wed 23/07/2025

Visual Arts Reviews

Pierre Bonnard: The Colour of Memory review, Tate Modern - plenty but empty

Florence Hallett

“Slow looking” is the phrase du jour at Tate Modern, an enjoinder flatly contradicted by the extent of this exhibition, which in the history of the gallery’s supersized shows counts as a blow-out.

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Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams, Victoria & Albert Museum - sumptuous

Katherine Waters

The heart of the V&A’s sumptuous Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams is a room dedicated to the workmanship of the fashion house’s ateliers.

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Fausto Melotti: Counterpoint, Estorick Collection review - harmonious things

Katherine Waters

For an artist whose cerebral and frequently playful works reference physics, myth and music, Fausto Melotti’s artistic education was appropriately heterogeneous.

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Bill Viola/Michelangelo: Life Death Rebirth, Royal Academy review - empty rhetoric versus focused intensity

Sarah Kent

Its a preposterous act of hubris, isn’t it? Pairing large scale video installations by American artist Bill Viola with drawings by Michelangelo can’t possibly illuminate our experience of either art form; or can it?

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Best of 2018: Art

Florence Hallett

Exhibitions routinely claim to be a once in a lifetime experience, but there can be no doubt about the prince among them this year, the Royal Academy’s spectacular Charles I: King and Collector.

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Edwin Landseer / Rachel Maclean, National Gallery review - a juxtaposition of opposites

Sarah Kent

Familiarity breeds contempt, which makes it difficult to look at Edwin Landseer’s The Monarch of the Glen (pictured below). The reproduction of this proud beastie on T-towels, aprons, jigsaws and biscuit tins blinds one to the subtle nuances of the original painting.

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Māris Briežkalns Quintet, EFG London Jazz Festival 2018 review - a Rothko symphony

David Nice

One part of the brain, they tell us, responds to visual art and another, quite different, to music; we can't cope adequately with both at once. Which is why I'm often wary of those musical organisations which think that what we hear needs to be livened up with more to see: mixing Debussy with so-called "Impressionists", for instance, or Stravinsky with Cubism.

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Edward Burne-Jones, Tate Britain review - time for a rethink?

Katherine Waters

When, in 1853, Edward Burne-Jones (or Edward Jones as he then was) went up to Exeter College, Oxford, it could hardly have been expected that the course of his life would change so radically. His mother having died in childbirth, he was brought up by his father, a not particularly successful picture- and mirror-framer in the then mocked industrial city of Birmingham.

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Klimt/Schiele, Royal Academy review - the line of gauntness

Maev Kennedy

The most touching tribute to the relationship between two giants of early 20th century art, Gustav Klimt and the much younger Egon Schiele, hangs in the first room of this fascinating exhibition at the Royal Academy  – Schiele’s poster for the 49th Secessionist exhibition in 1918.

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The new V&A Photography Centre review - a new museum to make us proud

Marina Vaizey

Prints of all kinds; the first small wooden camera invented by Fox Talbot that made the negative positive process possible; Box Brownies and hundreds of other cameras from then until now. All that is just for starters in the V&A's new, fully-fledged, mini museum of photography.

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