Visual arts
Sarah Kent
Its a preposterous act of hubris, isn’t it? Pairing large scale video installations by American artist Bill Viola with drawings by Michelangelo can’t possibly illuminate our experience of either art form; or can it? Are we meant to conclude that Viola is the contemporary equivalent of the Renaissance master or, conversely, that Michelangelo would have embraced video had it been available to him some 500 years ago? Both propositions are stupid and unhelpful and the idea of trying to update Michelangelo or big up Viola is distasteful. Yet despite these reservations, the juxtaposition is Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Exhibitions routinely claim to be a once in a lifetime experience, but there can be no doubt about the prince among them this year, the Royal Academy’s spectacular Charles I: King and Collector. Reuniting old master paintings, miniatures, classical sculptures and tapestries acquired by the king and dispersed after his execution in 1649, the show was a feat of administration, while the reflected glory of its association with that great icon of the art market today, the Salvator Mundi, which sold for a record sum in November 2017, made it seem uncannily timely. Attributed to Leonardo though its Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Familiarity breeds contempt, which makes it difficult to look at Edwin Landseer’s The Monarch of the Glen (pictured below). The reproduction of this proud beastie on T-towels, aprons, jigsaws and biscuit tins blinds one to the subtle nuances of the original painting. Rachel Maclean’s caustic wit is a useful antidote to Landseer’s romanticised view of the Scottish Highlands, so it makes sense to visit her exhibition first.In her film The Lion and the Unicorn (2012) the Scottish artist plays the Queen. First we see the Union Jack painted on the nail of her index finger, as she points to Great Read more ...
David Nice
One part of the brain, they tell us, responds to visual art and another, quite different, to music; we can't cope adequately with both at once. Which is why I'm often wary of those musical organisations which think that what we hear needs to be livened up with more to see: mixing Debussy with so-called "Impressionists", for instance, or Stravinsky with Cubism. A case can all the same be made for paintings which inspire composers, and vice versa, even if it's still a stretch to handle both simultaneously. This was the interesting experiment that Latvian musicians have just applied to the work Read more ...
Katherine Waters
When, in 1853, Edward Burne-Jones (or Edward Jones as he then was) went up to Exeter College, Oxford, it could hardly have been expected that the course of his life would change so radically. His mother having died in childbirth, he was brought up by his father, a not particularly successful picture- and mirror-framer in the then mocked industrial city of Birmingham. Early on at King Edward’s School he was marked out as a pupil of promise and transferred to the classics department which enabled him to attend university and prepare for a career in the Church. Yet he never took his degree, Read more ...
Maev Kennedy
The most touching tribute to the relationship between two giants of early 20th century art, Gustav Klimt and the much younger Egon Schiele, hangs in the first room of this fascinating exhibition at the Royal Academy – Schiele’s poster for the 49th Secessionist exhibition in 1918. It shows a group of artists around a table, an empty chair at one end – that of Klimt, who had died of pneumonia in February. Schiele has included his own ramshackle self seated at the opposite end, gazing at the place which should be occupied by his friend, mentor and inspiration, not knowing that within Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Prints of all kinds; the first small wooden camera invented by Fox Talbot that made the negative positive process possible; Box Brownies and hundreds of other cameras from then until now. All that is just for starters in the V&A's new, fully-fledged, mini museum of photography. From the late 1820s when the fixing of an image observed through a lens on a light sensitive surface was invented, through evolving cameras, lenses, and chemical processes to now, when digital – not to mention the iphone and the selfie – is seemingly dominating the agenda.Thus the small, meditative final Read more ...
Sarah Kent
It took 24 days to sell off the 4,000 items which Horace Walpole had amassed during 50 years of avid collecting. He bought a modest property beside the Thames in Twickenham in 1749 and, by 1790, had extended and transformed it into a fairy tale summer palace where he could throw lavish parties and show off his collection to friends and visitors.With its towers, slender turrets and decorative chimneys, Strawberry Hill is a Gothic revival fantasy. The design was cobbled together by Walpole with the help of the artist Richard Bentley and the amateur architect John Chute. Ideas were gleaned from Read more ...
Sarah Kent
What an ambitious project! Modern Couples: Art, Intimacy and the Avant-garde looks at over 40 couples or, in some cases, trios whose love galvanised them into creative activity either individually or in collaboration.The best thing about the exhibition is that it blows out of the water the traditional notion of the artist as a lone (male) genius who draws inspiration from a supportive but essentially non-creative muse, usually his lover. At last, the role of women as essential partners in many creative relationships is being acknowledged and explored. A typical example is that of Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Pitched as “a tale of two artists”, the National Gallery’s big autumn show promises a history woven in shades of friendship and rivalry, marriage and family, privilege and hard graft. Andrea Mantegna and Giovanni Bellini were brothers-in-law, Mantegna’s marriage to Nicolosia Bellini in 1453 a strategic match that brought fresh blood to Venice’s greatest artistic dynasty. The marriage kept commissions, and so money and prestige, safely within the family, but the two artists pursued entirely separate careers, Bellini distinguishing himself as a painter of landscapes and Mantegna as a master of Read more ...
Sarah Kent
A whiff of chlorine hits you as you open the door of the Whitechapel Gallery. Its the smell of public baths, and inside is a derelict swimming pool with nothing in it but dead leaves and piles of brick dust. Damp walls, peeling paint and cracked tiles make this a sorry sight. The door to the changing rooms has been sealed shut and some joker has sawn through the wall bars. Where has the pool come from, though? A wall notice explains. This was the Whitechapel Pool, opened in 1901 as an amenity for east enders. It was renovated in 1953, but in 1988, it was closed after losing its funding Read more ...
Sarah Kent
There’s a building site outside the Towner Art Gallery and a cement mixer seems to have strayed over the threshold into the foyer. This specimen (pictured below right) no longer produces cement, though. David Batchelor has transformed it into an absurdist neon sign by outlining it with fluorescent tubes. The Everyday and the Extraordinary explores the transformation of banal objects into art. A painting by Philip Core introduces the theme. We see Marcel Duchamp, the inventor of the readymade, playing chess with Andy Warhol, the doyen of pop art; they sit surrounded by the artworks they Read more ...