Visual arts
fisun.guner
We love the snow but hate the cold, and for almost 300 years Northern European winters were bitterly, catastrophically cold. Crops failed, there were famine riots and people died of hypothermia during the Little Ice Age. From the 16th to the 19th centuries, no population suffered at the hands of Old Man Winter quite as much as those in the Low Countries. Winters were long, life was harsh, but in Brussels Pieter Bruegel the Elder was singlehandedly inventing the winter landscape of our imaginations.Bruegel painted Hunters in the Snow in 1565, during the coldest winter for a century. At first Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Crime fiction once lured you in with lurid covers acting like a B-movie poster or fairground barker, selling the promise of thrills within. The British Library’s new exhibition is disappointingly light on such disreputable fare, and much too brief. But within its self-imposed limits it manages to indicate the genre’s range, and illuminate some forgotten corners.The small, alphabetically themed gallery includes a couple of the treasures otherwise locked in the Library’s archive. The neat, unmarked text of Conan Doyle’s manuscript for a late Holmes story, “The Adventure of the Retired Colourman Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Michael Winner was always proud to call himself a film director but his filmography is notably short of quality moments. The likes of I'll Never Forget What's'isname and Hannibal Brooks in the 1960s, pointless remakes of The Big Sleep and The Wicked Lady, a questionable foray into theatrical adaptation with A Chorus of Disapproval, Lia Williams' reluctant turn as a vengeful killer in Dirty Weekend or his last film Parting Shots - these will not be remembered fondly (or even at all). Death Wish (starring Charles Bronson, pictured below) and its several offshoots, at least in the cinema, is Read more ...
fisun.guner
“The new job of art is to sit on a wall and get more expensive,” the late Robert Hughes once said. In a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal, gallerist and dealer Larry Gagosian was particularly revealing. “I wish I was in luxury goods,” he confessed, “because then I could just call the factory and say, ‘I need 10,000 more of whatever’” – though he did add that he couldn’t, because “then it’s not art, it’s something else.”Meanwhile, the influential American critic Dave Hickey recently announced that he was walking away from the art world because editors and critics had become a “ Read more ...
fisun.guner
The London Art Fair may not have the international heft or VIP glamour of Frieze, but for 25 years it’s been the place to see and buy the best of British modern art. While the main fair features 100 established galleries – including Browse and Derby, specialists in mid twentieth-century British figurative art, and Pangolin, one of the few galleries in the UK dedicated to sculpture – there are two curated sections that are worth spending time in: Art Projects provides a compelling snapshot of contemporary art now, while the Catlin Guide features a selection of the UK’s brightest graduates.Both Read more ...
fisun.guner
The first thing to say about Paul Elmsley’s portrait of the Duchess of Cambridge, which was unveiled yesterday at the National Portrait Gallery, is that it looks rather better in real life than it does in reproduction. That doesn’t make it a great painting, but nor is it a risible one. The soft-focused, Vaseline-smeared visage, framed by that undulating cascade of buoyant hair (it’s unfortunate how much this makes her look as if she's taking part in an ad campaign for shampoo) is more convincingly defined and skilfully modelled than it is when you see it on the screen.Certainly, there’s a Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
For a man immortalised by his wails of rainy misery from the moors of Withnail and I, you would expect Richard E Grant to be very happy on the Riviera. He is, with the suave aristo manner of the Englishman abroad. Which is fitting for The Riviera: A History in Pictures, because the Riviera practically belonged to the Brits - we hivernots, winter escapers from northern cold - before the French realised it was there at all. And it came to their attention because artists from the Impressionists onwards went there.I’m not sure that A History in Pictures quite knows what it is aiming for: Grant is Read more ...
fisun.guner
That ultimate art rocker David Bowie is 66 today. The Victoria & Albert Museum is opening with a major survey of Bowie the style icon this spring. What’s more, he’s just released a new single, with an album following in March. Fittingly, for an art school idol, he once wrote a song about his favourite artist Andy Warhol (“Andy Warhol looks a scream / Hang him on my wall / Andy Warhol, Silver Screen / Can't tell them apart at all”). It got a typically blank response when Bowie played it to its subject – not even a “Gee, David”. Still, although it's not a patch on "Space Oddity", it's a Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
"After such knowledge, what forgiveness?" TS Eliot’s line could well stand as an epitaph to Jacqui and David Morris’s troublingly thoughtful film about British photographer Don McCullin, whose haunting images of conflict across the world over half a century have defined our perception of modern warfare (though his range of subjects goes far beyond that). The softly-spoken McCullin is our guide here to some of the stories behind this lifetime’s achievement, which is no less well summarized in his own words: “Seeing and looking at what others cannot bear to see is what my life is all about.”It Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The Mayan calendar recently suggested it was all over. It is now, almost. 2012 was, by anyone’s lights, an annus mirabilis for culture on these shores. The world came to the United Kingdom, and the kingdom was indeed more or less united by a genuine aura of inclusion. Clumps of funding were hurled in the general direction of the Cultural Olympiad, which became known as the London 2012 Festival, and all sorts leapt aboard. Just for a start, those opera companies who had been burning to perform a version of Vivaldi's L'Olimpiade could now finally proceed. At least three did.Not all of what Read more ...
Ismene Brown
In among the deluge of New Year Honours poured over Olympians (headed by Sir Bradley Wiggins, Sir Ben Ainslie, Dame Sarah Storey and Companion of Honour Lord Coe), there is a modest sprinkling over the arts world too. Roald Dahl's illustrator Quentin Blake becomes Sir Quentin, and another veteran entertainer, Jeremy Lloyd, co-writer of 'Allo 'Allo and Are You Being Served?, is made CBE. There are no arts Dames, but CBEs go to three well-known women, singer Kate Bush, artist Tracey Emin and choreographer Arlene Philips and to the less visible Cultural Olympiad chief, Ruth Mackenzie.Three other Read more ...