Visual arts
Sarah Kent
As you may recall, Jeremy Deller represented Britain at last year’s Venice Biennale and a distilled version of English Magic, his British Pavilion show, is now installed in the William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow. It's an especially relevant first stop on a tour that continues to Bristol and Margate, since Morris features large in Deller’s idiosyncratic commentary on British culture. William Morris is best known as the brains behind the Arts and Crafts movement and designer of those famous wallpaper patterns, but he was also an ardent socialist keen to improve the lot of the poor – not Read more ...
fisun.guner
What once appeared daring and transgressive will often barely raise an eyebrow given time. This much is obvious – or at least up to a point, since much avant-garde art continues to challenge and/or bemuse well into the 21st century. But the reverse can also be true. What was once produced as a work typical of its time can now make us feel very uncomfortable. Hannah Höch was a member of Berlin Dada in the years immediately following the First World War. These were the Weimar years in which artists who were later denounced as degenerate by the Nazi regime produced scabrous attacks on Read more ...
fisun.guner
In 1920, Man Ray, now better known for his solarized photographs, produced a sculpture made from found objects. L'Enigme d'Isidore Ducasse, named after the 19th-century French poet who used the pseudonym Comte de Lautréamont, is a sewing machine wrapped in a wool blanket and tied with string. The title refers to the poet’s evocation of the strange, even threatening beauty of familiar objects in startling juxtaposition, and is a line later adopted by André Breton to suggest Surrealist dislocation. With regard to Man Ray’s sculpture, we have to take it on trust that it’s a sewing machine Read more ...
fisun.guner
Not an exhaustive list, but, in no particular order, these are the shows I'm still left thinking about as the year draws to a close. The best have opened my eyes to new ways of thinking about an artist. A few are still on. Try not to miss. And do suggest your own favourites in the comments below. As you'll see, I've also nominated one "Disappointment of the year" and one "Most ill-conceived show of the year". Don't hesitate to suggest your own in these catagories too.1. Jake and Dinos Chapman: Come and See, Serpentine Sackler GalleryBehind that mask of tom-foolery, Jake and Dinos Chapman are Read more ...
Sarah Kent
What better way to celebrate Christmas than by contemplating this sublime altarpiece by the celebrated Venetian artist Giovanni Bellini? It hangs above a sidechapel in the church of San Zaccaria in Venice offering blissful relief from the noise and bustle of the narrow streets around San Marco. Listening with quiet concentration is one of the themes. Virgin and child sit on a raised throne absorbing the music played on a violin by an angel seated below them. With similarly downcast eyes, the saints standing on either side seem lost in thought.The saints are so immersed in reverie that, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It was the fate of Benozzo Gozzoli (c 1422-1497) to be a contemporary of the immortals. A merry journeyman dauber, his talents were overshadowed in his lifetime and are overlooked now. He had a good start in life, working for both Fra Angelico and Ghiberti, but his beautiful frescoes are to be found tucked away in hill towns, innocently crumbling in wayside Tuscan chapels, or locked in the basements of the great museums. In the last 30 years of his life, Gozzoli painted a vast cycle of Old Testament scenes in Pisa's Camposanto. Allied firebombs destroyed all but the odd fragment. Art Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Russia is the largest country on earth, unimaginably vast. Its people naturally have a great attachment to their country – and its landscape – in spite of their turbulent history, and in the late 19th century painters portrayed with deep feeling their native environment, their feelings for the motherland perhaps intensified among the more sophisticated the more they had travelled and studied in Europe. One of their leaders was Ivan Shishkin,1832-1898, known as the patriarch of the forest, and head of the landscape school at the Imperial Academy of Arts in St Petersburg. Well-read and Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Walk up Central Park West, past the Dakota building and all those plush-looking podiatrists’ offices with their gold plaques, and just before you get to the Museum of Natural History you’ll find the New-York Historical Society and Museum at 77th Street (it also houses a great research library, open to all). Descending its steps is a life-size replica of Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (pictured below), and on the day I visited some school kids were yelling, "That’s a nude woman? What? Where? I don’t see it."Very similar to the reaction that many artists, critics and visitors had Read more ...
fisun.guner
Even by his own eerie-peculiar standards, this is a perturbingly odd painting by that gifted English eccentric Stanley Spencer. It’s the night before Christmas and Christmas stockings hang from each bed frame: in this case, long rubber boots and saggy-bottomed Long Johns. And before we even consider what the occupants of each bed are up to, look closely at the heads of some of those toy figures: their painted grimaces are the thing of children’s nightmares. We all know that while little boys and girls sleep – and unbeknown to the adults of the house – toys take on a sinister life of Read more ...
fisun.guner
“Repellent” is one word I’ve heard to describe Alastair Adams’ new portrait of Tony Blair, but I don’t know if that’s a reaction to the painting or the subject. In either case, I can’t say I share that gut-reaction. Most of the portraits in the National Portrait Gallery manage to say very little about the subject or their reputation. This one does, so that’s my first positive response to it. In case you were wondering “why?” or “why now?”, the NPG’s commission is in line with their policy of acquiring a painted portrait of all former British prime ministers. I think they chose well in Read more ...
mark.hudson
There’s movement towards a walk after lunch, but by the time everyone’s hummed and hawed about where they might go, rubbed their bellies after one too many forcemeat balls and argued about who put the Guardian Quiz where, it’s already dark and there’s only you and one other still up for it. They cry off – a mercy – and you’re alone, heading out across the garden, along the path towards the headland. As you crest the dark bank you’re hit by freezing wind and the radiance of the moon’s path across the icy sea. Instantly you’re outside the cosy fug of gleaming baubles, leftover turkey and Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Jan Gossaert’s The Adoration of the Kings, painted in 1510-15, is a sumptuous, richly detailed and even, to us today, slightly hilarious painting. It’s the large central panel of a Flemish altarpiece which includes practically every motif of the subject possible in a heady mix of ingredients.With its meticulous attention to detail, its exquisite rendering of texture and material, it’s a Northern Renaissance painting par excellence. The central figure is the Virgin, unusually all in blue – ultramarine being among the most expensive pigments of the time – with one of those little old babies, so Read more ...