Visual arts
Sarah Kent
Ilya and Emilia Kabakov’s Tate Modern exhibition features an installation made in 1985 of a Moscow bedsit, its walls lined with political posters. There’s a gaping hole in the ceiling made when the occupant apparently catapulted himself through the roof to escape the incessant clamour of propaganda bombarding Soviet citizens on a daily basis.Focusing on these same images, Red Star Over Russia: a Revolution in Visual Culture 1905-55 reveals the incredible range and versatility of the posters, pamphlets, postcards, magazines, books and banners designed to spread the word about the 1917 Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Jules Dalou, Edouard Lantéri, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, Charles-François Daubigny, Alphonse Legros, Giuseppe de Nittis? Perhaps not household-name Impressionists, but the subtitle of Tate Britain's exhibition, French Artists in Exile 1870-1904, makes things clearer: this is really an examination of cross-channel conversations occasioned by the drastic military and political crisis in France in 1870-1871 – the Franco-Prussian war, followed by the Commune.Not only did some 230,000 or more combatants and civilians die, but many a familiar landmark was pulverised as central Paris was profoundly Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Annual lists of the richest, the most powerful, the movers and shakers, have an awful fascination: like gossip, we like to look and comment while feeling slightly morally compromised. But they also have a function as a snapshot of where we are at. This time it’s the turn of the art world’s most influential figures, as chosen by the magazine ArtReview, which each year creates a talking point for itself replete with embargoes and PR. After topping last year’s list the very busy Hans Ulrich Olbrist (picture below right), creative force at the Serpentine Galleries, finds himself at number Read more ...
Katherine Waters
The Imperial War Museum’s Age of Terror: Art since 9/11 brings together art made in response to the immediate events and long-term consequences of the events of 11 September. In the main the exhibition is more historical survey of conflict-related artistic output than engaged examination of how artists have responded to the resulting conflicts, and what coherence it achieves derives from the paint-by-colours effect of dividing it into four roughly chronological topics: 9/11, State Control, Weapons, and Home. These divisions also make it pretty uncomfortable viewing.Since the purpose of the Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Might a painting ever achieve the veracity of a sculpture, a "real" object in space that we can walk around and view from every angle? Could the documentary quality of an engraving ever be equalled by a painting? And how could painting respond to photography – drawing with light – an invention that in the 19th century prompted a thorough reconsideration of painting’s purpose.From the paragone debate of the Renaissance, in which the relative merits of painting and sculpture were considered in a spirit of fierce competition, to more recent challenges presented by new and changing technologies, Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Some 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 portrayal of people for the first time.It is that proverbial once-in-a-lifetime show: half a dozen or so works have not been seen in public for decades, and several have never been shown in the UK. In microcosm, too, this selection shows us essential Cézanne: exactly what made him different from his peers as he took what, say, the Impressionists were Read more ...
Rebecca Sykes
Born into an artistic Swedish-speaking household in Helsinki, Tove Jansson’s first, and most enduring, ambition was to be a painter. Although best known as the illustrator behind the creatures of Moominvalley, those plump white hippopotamus-like folk with an existential longing for adventure, Jansson came to regard her widely successful creations as a distraction from what she considered to be her “real work”.Jansson’s illustrations may have been exhibited in Britain before, but Dulwich Picture Gallery is the first to make explicit those connections between the artist’s graphic work and her Read more ...
Alison Cole
This is the latest in a line of beautifully curated, closely focused exhibitions that the Courtauld Gallery does so well. Its subject is the great Russian-French painter Chaim Soutine (1893-1943) who, remarkably, has not had a UK exhibition devoted to his work for 35 years. More specifically, the show draws together a series of Soutine’s portraits of modern workers, largely men and women working in the hospitality trades, many identified by their uniforms (such as bellboy reds or kitchen whites): hotel page boys, valets and room-attendants; cooks and pastry chefs; waiters and maids.For those Read more ...
Katherine Waters
During his time at the Slade David Bomberg — the subject of a major new retrospective at Pallant House Gallery — was described as a "disturbing influence". The fifth son of Polish-Jewish parents who fled the pogroms, he grew up at the turn of the 20th century in the East End of London where neighbours lived on top of one another and space was scarce. One of a cohort of local kids to be funded through art school by the Jewish Education Aid Society at a time when European modernism was making an impact among London artists, Bomberg became part of a group known as the Whitechapel Boys who were Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Harry Potter has a track record of trickery. He miraculously persuaded a generation of screen addicts to get stuck into hardbacks. Lately he has been luring multiplex junkies into the theatre to see live wizards on stage. Can Harry Potter make it a hat trick by coaxing his fans into a gallery? Harry Potter: A History of Magic is at the British Library. “I’ve got to get to the library!” says Hermione Grainger on the inside flap of the exhibition book. Is a trip to this library obligatory?The show is astutely pitched at younger gallery-goers. For one and a half days a week, you won’t be able to Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The Kabakovs' exhibition made me thank my lucky stars I was not born in the Soviet Union. A recurring theme of their work is the desire to escape – from the hunger and poverty caused by incompetence and poor planning, and the doublethink required to survive under a regime that became ever more repressive the greater and more obvious its failings.I first came across the Kabakovs' work in 1992 at Documenta art fair in Germany. A concrete bunker with two entrances labelled “Male” and “Female” contained two rooms lined with latrines. Someone had filled these dismal spaces with furniture that Read more ...
David Nice
There's something here for everyone, as a "roll up!" slogan for one of the greatest shows in town might put it. Even opera buffs don't seem to have found much to fault with the cornucopia of sounds, moving pictures, objects, paintings, drawings and even a working stage set handsomely displayed in the spacious areas beneath the Victoria & Albert's gleaming new Exhibition Road entrance.Discrimination proves key. "Operas and cities" is the brief, which could have sprawled or resulted in some inapposite choices, but what we have is impeccable. In the first two "theatres", it looks as if there Read more ...