Visual arts
Alison Cole
David Bowie needs no introduction, yet he kept one aspect of his life largely hidden away: his art collecting. Now Sotheby’s, which is auctioning off around 400 items of his private art collection in a three-part sale on 10 and 11 November, is holding a very special exhibition, lasting just 10 days. The exhibition and the extensive catalogues that accompany the sale provide an exceptional opportunity to see the works together before they are dispersed and to look at how much the collection reflects the man (and sometimes his music).As you would expect from someone of Bowie’s range of burning Read more ...
Florence Hallett
In Monster Field, 1938, fallen trees appear like the fossilised remains of giant creatures from prehistory. With great horse-like heads, and branches like a tangle of tentacles and legs, Paul Nash’s series of paintings and photographs serve as documents, bearing witness to the malevolent lifeforce that, unleashed by their undignified end, has taken hold of these apparently dead trees.Like the trees of Monster Field, piles of wrecked World War Two aircraft at Cowley Dump, removed from their proper environment in the sky, take on a new and disturbing life of their own, shifting and stirring, Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Oh, those dogs: just a flick of the brush, and there they are, bursting with life. Pets, hunting dogs, companions, strays: romping on beaches, or in Dutch forests, living on farms and in imagined arcadias. Adriaen van de Velde was a 17th century master of canine depiction. His frisky creatures were bit players in hunting scenes filled with horses, carriages, people and birds ready to be let loose, all set in the verdant Dutch landscape, or by the North Sea. So clever was van de Velde at depicting domestic animals that part of his practice was to insert them into paintings by other artists. Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Compiled by an anonymous panel, the 15th edition of ArtReview magazine’s annual list of the most powerful and influential people in the art world was published on Thursday. And who doesn’t like lists, to poke fun at, to argue with – or perhaps even agree with?This particular list is a peek into the art world, and is as surprising for its omissions as for some of its inclusions. Inevitably there are more men than women, and number one is the London-based Swiss Hans Ulrich Obrist (pictured below right), the peripatetic curator, co-director of the Serpentine, contemporary art polymath and Read more ...
Alison Cole
This is an inspired and beautifully curated exhibition. It is subtitled The Essence of Movement, but it could equally be called The Essence of Art. What marks it out is not only the sensitively selected and tightly focused content, but also its close exploration of Rodin’s artistic process. It also benefits greatly from the fact that the exhibits – drawn largely from the last 20 years of Rodin’s life – reflect a period where the then famous sculptor could afford to work for the sheer pleasure of it, exploring and experimenting with exciting and potentially shocking new ideas.The exhibition Read more ...
Sarah Kent
In this autumn’s Vagabonds Collection, Viktor and Rolf showed a pink top covered in hundreds of buttons and framed with elaborate furls of pale pink and blue tulle; did they intend the model to look as if she was wearing a giant vulva across her chest? For me, this is the most vulgar garment (pictured below right) in an exhibition that supposedly explores the concept of vulgarity, yet is full of extremely tasteful designs.On video, fashion designers like Manolo Blahnik, Zandra Rhodes and Christian Lacroix discuss what vulgarity means in terms of their work. Most interesting is milliner Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Cheekily bottom-like, their downy skin blushing enticingly, these must be the sexiest apricots ever painted. If you held out your hand, you might just be able to touch them, there in the foreground of what is thought to be Caravaggio’s earliest surviving painting. Echoing the skin tones of a boy absorbed in the act of peeling fruit, the light highlights his hands and his downcast eyes make us voyeurs in a scene of unexpected sensuality. As setting the scene goes, it’s an excellent choice, and its somewhat tentative attribution is fitting for an exhibition dominated by the work not of Read more ...
Alison Cole
The fifth edition of the highly popular Frieze Masters – the quieter sibling of the boisterous contemporary Frieze Art Fair London – is underway in Regent's Park, London. This year, the fair features 133 leading galleries from around the world. Their various displays include curated and created sections as well as solo exhibitions devoted to the works of artists such as Paula Rego (Malborough Fine Art, London), Robert Motherwell (Bernard Jacobsen Gallery, London), Lynn Chadwick (BlainSouthern, London) and Eduardo Paolozzi (Jonathan Clark Fine Art, London). As usual, there is a gorgeous feast Read more ...
Florence Hallett
There’s something familiar about those dark, piercing eyes, but the impenetrable, mask-like countenance of Picasso’s Self-Portrait with Palette, 1906, is ultimately unknowable. In fact, the painting serves as something of a rebuke: we think we know Picasso so well, but we don’t. It’s a theme emphasised by the hang of this exhibition, and the bewildering range of styles and formats from Picasso’s early years results in a visual discord that underlines his chameleon-like tendencies.There are tiny, pen and ink portraits of his cronies at Els Quatre Gats, the legendary watering hole of Barcelona’ Read more ...
Alison Cole
It was inevitable that David Shrigley's breezy new sculpture for Trafalgar Square – part of the popular Fourth Plinth Programme – would be appropriated for political purposes. As the giant seven-metre-high thumbs-up Really Good was unveiled by Mayor Sadiq Khan it was greeted with a sudden downpour, but exuded a defiant post-Brexit cheery optimism. "London is open to the world," declared Khan to the sodden onlookers, welcoming immigrants, EU citizens, people of all ages and backgrounds.Shrigley is equally aware that Really Good could be co-opted by a grinning Nigel Farage – but he is a fan of Read more ...
Florence Hallett
While the Turner Prize shortlist can reasonably be expected to provide some sense of British art now, the extent to which British art can or should attempt to reflect a view of British life is surely a moot point. Art that is socially or politically engaged can all too easily tend towards the artless, its functionality placing it uncomfortably close to pamphleteering, with the certainties of propaganda drowning out the possibilities of art. Curious then, that the best of this year's four finalists are loosely united by an unmistakeable sense of life now, an engagement with the status quo that Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Helaine Blumenfeld was living in Paris in the 1960s when she received an invitation from the Russian-born sculptor Ossip Zadkine to attend one of his salons. Zadkine had emigrated to Paris at the beginning of the century, evolving a style influenced first by Cubism and then African art. His most celebrated sculpture The Destroyed City (Rotterdam) had drawn comparisons with Picasso’s Guernica, while his social circle had included Henry Miller, Picasso, Brancusi and Modigliani. So when he invited the then unknown Blumenfeld over after seeing her sculptures in the atelier where he had been Read more ...