Visual arts
fisun.guner
The Rijksmuseum is reopening after 10 years. What took it so long? Escalating costs, contractual problems, a protracted battle with the cycling lobby (this is Amsterdam, after all). I’m sure there’s more, but one whole decade’s worth? It’s a long time to go without a national museum that represents the best of Dutch art to the Dutch people, and to the world.It’s easy to forget what a spectacular Medievalist fantasy the building actually isBut it’s all OK now. It’s been worth the wait. In fact, the improvement is staggering. The crepuscular gloom has been lifted and light has flooded in. You Read more ...
fisun.guner
There was a time when the art of the Low Countries was considered to be very lowly and base indeed. It was the high art of Italy that counted if you were a person of culture and breeding. Not for you the carousing common folk of Jan Steen, or those watery flatlands of Van Goyen, touched with too much bleak realism. It was the arcadian Campagna of Claude – like Poussin a Frenchman but with the Rubicon flowing through his veins – that you looked to.But that was all long, long ago, in the days when the Grand Tour didn’t allow for a quick stop-over and art-pillage in Leiden or Amsterdam, and when Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Ambika P3 is a windowless, cavernous basement once used to test concrete for huge building projects – the Channel Tunnel among them – now ingeniously recycled as a kunsthalle gallery / performance space. Thus it is strikingly appropriate for its current incarnation.We are in a cinema, with rows and rows of old-fashioned, surprisingly comfortable, plush red seats. On the screen showing in that syrupy sticky colour of the 1930s-50s there are hordes of horribly happy peasants: handsome sweaty young men and kerchiefed lipsticked dewy-skinnned young women, all singing at the tops of their Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s an instinct of curators to put the pieces back together, to reintroduce works of art which time and market forces have scattered to the four winds. In recent memory, exhibitions have reunited in one space all of Monet’s haystacks, Cézanne’s card players and, in the case of the National Gallery’s momentous Leonardo show, both versions of The Virgin on the Rocks. A new exhibition opened this week in Florence which takes the business of synthesis to the next level.The Florentine Renaissance – as implied by the name conferred on it by Burckhardt in The Civilization of the Renaissance in Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The images in this gallery illustrate some of the links and juxtapositions made in The Springtime of the Renaissance. Classical statues which influenced Florentine artists, works reunited for the first time in centuries, sculptural forms reproduced in two-dimensional paintings (see main image) - you can find all of them below. The 20 images are arranged in 10 pairs, each of which represents a theme of the exhibition.Click on the images to enlarge, and read the full article about the exhibition here.Row 1: The Dawn of the Renaissance The first-century BC Boy with Thorn in marble (Galleria Read more ...
fisun.guner
"In the midst of life we are in death.” This is a line we may feel compelled to reverse as we encounter the first exhibits in the British Museum’s extraordinarily powerful exhibition, for this is a display vividly bringing the dead to life in the very midst of their extraordinary demise. But then, “ashes to ashes” conveys particular resonance, too, for we all know that Pompeii, a town situated in the Bay of Naples, and its lesser known, less populous neighbour Herculaneum, were both covered in a thick layer of ash when Mount Vesuvius erupted in AD79. In a single day, Read more ...
Louise Gray
It’s not often that a performance’s technological properties leaves you simply slack-jawed. Robert Wilson’s very long Swedish-language version of Strindberg’s A Dream Play did – at the same venue, though this time in 2001 – when the surtitle machines broke down (the audience gave an audible gasp of horror and then settled to its collective fate), but that was for altogether different reasons. Compared to what Ryoji Ikeda and his team are capable of, even the beautiful crispness of Kraftwerk’s stage shows fade into the realm of the bland.In superposition, the Japanese installation artist – now Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Rodin’s The Burghers of Calais have decamped from their usual perch next to the House of Lords to cosy up to the work of Henry Moore. They can be found at Moore’s home and studio at Perry Green in Hertfordshire, in a tellingly succinct anthology of the towering giants of modern European sculpture. At first glance Rodin’s extraordinary evocations of energy and sensuality, literally embodied in the models he studied so intensively, and Moore’s semi-abstracted helmet heads and upright motives, don’t have much in common. But the compare-and-contrast thrust of this wide-ranging compilation, also Read more ...
theartsdesk
Even visitors from distant galaxies will be aware that, when it comes to the arts, state munificence is not what it was. Cuts are biting deep into an industry which is not always able to provide facts and figures in support of its importance to national wellbeing. When public money runs dry, the only other source is private wealth. But even sponsors and benefactors are feeling the pinch these days, so a new initiative has been announced to address the problem by going directly to consumers of the arts.Donate was launched by the National Funding Scheme for the Arts and Heritage today. The idea Read more ...
fisun.guner
You might phrase the question rhetorically: “just what do artists do all day?” Or you might ask it in the spirit of genuine enquiry: after all, to many, the artist is an exotic creature whose mystery is still to be fully penetrated. Either way, it’s pretty clear that though it may not be “a proper job”, artworks don’t make themselves. The title was enticing, but, in fact, What Do Artists Do All Day? turned out to be, well, just another low-key television profile of an artist: the relatively little-known Royal Academician Norman Ackroyd. But it’s good the title didn’t suggest any of Read more ...
howard.male
How much more of a melancholy experience walking round this exhibition would have been if its subject hadn’t just sprung a new album on us that’s so suffused with energy and life. It’s meant that the exhibition's title - David Bowie Is – feels like a genuine statement of fact rather than just wishful thinking, at least in the literal sense. However, metaphorically speaking, the title would have still held since Bowie's influence as a multifaceted creation is still everywhere in our culture. There is much – in fact almost too much – to enjoy in this show. But let’s get a couple of Read more ...