Visual arts
Marina Vaizey
What is it about Vermeer? Just mention the name and there will be queues around the block. It’s true that there are a handful of other artists with that charisma, but none so rare as Vermeer. The Girl with a Pearl Earring is not only the subject of a recent novel and a film, but also a kind of poster for Holland as a whole, and the star of the recently reopened Mauritshaus in the Hague. At the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam you can hardly see the handful of Vermeers for the crowds.Such power to attract is shared by a few others, including several Dutch masters – think Rembrandt and Van Gogh – Read more ...
theartsdesk
At first glance David Stewart’s Five Girls 2014, the winning entry in this year’s Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize, is a very ordinary scene. Five young women sit behind a table, obligatory mobile phones within reach and lying amongst the remains of a rather dismal-looking lunch. They’re not looking at each other, and nor are they looking at us – in fact they are not even looking at the same thing: they embody the disengagement we like to insist is the malaise of the young. And yet, while fulfilling our low expectations, they also confound them: they are not hunched over their Read more ...
fisun.guner
Sculpture that moves with the gentlest current of air! Sculpture that makes you want to do a little tap dance of joy! Or maybe the Charleston – swing a leg to those sizzling Jazz Age colours and shapes and rhythms. Look, that’s the queen of the Charleston right there – the “Black Pearl” of the Revue Nègre, Josephine Baker. She’s a freestyle 3D doodle in space, fashioned out of wire: spiral cones for pert breasts, that sinuous waist described by a single serpentine line. What a callipygous shimmy. And who’s that with the Chaplin moustache? Why, it’s the head of Fernand Léger (pictured below Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Every object tells a story, nowhere more so than in a museum. The Victoria & Albert has been busy retelling as many stories as it can by rearranging, refurbishing, adding and subtracting from the millions of objects it has at its disposal to display, study and conserve.The simply named FuturePlan, which started in 2001 and has several more years to run, has been redoing, reviewing and renewing the entire museum, examining one by one the extraordinary holdings of the V&A, sometimes across cultures, sometimes with a horizontal chronology across categories, and sometimes from beginning Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Chairs, chairs, chairs, as far as the eye can see. Plywood or plastic shells, some decorated with hilarious drawings of jolly nudes by Saul Steinberg (main picture), others in all the colours you can imagine – stacks, in rows, alluring and all so familiar. As it is an exhibition, there is an air of reverence – heaven forbid that you actually have a chair to sit on! - but these chairs have been design icons for well over half a century. Here they are the stars of “The World of Charles and Ray Eames”, an anthology of projects and successes, shown not only in actual produced objects but drawings Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman used her camera to record, with a sympathetic eye, the world around her – both in the immediate surroundings of her Paris flat and in the wider world. The news that she died last month, apparently by her own hand, sadly makes this retrospective of the installations she began creating in 1995 all the more timely.Akerman (pictured below right) is best known for films such as Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce and 1080 Bruxelles (pictured below full column), a three-hour feature made in 1975 when she was just 24 that has since been showered with accolades Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Metal figures on the foreshore of Crosby Beach, Liverpool, set against a sunset, signify the preoccupations of Antony Gormley. The sculptor has been concerned consistently with the human figure, manifested in metal – lead or iron – casts of his own body.We were shown his career from work to work, interspersed with questions and answers between Gormley and Alan Yentob (pictured below, with Gormley), the presenter here diffident and attentive. Tim Marlowe, once connected with Gormley’s gallery White Cube (not referred to – the business of art did not get a look in, although we were told that Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Switching between the orderly and the chaotic, David Jones’ depiction of Noah’s family building the ark immerses us in the drama of the moment while simultaneously holding us at some point out of time, to emphasise the story’s ancient roots. Viewpoint and scale shift unnervingly to evoke the watery unsteadiness of the scene, building an intense psychological charge that balances the disorienting, claustrophobic treatment of space with patterns and reiterations that provide respite for the eye; pieces of timber, bricks in a wall, and pairs of figures and birds serve as punctuation to control Read more ...
Mark Sheerin
Poetry is everywhere in Mons, with 10 kilometres of verse painted along the city streets. You’ll even find it on the walls of the city’s imposing 19th-century prison, at odds with the arrow slits, the crenellations, and the towering nets preventing family or friends throwing contraband into the exercise yards.But the poetic muse can come and go as she pleases, and a number of poems written inside these walls have entered the literary canon. Between 1873 and 1875, the city’s most famous inmate was Paul Verlaine, who shot fellow poet Arthur Rimbaud, but was banged up for a number of reasons Read more ...
David Kettle
Sometimes it’s visual art with a sonic slant; sometimes it’s music with a visual slant. Glasgow’s Sonica – created by producers Cryptic, now in its third year and bigger than ever – feels like a thoroughly modern festival, defying genre boundaries and instead focusing squarely on the intersection of the sonic and the visual. That might make some of its offerings hard to categorise, but there’s nothing wrong with that.A couple of the opening weekend’s events, however, felt far more straightforward in their melding of sound and vision. In the appropriate surroundings of Glasgow’s ultra-modern Read more ...
fisun.guner
Any exhibition of Sol LeWitt’s work raises an interesting question. Why go and see it if it’s the idea that’s the most important aspect of the work? In his 1967 essay, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art”, he clearly outlined the predominance of the idea over material form, which may seem an obvious statement to make about conceptual art (the label’s on the tin) but LeWitt went further. “All of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair,” he wrote. “The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.”This was not only an affront to traditional notions of art Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
This was the fifth and last in a series of hour-long programmes amounting to a vivid, varied and extraordinarily lively history of Britain. Although ostensibly a history of portraiture, the images have been hooks for Simon Schama, that most ubiquitous historian who bears a rather charming resemblance to Tigger – very bouncy, very chatty, very enthusiastic, a little self-regarding – to subtly engage us in a journey through the political and social landmarks of British history. In this one, titled “The Face in the Mirror”, we did indeed bounce through nearly eight centuries of British artists Read more ...