nude, the shrouded head, the bowler hat, the apple and the pipe, to name a few – and painted in that precise, pictogram way of his, Magritte is an artist who holds back more than he gives away. Next to his restrained, meticulously tidy offerings, Dalí appears decidedly overcooked.In paintings such as The Treachery of Images (Cesi n’est pas une pipe), 1929, in which a representation Read more ...
David Nice
Nine out of 10 attempts to feed an audience's visual responses to abstract music are doomed to failure; a great communicator will always conjure stronger pictures in the listener's mind. And there's no doubt that young violinist Alina Ibragimova communicates at the highest level. But here she simply held her own to work in shadowplay with both the mysterious spaces of London's most atmospheric venue and the even more intangible visions of twins Timothy and Stephan Quay. Their film around Bartók's Solo Violin Sonata, though defying intellectual analysis and easy correspondence with the musical Read more ...
howard.male
For 35 years, contemporary art in Iraq was a no-no unless it was grimly, dully figurative or a gaudy mural glorifying Saddam Hussein. But this year, six Iraqi artists were invited to the most prestigious annual contemporary art event in the world; the Venice Biennale. It may be of little significance that Alan Yentob’s parents came from Iraq, but last night’s Imagine was probably the best of the series so far. Its focus may have been these artists and their art, but its reach was somehow much greater.It’s said that the best literature springs from oppressed or ravaged cultures, making Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Hadie Shafdie, Iranian-born and now living in America, uses phrases and words taken from mystical Sufi poetry, incantations of sequences of the names of the divine. She handwrites and prints the devotions, usually spoken or chanted, on thousands of tiny scrolls in a broad spectrum of beguiling colours. The paper is rolled into circles of varying sizes, with the Farsi script almost entirely hidden, and tightly packed into wall-hanging glazed wooden vitrines. The resulting two pieces – 22500 Pages and 26000 Pages, both created this year - are captivating, echoing in stasis the physical Read more ...
terry.friel
As hot, sweaty tourists dangle their feet in pools for Thai Nibble Fish to eat the dead skin from their feet at Kuala Lumpur’s quirky Art Deco Central Market, a small theatre upstairs is packed for a play about racial divisions and the myth of social unity here. The performance of Parah ( which means "severe") at the market’s Annexe Gallery by the young team from The Instant Café Theatre Company is a daring look at race and division in a country that paints itself as a shining example of unity, but whose policies are increasingly driving a wedge between the main groups – Malays, Chinese, Read more ...
theartsdesk
Lucian Freud, who died aged 88 at his west London home on Wednesday, was often described as Britain's greatest living artist. In the six decades he was active, figurative painting went in and out of fashion - though mostly it was out - but Freud remained resolutely outside and beyond fashion. As both an art world grandee and something of a celebrity, he really had no rival, though perhaps David Hockney, still alive and 15 years his junior, came closest. Freud, however, had a very different way of looking: cooler, harder, more penetrative. Below, four writers pay their personal tributes. Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The National Gallery has in recent years made a speciality of examining the hitherto unexamined. Just for starters, a surprise hit some years ago was Spanish Still Lifes, 2007 saw Renoir Landscapes (who knew?), last year there was the ravishing Christen Kobke, star of the Danish Golden Age, and just this spring New York’s Ashcan School, all with committed scholarship throwing light on the internationally disregarded. In a gallery full of stormy seas, Alpine passes (with the occasional mountain goat), fast-moving streams and huge skies, two more unfamiliar geographies are on view. We may Read more ...
fisun.guner
Who could argue that television isn’t a great medium for learning about art? In its pared-down, visually literate way it delivers what dull, theory-laden extrapolations often can’t (if only because artists don’t think that way when they make things, and we don’t think that way when we look at things). It can breathe renewed life and vigour into a subject we think we know well, and, as a medium for simplified, pocket-sized information, it can get straight to the heart of a matter. Perfect. Possibly. And so we come to The Impressionists: Painting and Revolution.Waldemar Januszczak gave us this Read more ...
fisun.guner
It begins in a so-so fashion. The ground-floor gallery at White Cube’s Mason’s Yard features a sea of Constructivist sculptures on plinths. These are made from bits of torn cardboard and loo rolls, sloppily painted. Jake and Dinos Chapman love corny art jokes, but this gag feels like it’s already a little flat. And I’m disappointed to be disappointed. Chapman exhibitions are always something to look forward to, and I was looking forward to this one, especially since they had in mind a game. And the game in this instance was that they had worked independently for the first time - in separate Read more ...