Visual arts
Adam Sweeting
In his forbidding dark suit and heavy-framed sunglasses, declaiming his artfully wrought texts to camera with the ominous certainty of a hanging judge, Jonathan Meades is one of TV’s most unmistakable presences. While it may be lamentable that we don’t see him more often, it’s miraculous, in the current climate, that we see him at all.His films are densely layered brain-twisters where history, architecture and folklore collide, ripe with allusion, metaphor and facts carefully selected for their provocative value. His best-known series include Abroad In Britain, Further Abroad with Jonathan Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Norman Rockwell (1894-1978) may be the great idealiser of American smalltown life, but many of his paintings took their cues from Dickens, and they thus have an English tang. None more so than Merrie Christmas (pictured below), which Rockwell painted for the cover of 7 December 1929 edition of the Saturday Evening Post: Tony Weller, the philosophising coachman father of Mr Pickwick’s manservant Sam, is shown cracking his whip with one hand and doffing his holly-spiked hat with the other.Resplendent in a great blue coat, a red scarf and beige breeches and waistcoat, as fat-bellied if not as Read more ...
fisun.guner
This exhibition may claim to reveal the real Van Gogh through his letters, but what of the Sunflowers, the Self-Portrait With Bandaged Ear, oh, and Starry Night, with its roiling night sky and dark, mysterious cypress tree? What even of the dizzying Night Café, with its migraine-inducing electric lamps, its violent clash of reds and greens and the walls that threaten to collapse inwards, as if the painter had been hitting the absinthe all night? Surely these are the knock-out masterpieces that we expect to see in the first major UK exhibition of Van Gogh’s work for over 40 years?We may know Read more ...
theartsdesk
The annual Sony World Photography Awards began in 2007. They showcase the work of both professional and amateur photographers across genres which inclu de journalism, fashion, architecture, advertising, sport and music. This year there were over 60,000 images submitted from 139 countries. Each year, the winners and runners-up are collected in an exhibition which tours the world. The London stop of the tour opens today at the Art Work Space gallery in London W2. Here is a selection of images, with short commentaries by the photographers themselves.Gordon Welters (Germany): Loveparade 2008: Read more ...
fisun.guner
When we look at still images of moving figures what we see is not exclusively determined by what is in front of our eyes but what we already know about the world. If we stopped to think about this, it would seem obvious. We would know, for instance, that the putti who are so joyously leaping, dancing and bounding about in Donatello’s static frieze Cantoria would make little sense to us if we didn’t already know what such static postures implied: still images of moving figures can only come alive in the imagination when we have some understanding of how living bodies move, and of what comes Read more ...
fisun.guner
The latest official royal portrait, and the first painted portrait featuring the Princes William and Harry, hangs in a small room at the National Portrait Gallery among a selection of royal portraits of the Windsors. There’s the rather quirky one of the Queen Mother, painted in 1989 by Alison Watt, an artist who sought to capture her sitter “as ordinary as possible”. What our attention seems most drawn to is the china cup turned upside down on the arm of the Queen Mother’s armchair. Eh?Then there is the immensely engaging portrait of Charles and the boys taken in 2004 by Mario Testino. Read more ...
theartsdesk
theartsdesk received a New Year's gift last night when we were given a significant accolade from BBC Radio 5 Live. In Web 2009 with Helen and Olly, the station's podcasters and self-styled "internet obsessives" Helen Zaltzman and Olly Mann recognised theartsdesk as one of the five "essential sites of 2009" in a series of awards to the "cream of weblebrity". The shortlist included such big names as Google Streetview and Spotify, the winner.Our category consisted of sites which "this year seemed to become entirely essential" and the presenters (pictured right) praised theartsdesk's " Read more ...
fisun.guner
2009 hasn’t been a vintage year for art, exactly - no queue-round-the-block showstoppers, if that’s your type of thing. Nonetheless the year was nicely topped and tailed by some memorable, and quietly seductive shows. My top five are Picasso, Mark Wallinger, Gerhard Richter, Sophie Calle and The Sacred Made Real.Picasso: Challenging the Past, National Gallery, London (February-June)
Originally shown in Paris, where Picasso’s paintings featured alongside works that had directly inspired them, this became a much tighter, more focused exhibition by the time it arrived in London. It was all the Read more ...
mark.hudson
2010 begins with a worldbeating blockbuster capable of breaking all attendance records – and it ends with another. It’s more than 40 years since Britain saw a major exhibition of the work of Vincent van Gogh; 40 years in which the tormented Dutch genius has gone from being merely an extremely famous and influential painter to, by common consent, the world’s favourite artist, the man who sacrificed himself for his art, whose light-filled canvases tell us most about what we think art should be – never mind that many of them are of dark, rain-drenched Dutch fields.The Royal Academy’s The Real Read more ...
theartsdesk
The morning after the day before has dawned. If you're not inclined to join the shopping queues, theartsdesk is happy to suggest alternatives. Our writers recommend all sorts of cultural things you could get up to in the next week.See Wicked. This smart, feisty show is not just for teenage girls (though heaven knows they’ll thank you for taking them) but will tweak at the imagination and tickle the funny bone of anyone who’s ever contemplated the back-story of The Wizard of Oz. Stephen Schwartz’s zingy score is one of the best to have come out of Broadway in the last decade and you really Read more ...
sue.steward
Every day till 3 January theartsdesk will carry a survey of one of the arts we cover. We begin with Photography. Photography books are exploding on to the market like fireworks just as the book as a tangible object is becoming increasingly endangered. And with so many titles emerging from established and pop-up publishers, it’s a hard task to pin them down to the best of 2009 without some shocking omissions. So I’ll call them “Favourites” - and await cries of outrage about who’s in and who’s out.
First, some regretted omissions: the National Portrait Gallery’s Beatles to Bowie exists thanks Read more ...
fisun.guner
There was a time, not long ago in fact, when contemporary art could seem all too wrapped up in its own juvenile cleverness. It was all about being ironic and irreverent. Certainly a lot of it was achingly self-referential. But we eventually got fed up with all that. What’s more, we now live in less frivolous, more fearful times: recession has hit and the sea waters are rising, ready to flood us out and turn our congested cities into swampy, primitive marshland, like an apocalyptic J G Ballard novel.So now the mood music is sombre, more earnest. Artists have once again turned their attentions Read more ...