Visual arts
fisun.guner
Baudelaire called him a “pictorial Balzac” and said he was the most important man “in the whole of modern art”, while Degas was only a little less effusive, claiming him as one of the three greatest draughtsman of the 19th century, alongside Ingres and Delacroix.Honoré Daumier has always been held in the highest esteem by fellow artists, both in his own time and today, with contemporary artists such as Peter Doig and Paula Rego keen admirers. But beside his technical skills, Daumier was also among the most socially alert and politically engaged artists of the 19th century. A socialist and Read more ...
Florence Hallett
It is hard to know whether the thematic and stylistic threads running through this year’s Taylor Wessing Prize are evidence of some general shift in approach, or simply reflect the judges’ tastes. In any case, where last year’s shortlist featured stark portraits highlighting the tricky power relationships between photographer and subject, this year’s competition tends towards something gentler and more empathetic – an altogether homelier sort of photography. Submitted by over 1,700 photographers from all over the world, including amateurs, students and well-known professionals, many of the Read more ...
Sarah Kent
There’s no escaping it; Hat Stand, 1969, is a beastly object. The blank-faced mannequin is too literal to succeed as a sculpture, and the conceit is too nasty to be ignored. Her position – holding up her hands to receive our hats – recalls the torture meted out to prisoners of war by their Japanese guards in WWII. She wears fetish gear comprising a purple bolero over conical tits with teat-like nipples that point heavenwards, a restraining collar linked to a leather g-string and tightly-laced, thigh-high boots. Her body is visible yet constrained and her head is similarly encased in a helmet- Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Walking into this exhibition is a bit like walking into a great forest. The dark green walls are hung all around with paintings of trees; we look up through branches that spiral dizzyingly skyward, while the upwards sweep of vast trunks seem relentlessly, tangibly full of life. Some of these paintings verge on abstraction, the forms of tree trunks simplified and reduced to an arrangement of planes, with spatial recession represented entirely through colour. In others, a flurry of brushstrokes captures the energy of the forest, the wind in the leaves, the light breaking through to the velvety Read more ...
fisun.guner
So many words have been expended on Egon Schiele, that it’s almost impossible to imagine what more can be added for such a relatively small and narrow, albeit intense, body of work. His was an early blossoming talent, and in his short life – he was 28 when he succumbed to Spanish flu, dying three days after his pregnant wife, in 1918 – he produced works preoccupied by sex and decay, riven by anxiety and fear, often marked by a tone of aggressive swagger. The work appears not only to embody the spirit of Vienna in the age of Freud, but also to betray his youth. Not for nothing has Schiele’s Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Written in the 16th century, Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists continues to underpin our understanding of the Renaissance, and its author is blamed, often with some justification, for a multitude of art historical anomalies. But there can be little doubt that Vasari’s omission of Giovanni Battista Moroni, a fine painter of portraits and religious subjects, has been instrumental in the disappearance of this artist from the Renaissance halls of fame.Celebrated in his own lifetime, Moroni’s reputation dwindled after his death but revived in the 19th century, when his work was collected Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Alan Yentob’s culture programme, Imagine, returned for its autumn season with a two-part examination of one of the most potently disturbing episodes in the history of art, let alone culture. Even before the programme’s title, masterpieces by such as Kirchner, Beckmann and Klimt flashed before our eyes. Thus began an exploration into how Hitler – a failed art student -– acted out his hatred of the great art of the 20th-century avant garde, which he thought to be as sickly and degenerate as the Jews he was also determined to destroy.Yet it was German Jews who in the main collected and supported Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Can you sense a person's life through a sequence of objects? Not to mention influence and legacy? Biographical exhibitions are fascinating, not least because they also tell us something about looking back through the filter of the present. And William Morris (1834-1896) has certainly been, in many ways, a man for all seasons. Here the gifted design historian and biographer, Fiona MacCarthy, is the compiler in charge, providing an affecting look at a man whose sheer intelligence, combined with heartbreaking energy, determination and idealism, not only affected his world but went further Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Another October and another Frieze week just passed. This means the biggest of big hitters have been turning up in London. The economic quantifiers aren’t precise, but there have been plenty of estimates. Hordes of well-heeled visitors mean big profits for hotels, restaurants, shops and transport. All the people employed to literally make the fair, and the huge cluster of shows, events and happenings which take place because of Frieze, from auctions to ancillary fairs, mean conservative estimates are now hovering around £50m+ for the London economy. And no, that’s not for art sales but all Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Installed in the main exhibition space, this could have been a blockbuster show introducing a large audience to an important moment in Russian Theatre; but tucked away in the Department of Theatre and Performance, where spaces are narrow and galleries small, there is little room to show off these superb exhibits to their best advantage. Only the initiated will, I fear, brave these claustrophobic corridors and persevere long enough to appreciate the goodies on offer.Faced with walls painted bright red, labels hung too low and hard to read, copious detail about each production but little Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The night before he was locked up, Chris Huhne had that Grayson Perry round for tuna steaks. Who knew? Perry was embarking on a series of portraits about identity at a crossroads, and can there be a more public crisis of identity than a Cabinet minister going to prison? But first Perry wanted to get to know his subject. Huhne was resistant to probing. “People are not like Russian dolls,” he volunteered. “They are exactly like Russian dolls!” countered Perry.Perry’s theory of the portrait is that a good one “tells you something a thousand selfies never could”. A portraitist is somewhere Read more ...
fisun.guner
In a tavern somewhere in Tokyo, two Japanese macaque monkeys work a daily, two-hour shift (under Japanese law, these hours are regulated). Dressed in miniature uniforms, the monkeys’ main task is to deliver hot towels to amused customers before drinks orders are taken by a human. The customers tip the monkeys in boiled soy beans. A search on YouTube throws up quite a few of these monkey-waiter skits. Who knew? Perhaps all the footage comes from the same restaurant, since it seems unusual enough to have warranted a jolly “strange but true” item on Japanese news. One segment of this news Read more ...