Visual arts
Kieron Tyler
The trio of Sixties television documentaries assembled here are prototypical examples of Ken Russell’s oeuvre: hyper-real, and often frenzied, depictions of the lives of their subjects. Each not-quite or more-than documentary was made for the BBC in an era when boundaries were pushed and the corporation allowed directors to follow their artistic sensibilities. Although there is little immediate link with the Ken Loach of 1966’s Cathy Come Home, both he and Russell thrived in the fertile environment of a BBC which took chances.The Great Passions collects Always on Sunday (1965), a portrayal of Read more ...
David Nice
Art can inspire music, and vice versa. When concert (as opposed to theatre or film) scores are accompanied by images, however, the effect dilutes the impact of both; above all, the imagination stops working on the visual dimension created in the mind's eye. That had to be the case last night, though given Olivier Messiaen's tendency to outstay his welcome by at least three movements in his orchestral epics, Deborah O'Grady's nature photography carried on with its capacity to surprise and stun long after the music, in this second event of the Los Angeles Philharmonic's Barbican mini-residency Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
A good half of the portraits in Russia and the Arts are of figures without whom any conception of 19th century European culture would be incomplete. A felicitous subtitle, “The Age of Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky”, provides a natural, even easy point of orientation for those approaching Russian culture, and with it the country’s history and character, without particular advance knowledge.Much is new here, not least the artists themselves, none of whose names are anywhere near as well-known as their subjects. The wider intellectual world they inhabited may seem remote, with its conflicts between Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Once you’ve seen him, you can’t forget him. Taken in 1951, Paul Strand’s black and white portrait of a French teenager sears itself onto your retina. He stares unflinchingly back, and looking into his eyes, you feel almost scalded by his exceptional beauty and the piercing intensity of his gaze. With his chiselled features, Roman nose, curled lips and leonine shock of hair, he could be a classical Greek sculpture; and as though to affirm this association, his skin has the sheen of burnished bronze. The textures and patterns are all-important; his denim boiler suit and knitted woollen Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The dazzling, controversial, fascinating exhibition In the Age of Giorgione at the Royal Academy inadvertently provides a striking example of an unavoidable and perhaps insoluble problem common to almost all exhibitions of painting – especially those with a high proportion of loans – in public museums and galleries.A significant number of the paintings on view, including several of the Giorgiones at the heart of the visual essay being presented, not to mention works by Dürer and Bellini, are visually vandalised. The image is disfigured and its proportions distorted by a horizontal dark shadow Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Much is made of the mystery surrounding Giorgione, a painter of pivotal influence, about whom, paradoxically, we know almost nothing beyond the manner of his death. He died in a Venetian plague colony in 1510 aged about 33, and was as elusive in the 16th century as he is today, his paintings highly sought after but hard to come by, and by the time of his death already invested with mythic status. Today, there are about 40 paintings attributed to Giorgione, and of those, only a handful are secure in their attribution: this is an exhibition about an artist who exists as a ghostly trace in Read more ...
David Nice
It's rare that a sponsor does more than stump up the money for culture and sometimes request a mention in a review (usually ignored). Last night's godparent, though, the Savings Bank Foundation DNB, is a true self-styled "collaborator", responsible not only for the first major exhibition bringing the remarkable Norwegian artist Nikolai Astrup to the world and public-spirited owner of the greatest collection of his paintings and woodcuts, many on display here, but also through its subsidiary Dextra Musica providing the "Kreisler Bergonzi" violin and the Guadagnini violin on loan to the two Read more ...
Florence Hallett
A gallery chock-full of Botticellian lips and tits is no place to start disputing the central premise of this show, that the Florentine artist’s paintings are woven into the fabric of our collective visual consciousness. From tuppenny ha’penny statuettes to a Dolce & Gabbana trouser suit printed with fragments of the Birth of Venus, Botticelli’s most famous paintings, whether in spirit, pastiche or frank reproduction, are everywhere. And if Ursula Andress emerging from the sea in Dr No is the most effortless of knowing references to Botticelli’s great painting, French performance artist Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Celebrating the four ages of man, eight huge, semi-abstract paintings create a carnival atmosphere in the Serpentine’s central gallery. The freshness of Childhood is characterised by flowers, petals and stamens floating on a blue ground. The passions of Youth warrant a ground of hot orange crammed with circles and spirals jostling for space like amoeba in a petrie dish. Adulthood is dominated by a large, yellow gourd-like shape on a lavender ground; dancing in attendance are looping letters and clover-leaf swirls. Old Age is no less euphoric, but the colours are subtler and the loops and Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Was Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), who straddled the arts and science in such a unique way, several hundred years before his time? Did the painter-inventor-engineer really draw the prototypes for, inter alia, the aeroplane, the motor car, the helicopter and the submarine, or were they doodles to which history has ascribed more genius than they are due? This small but interesting exhibition attempts to answer those questions as it places his mechanical works under scientific scrutiny.This show has its origins in an exhibition in Milan in 1952 to celebrate the 500th anniversary of Leonardo's Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
It is an inspired pairing: iconic images by the American photographer Richard Avedon (1923-2004) and the painter, printmaker and filmmaker Andy Warhol (1928-1987), almost all of whose mature work was based on the photographic image. They are together in a large exhibition at Gagosian, Britannia Street, itself one of the largest and most elegant commercial art spaces in London, designed by that cultural architectural duo Caruso St John.The show is also making, if you like, a statement about the market. Photography as a medium has been around since the 1840s, ubiquitous for much of the 20th Read more ...
Florence Hallett
In Hell, the souls of the damned endure cruelly imaginative punishments for all eternity. Corrupt churchmen are buried headfirst in the ground with their feet set on fire, and soothsayers, who in life presumed to be able to see into the future, have their heads turned 180 degrees and are forced to walk around looking backwards. Drawn in metalpoint strengthened here and there with ink, Botticelli’s lines are as fine as spider’s silk. Sometimes barely there at all, their extraordinary refinement lends a strange, jarring intensity to the violence and terror they depict. By contrast, their Read more ...