Visual arts
Tom Birchenough
You can only marvel at the family intrigues that virtually closed down the legacy of photographer Erwin Blumenfeld in the years following his death in 1969. "Destroy, destruct, separate, divide,” was the emphatic double-phrased imperative with which one of his granddaughters described the “family legacy” in The Man Who Shot Beautiful Women, the BBC Four documentary that’s itself the work of another descendant, grandson Remy Blumenfeld, who wrote and produced this film by Nick Watson.It’s astonishing that it’s the first such screen tribute to a figure of Blumenfeld’s stature: the efforts of Read more ...
simon.broughton
The Ghetto Heroes Square in the Muranow district of Warsaw is a bleak place surrounded by drab apartment blocks. But at its centre there’s now a new building that attracted over 15,000 visitors in the first two days of its opening on 20 and 21 April, the 70th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943. It’s particularly remarkable as the building doesn’t yet have any exhibits on show. But Daniel Libeskind’s extension for the Jewish Museum in Berlin also opened so people could experience the building itself before the exhibition was installed – and reveals a country that is coming to Read more ...
fisun.guner
Mariele Neudecker is the lead artist of this year’s HOUSE, a festival for the visual arts which is now in its sixth year and which runs parallel with the Brighton Festival. She's a fitting choice: an immersive exhibition in a beautiful wreck of a Regency house by the sea complements her long-held fascination with the watery sublime.The Düsseldorf-born artist, who now lives in Bristol, became known over a decade ago for her miniature three-dimensional representations of rugged and magnificent land and seascapes. These perfectly realised models suggested paintings by Friedrich, with echoes of Read more ...
fisun.guner
Every time you turn a corner, he’s there, on yet another monitor. Either the exhibition curators have a sense of humour, or Alastair Campbell really is the last word on propaganda, a subject about which the British Library has mounted an excellent and occasionally provocative exhibition.On one screen Blair’s former spin doctor can be seen talking with some regret. The P-word, he is saying, is so sullied that it’s now no more than a byword for lying. Personally, I feel more comfortable with the Jeremy Paxman line: “Why is this lying bastard lying to me?” Perhaps Campbell could mount a campaign Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Sixty years of hard work, encapsulated in 90 drawings and a handful of thickly encrusted paintings, by the distinguished, obsessive, single-minded octagenerian artist Leon Kossoff (b 1926) vividly set out a passionate attachment to a simultaneously immutable and ever changing London. An East Ender, Kossoff has had several subjects: he has painted people, and has continually drawn after the Old Masters, first visiting the National Gallery as a schoolchild. His drawings after Poussin were exhibited at the National Gallery. But here for the first time, is an exhibition concentrating on Kossoff’s Read more ...
fisun.guner
After the marvellous Great Thinkers: In Their Own Words, the BBC has once again rummaged through its documentary archives, this time to see what artists have to say for themselves. Artists are often not the most loquacious breed, which is why they communicate best in the language of images and objects. But it can certainly be instructive to get the lowdown straight from the horse’s mouth, even if it ends up being all performance and no insight.Picasso’s art is turned into performance, though one that speaks more eloquently than any spoken statement canIn this first episode of three, subtitled Read more ...