sun 15/06/2025

Visual Arts Galleries

Art Gallery: Tim Burton, MoMA, New York

Sheila Johnston The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy and other stories (1998), pen and ink, watercolour on paper

To accompany our review of the spectacular and extensive exhibition dedicated to Tim Burton at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, we present a tiny selection of the 700-plus works on display there until 26 April 2010. Click on any of the images below to...

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Photographic Gallery: Points of View, British Library

sue Steward William Henry Fox Talbot, 1839, Photogenic Drawing of Flower Specimens: the delicate first step on the path to a major visual art

The British Library has for the first time created an exhibition from its unique photography archive of some 300,000 items, dating back to the first days of the process. Sue Steward reviews this major exhibition elsewhere, while here we present a selection of some of these marvellous early images.

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Graffiti Gallery: Crack & Shine

theartsdesk

Graffiti is the only form of artistic self-expression that can get you both arrested and exhibited. Its most celebrated exponent, Banksy, is the subject of tabloid news speculation. The faces and names of most graffiti artists are even more of a closed book. Until Crack & Shine, that is. Gaining exclusive access to these creative renegades as they work, the photographer Will Robson-Scott shines a light into occluded corners of nighttime London where graffiti art finds its...

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Art Gallery: Ed Ruscha

theartsdesk Standard Station: 'The Hayward exhibition achieves the rare feat of making you actually like the artist as a human being'

Half a century of Ed Ruscha's paintings are on show at the Hayward Gallery, London. Mark Hudson reviews elsewhere in theartsdesk the display of Los Angeles's most famous painter, "an aspect of American art about which we’ve remained remarkably ignorant".

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Art Gallery: The Sacred Made Real

theartsdesk Fernandéz' Dead Christ, 1625–30:

Mark Hudson reviews on another page the National Gallery's exhibition of 17th-century Spanish sculpture and art, The Sacred Made Real, which he describes as "in some ways the most contemporary exhibition in London". Here are some of the artworks on show.

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Art Gallery: Romuald Hazoumé

theartsdesk

An extensive selection is shown here of the work of Romuald Hazoumé, the Benin contemporary artist whose iconic masks made from petrol canisters dumped around his poverty-stricken homeland of Benin launched his international career. A major installation is owned by the British Museum, other pieces have been exhibited in the Saatchi and Hayward Galleries. Read the article on him by Sue...

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Photographic Gallery: Jillian Edelstein

Jillian Edelstein

Acclaimed photographer Jillian Edelstein's series of Portraits include images of significant figures from the world of arts, fashion and the demi-monde, but also politics: her portrait of Nelson Mandela, taken in Cape Town in 1997. There is also a delightful photograph of three South African boys mucking about by the water.

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Exclusive Art Gallery: Titian

theartsdesk

With thanks to the National Gallery, the Musée du Louvre, Madrid's Prado Gallery, Naples' Capodimonte Museum and Washington's National Gallery, and to mark the publication of Mark Hudson's major new biography, Titian: The Last Days, we reproduce a marvellous gallery of masterpieces. This is the first part of a four-part special, including three extracts from Hudson's book, about the master Venetian painter, Tiziano Vecellio (1489?-1576), universally known as Titian.

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Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne

Mark Hudson Bacchus and Ariadne, 1520-3: Titian’s masterpiece has been endlessly drawn upon by artists down the centuries

In 1519 Titian was commissioned by Alfonso d’Este, the famously irascible Duke of Ferrara, to provide the first of three paintings for a study, the so-called camerino d’alabastro or alabaster room. If the following five years of delays and procrastination drove the duke almost  to distraction, they produced what is arguably the most famous room in the history of Western art.

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