Visual Arts Reviews

Avedon Warhol, Gagosian Gallery

Marina Vaizey Thursday, 25 February 2016

It is an inspired pairing: iconic images by the American photographer Richard Avedon (1923-2004) and the painter, printmaker and filmmaker Andy Warhol (1928-1987), almost all of whose mature work was based on the photographic image. They are together in a large exhibition at Gagosian, Britannia Street, itself one of the largest and most elegant commercial art spaces in London, designed by that cultural architectural duo Caruso St John.

Botticelli and Treasures from the Hamilton Collection, Courtauld Gallery

Florence Hallett Tuesday, 23 February 2016

In Hell, the souls of the damned endure cruelly imaginative punishments for all eternity. Corrupt churchmen are buried headfirst in the ground with their feet set on fire, and soothsayers, who in life presumed to be able to see into the future, have their heads turned 180 degrees and are forced to walk around looking backwards. Drawn in metalpoint strengthened here and there with ink, Botticelli’s lines are as fine as spider’s silk.

Performing for the Camera, Tate Modern

Sarah Kent Saturday, 20 February 2016

The earliest known selfie is as old as the medium itself – literally. Hippolyte Bayard, one of the inventors of photography, pictured himself as a drowned man. His technique of photographic printing on paper had been upstaged by the daguerrotype, a metal plate alternative developed at the same time (1839) by Louis Daguerre.

Delacroix and the Rise of Modern Art, National Gallery

Florence Hallett Wednesday, 17 February 2016

Art exhibitions hardly seem comparable with battery farming, and yet just as our insatiable appetite for cheap meat gives rise to some troubling consequences, so too does the demand for definitive exhibitions that require vulnerable works of art to be shipped around the world.

The Renaissance Unchained, BBC Four

Marina Vaizey Tuesday, 16 February 2016

Waldemar Januszczak always has a provoking agenda to shape his now nearly countless forays into television art history. In this four-part series he's out to challenge what he sees as the unthinking acceptance of the one-dimensional traditional and monopolistic version of the Renaissance.

Comment

Vogue 100, National Portrait Gallery

Marina Vaizey Monday, 15 February 2016

When it got too hard to ship the original American edition across the Atlantic during the Great War, British Vogue appeared as a sister publication in the Condé Nast empire.

Nikolai Astrup: Painting Norway, Dulwich Picture Gallery

Marina Vaizey Sunday, 14 February 2016

Dulwich Picture Gallery, the oldest public painting gallery anywhere with one of the world’s finest collections of Old Masters, has in recent years built up a deserved reputation for bringing to the British audience unfamiliar aspects of well known painters, along with reappraisals and new discoveries. Their latest show is the first-ever exhibition outside of Norway for that country's landscape painter Nikolai Astrup (1880-1928).

Comment

Generation Painting 1955-65, Heong Gallery, Cambridge

Marina Vaizey Tuesday, 09 February 2016

The individual colleges of the University of Cambridge can call, when needed, on an astonishing international network of alumni for expert advice, consultation and financial support. Such is the backing for an exquisite new public gallery on the site of Edwardian stables in the grounds of Downing College there.

Bruegel in Black and White: Three Grisailles Reunited, Courtauld Gallery

Florence Hallett Monday, 08 February 2016

Now that Renaissance altarpieces live for the most part in museums and not churches, our experience of them is, quite literally, flat. Once, the winged altarpieces so popular in northern Europe, comprising a central panel flanked by two moveable “doors”, would have changed appearance according to the Church calendar, the wings left closed during Lent to be opened again at Easter when the glorious colours of its central image would once again be revealed.

Painting the Modern Garden, Royal Academy

Marina Vaizey Sunday, 31 January 2016

Painting the Modern Garden explores the interstices between nature and ourselves as revealed in the cultivation of gardens, that most delightful and frustrating of occupations, and an almost obsessive subject for many artists. About 150 paintings from the 1860s to the 1920s, gathered together from private and public collections in North America and Europe are on view, amplified by letters, plans, documents, photographs and illustrated books on horticulture.