Visual Arts Reviews
Light Show, Hayward GalleryTuesday, 29 January 2013
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. Read more... |
Manet: Portraying Life, Royal AcademyFriday, 25 January 2013
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. Read more... |
Tales of Winter: The Art of Snow and Ice, BBC FourWednesday, 23 January 2013
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. Read more... |
Murder in the Library: An A-Z of Crime Fiction, British LibraryTuesday, 22 January 2013
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. Read more... |
Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, National Portrait GallerySaturday, 12 January 2013
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. Read more... |
The Riviera: A History in Pictures, BBC FourWednesday, 09 January 2013
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. Read more... |
McCullinTuesday, 01 January 2013
"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). Read more... |
London 2012 and Beyond: The Best of 2012Monday, 31 December 2012
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. Read more... |
Art: The Best of 2012Wednesday, 26 December 2012
It was the year that everyone got just a little hysterical about Damien Hirst. That and the art market that made him. But that didn’t keep the visitors away from his retrospective at Tate Modern. The exhibition had more crowds than Wembley Stadium, or at least more than for any other exhibition in Tate Modern’s 12-year history (and possibly for any exhibition since Tate records began). It was cleverly curated (i.e. Read more... |
Constable, Gainsborough, Turner and the Making of Landscape, Royal AcademySunday, 16 December 2012
All roads start from Rome, and so it proves in this challenging exhibition put together from the holdings of the Royal Academy’s art collection, archives and library. It features 17th-century Italian paintings – some of the grandest by the French artists who settled in Rome, and took inspiration from the surrounding campagna – brought back to Britain by the Grand Tourists who, in the midst of their various adventures, amassed substantial art for their stately homes. Read more... |
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