Visual Arts Reviews

Man Ray Portraits, National Portrait Gallery

Mark Hudson Thursday, 07 February 2013

Travelling through Canada by train – more decades ago than I care to divulge here – I bought a book of Man Ray photographs at Banff in the heart of the Rockies. I spent the rest of the journey with one eye on the majestic mountains, and the other glued to the luminous, edgy, ineffably stylish images of the American surrealist in Paris.

Comment

Ice Age Art: Arrival of the Modern Mind, British Museum

Marina Vaizey Wednesday, 06 February 2013

Prehistory – human life before written language - enters art’s mainstream with this seminal and eye-opening exhibition. This one-off show, amplified by excellent labelling and atmospheric lighting, is enormously ambitious: the largest anthology of portable prehistoric European art there has ever been, unprecedented in its scope with artefacts from museums in Russia, Germany, France, and the Czech Republic, homes to the greatest of the sites.

Carl Andre / Rosa Barba, Turner Contemporary

Fisun Güner Monday, 04 February 2013

What a different country the past is. When one thinks of all the famous art works that caused an outrage when they were first unveiled and yet we now admire as ground-breaking and consider “seminal”. It’s probably everything that ever caused a critic of the old guard to sneer and that much maligned member of the unsuspecting public to have a fainting fit.

Juergen Teller: Woo!, ICA

Marina Vaizey Monday, 04 February 2013

Crossover isn’t the half of it. Not since Helmut Newton has a photographer operated so successfully in both the worlds of celebrity high fashion and the world of art.

Bruce Nauman: Mindfuck / Eva Hesse 1965, Hauser & Wirth, London

Steven Gambardella Friday, 01 February 2013

Bruce Nauman is a great synthesizer of art forms, melding the language games of conceptual art with the physicality of post-minimalist sculpture and performance art. Where the minimalists duplicated the serial and repetitive industrial world around them, Nauman’s use of repetition and order have a linguistic basis. Inculcation, jokes, paradoxes and puns form the logic of much of Nauman’s work and these games grew out of his choreographed minimalist performances.

Schwitters in Britain, Tate Britain

Sarah Kent Wednesday, 30 January 2013

The Pop Art collages of Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi and, more recently, the wayward sculptures and installations of artists like Phyllida Barlow would be unthinkable without the inspirational presence in Britain of Kurt Schwitters. Yet the German emigré is hardly a household name.

Light Show, Hayward Gallery

Steven Gambardella Tuesday, 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.

Manet: Portraying Life, Royal Academy

Fisun Güner Friday, 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.

Comment

Tales of Winter: The Art of Snow and Ice, BBC Four

Fisun Güner Wednesday, 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 16^th to the 19^th centuries, no population suffered at the hands of Old Man Winter quite as much as those in the Low Countries.

Murder in the Library: An A-Z of Crime Fiction, British Library

Nick Hasted Tuesday, 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.