Visual arts
fisun.guner
Matthew Collings was snowed in in Norfolk, so was sadly unable to join us, but the weather didn’t defeat The Arts Desk/London Art Fair debate. The Art Newspaper’s market expert Melanie Girles and TAD critic Mark Hudson rose to the challenge, while I did my best to steer the lively conversation. Under discussion was the question of whether art as commodity had finally taken over from art as art, as Robert Hughes had predicted over 30 years ago, and whether crazy prices at auction ultimately changes our viewing experience.Along the way we discussed art under totalitarian regimes, Carl Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Pre-Raphaelites, eat your heart out; and wherever he is, John Ruskin, once so dismissive of the artist, must be beaming with pleasure. The American landscape painter Frederic Church (1826-1900) was indeed seen as the heir to Turner, and his distinct landscape idiom is encapsulated by a handful of oil sketches – just over two dozen – of scenes from the Hudson River Valley to Petra, Ecuador to Newfoundland, Bavaria to Salzburg, Jamaica to Labrador. It is enough to give a tantalising glimpse of his extraordinary fluency with colour, texture and composition, at the service of a passionate Read more ...
mark.hudson
Travelling through Canada by train – more decades ago than I care to divulge here – I bought a book of Man Ray photographs at Banff in the heart of the Rockies. I spent the rest of the journey with one eye on the majestic mountains, and the other glued to the luminous, edgy, ineffably stylish images of the American surrealist in Paris.Those images were pretty well-known then. They’re infinitely better known now. The "Ingres" woman with violin marks on her back (pictured below, Le Violon d’Ingres, 1924), the pale-faced Parisian beauty with the African mask, the solarised profile of Lee Miller Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Prehistory – human life before written language - enters art’s mainstream with this seminal and eye-opening exhibition. This one-off show, amplified by excellent labelling and atmospheric lighting, is enormously ambitious: the largest anthology of portable prehistoric European art there has ever been, unprecedented in its scope with artefacts from museums in Russia, Germany, France, and the Czech Republic, homes to the greatest of the sites. (Although 40,000 years ago Britain was attached by land to the rest of Europe, the place was evidently too cold for human migration and survival.) Read more ...
fisun.guner
What a different country the past is. When one thinks of all the famous art works that caused an outrage when they were first unveiled and yet we now admire as ground-breaking and consider “seminal”. It’s probably everything that ever caused a critic of the old guard to sneer and that much maligned member of the unsuspecting public to have a fainting fit. One may go back at least as far as the last 150 years – it’s the 150th anniversary of Manet’s Olympia, after all – and to the wellsprings of modernism. These thoughts naturally bring one to the American minimalist Carl Andre Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Crossover isn’t the half of it. Not since Helmut Newton has a photographer operated so successfully in both the worlds of celebrity high fashion and the world of art. In Juergen Teller’s case there is an emotional warmth that is particularly engaging, meaning the art world’s embrace is free of the occasional smugness that comes with its acceptance of the success in the “real” world of someone like Mario Testino. Teller makes everything highly personal, and we respond subliminally to his attachment to whatever he is photographing. There is always a sense of specific biography or Read more ...
Steven Gambardella
Bruce Nauman is a great synthesizer of art forms, melding the language games of conceptual art with the physicality of post-minimalist sculpture and performance art. Where the minimalists duplicated the serial and repetitive industrial world around them, Nauman’s use of repetition and order have a linguistic basis. Inculcation, jokes, paradoxes and puns form the logic of much of Nauman’s work and these games grew out of his choreographed minimalist performances. Given this trajectory, the psychoanalytical angle taken in this exhibtion feels grafted on.Filling one of Hauser & Wirth’s huge Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The Pop Art collages of Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi and, more recently, the wayward sculptures and installations of artists like Phyllida Barlow would be unthinkable without the inspirational presence in Britain of Kurt Schwitters. Yet the German emigré is hardly a household name.The Tate exhibition Schwitters in Britain hopes to put that right by showing the full range of his work. These include reliefs and collages made from detritus picked up off the street; oddball sculptures fashioned from plaster, wood, stone, metal or bone; grotto-like installations that crept across walls Read more ...
Steven Gambardella
Central to this thoughtful show is not really the use of light in art per se but how light appropriately serves a post-minimalist shift from the work of art to the environment itself. For the most part, the works here endeavour to shape the space around us or invoke a response on a physiological level.The lower gallery’s main room is dominated by Cerith Wyn-Evans’s S=U=P=E=R=S=T=R=U=C=T=U=R=E ("Trace me back to some loud, shallow, chill, underlying motives overspil..."), 2010, made up of floor-to-ceiling columns of incandescent lights which “breathe” by slowly glowing bright and dimming, Read more ...
fisun.guner
While any Manet survey, however compromised by a lack of significant loans, must be considered "an event", this is not quite the exhibition one might have hoped to see of a great artist. Taking up one vast floor of the Royal Academy with just over 50 paintings (and some not very good pastels), many of which are unfinished and must have been judged unsatisfactory by the artist himself, it is far too thinly spread to be the touted blockbuster it seeks to sell itself as. And since there are quite a few indifferent paintings, one feels slightly sad that anyone coming fresh to this bold and Read more ...