Visual arts
mark.hudson
Alan Davie, who died on Saturday aged 93, was one of the great 20th-century British artists, a life-long maverick whose explosive canvases cut a swathe through the provincial aridity of the postwar art scene. The first British – probably the first European – artist to become aware of Pollock’s innovations and take on the challenge of “action painting”, the quietly spoken but formidable Scot forged his own expressive path that was less an imitation of Pollock more, as fellow artist Peter Doig put it recently, “like an expanded Paul Klee… but much more physical, much more visceral.”At the time Read more ...
Mark Sheerin
Given the kooky title of a new painting show at De La Warr Pavilion, it seems necessary to point out, yet again, that painting isn’t dead. The line is from poet A.E Housman, who wrote a versified dialogue between a dead man and his living friend. So while certain painters may be dead, contemporaries can talk to them. And that’s what 21 painters line up to do in this new, undogmatic survey on the South Coast. Rest assured, the conversation is breezy.Co-curators David Rhodes and Dan Howard-Birt have taken the bright decision to show artists who are “emerging”, mid-career and senior. Where else Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The revamping of Tate Britain has produced such an atmosphere of understated elegance that one hardly dares breathe for fear of displacing a particle of dust. An air of suffocating sterility has seeped into the displays, which are so tastefully arranged that even the most passionate works are drained of emotion; and without a ripple of feeling ruffling the exquisite calm of these genteel waters, British art appears unrelentingly polite – and provincial.Thank heavens for Phyllida Barlow who manages, single-handedly, to energise the space by filling the Duveen galleries with an installation Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Perhaps my big mistake was to read the exhibition blurb before going in: as someone who worries about dark, confined spaces, I was anticipating Miroslaw Balka’s new installation with a perverse sort of excitement. Certainly, for anyone who enjoys a dose of controlled terror Above your head sounds promising, with White Cube’s basement gallery supposedly transformed into a “large cage” and the ceiling lowered to a claustrophobic two metres. Disappointingly, however, the thrill was entirely in the anticipation.As someone particularly susceptible to the sensations the Polish artist has tried to Read more ...
Mark Sheerin
Were it not for the bombs which rained down on Calais, its current Musée des Beaux-Arts would not exist. The 1966 building was part of a civic reconstruction programme, so it too is a war memorial of sorts. And it's now playing host to an exhibition dedicated to the idea of the monument which looks to commemorate the two world wars.Not only is it 100 years since the outbreak of World War One, but it's 70 since the D-Day landings on the beaches of Normandy. Seeming not to be content with present-day conflicts, like Syria, and potential conflicts, like the Ukraine, the media and to some degree Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Initiating the tercentenary of the arrival of the Hanoverians and thus the foundation of our German royal family, this startling and beguiling exhibition of the work of the polymath William Kent (1685-1748) crams 200 objects – drawings, paintings, plans, photographs, furniture, illustrations, models – into an illusionistic array of gauzy rooms, evocative of real interiors. The profusion is deliberate. Long before art nouveau, Kent’s interiors left no surface without rich ornament. His own admirations are clear; the exhibition shows us at its very beginning marble busts modelled Read more ...
fisun.guner
Has any artist ever painted an apple that gets as close to the essence of appleness as Cézanne? I don’t think so. Cézanne’s apples are the equivalent of William Carlos Williams’s cold, sweet plums. Not only can you almost taste Cézanne’s apples but you can sense their weight, their density. And in your mind, you touch their smooth, waxy skins.Cézanne’s still-life oil paintings are a thing apart. Those simple table-top arrangements are, for me, the most seductive of anything he ever painted. But of watercolour, that other medium he painted them in, he thought very little. His sketchy Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The National Gallery has produced a revelatory and unprecedented exhibition which shows us an array of paintings from cabinet size to mammoth by a long acknowledged star: Veronese, probably the most flamboyantly exciting artist at the heart of the Renaissance in Venice.Paolo Caliari (1528-1588) known as Veronese in honour of his native city, was born in Verona the son of a stonecutter, and was originally destined to be a sculptor. Changing media, it is his 30-plus years or so in Venice at its artistic heights at the heart of the 16th century, that made him a force to be reckoned with, Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Georg Baselitz might seem an unlikely connoisseur of 16th-century prints, but since the Sixties the controversial German artist has amassed a collection of chiaroscuro woodcuts to rival that of any museum. His interest in Renaissance prints emerged while on a scholarship to Florence, where he studied the work of Mannerist painters like Parmigianino, one of the earliest artists to realise the full potential of chiaroscuro woodcut, both as a highly expressive medium and as a means of transmitting his ideas. Supplemented by loans from the Albertina, Vienna, Baselitz’s extraordinary Read more ...
fisun.guner
Addressing a crowd of journalists gathered at the press launch of her major retrospective at the Guggenheim Bilbao, Yoko Ono begins by telling us how cynical she is. It’s quite a claim considering it’s just about the last thing you’d ever think to call her. Perhaps she’s finally tired of being dismissed as a naive idealist. But no, it’s just a roundabout way for her to express her astonishment at the extraordinary architecture of Frank Gehry’s glinting, titanium-clad masterpiece, which opened 16 years ago in this Basque city of northern Spain. Being “naturally cynical” she hadn’t, she said, Read more ...
Ron Peck
It was very odd, in January this year, to see that Super-8 camera of Derek’s in a glass case and a few open notebooks in his beautiful italic handwriting in some other glass cases in the same room. There were five or six small-scale projections from his films in other rooms, including The Last of England, and some art works, but, somehow, Derek wasn’t there at all for me.The location where all these things were turned into what felt like sacred relics was the Inigo Rooms at Somerset House and the exhibition was Derek Jarman: Pandemonium. Pandemonium didn’t sound so out of place in relation to Read more ...
fisun.guner
Georg Baselitz, the veteran German artist who likes to bait, provoke and raise hackles, most recently with an interview in Der Spiegel in which he said women artists couldn’t paint (he mentioned the few exceptions, which was generous of him), is enjoying a triple billing in London. His new paintings at the Gagosian Gallery adopt the Abstract Expressionist brushstrokes and bright palette of Willem de Kooning, while the British Museum displays prints from the early Sixties and Seventies, alongside the graphic works of five postwar German contemporaries. The third outing opens this week at Read more ...