Photography
We'll Take Manhattan, BBC FourFriday, 27 January 2012
The Beatles’s arrival on US TV screens in February 1964 is usually recognised as the beginning of the British Invasion of America. But this drama, focusing on chippy, upstart photographer David Bailey, his relationship with his chosen model Jean... Read more... |
Photo Gallery: Top DeckSunday, 22 January 2012
In popular myth, Margaret Thatcher reportedly said that any man still travelling by bus after the age of 30 could consider himself a failure. The quote is almost certainly apocryphal, but it stuck in the public consciousness because it sounded like... Read more... |
Art Gallery: London Art Fair 2012Tuesday, 17 January 2012
Featuring over 100 galleries specialising in modern and contemporary British art, the London Art Fair is a January highlight for those who prefer a more relaxed atmosphere to that offered by the international VIP frenzy of Frieze. From the great... Read more... |
The Scottish National Portrait Gallery, EdinburghFriday, 09 December 2011
The Scottish National Portrait Gallery has been transformed with a £7.6 million facelift. As a first-timer I confess I don’t have a clue what it looked like before, but I am assured it was dark and gloomy and had the air of a building cast aside in... Read more... |
America in Pictures: The Story of Life Magazine, BBC FourFriday, 02 December 2011
Before the internet and the Kindle were invented, generations of Americans saw their lives refracted through the pages of Life magazine. In particular, through its photography, since writers at Life were largely relegated to supplying glorified... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Director Ken Russell, 1927-2011Monday, 28 November 2011
In 2006 the thatched house in Lymington on the Hampshire coast which had been the home of Ken Russell (b 1927) for 30 years burned down. All of the director’s original film scripts, including Women in Love, The Devils and Tommy, were destroyed. So... Read more... |
Photo Gallery: Ken Russell - A RetrospectiveMonday, 28 November 2011
An exhibition of Ken Russell's photographs, taken in the 1950s, spirits you back to a London still in recovery from the trauma of war. And yet seen through the prism of Russell's lively eye, always on the look-out for mischief and absurdity, an era... Read more... |
Bloomberg New Contemporaries, Institute of Contemporary ArtsMonday, 28 November 2011
In his catalogue essay, Peter Osborne discusses the meaning of epithets such as “new” and “contemporary” when applied to current art, yet no one in this year’s New Contemporaries seems to be striving to make work that is “new”, “different”, “radical... Read more... |
Alice in Wonderland: Through the Visual Arts, Tate LiverpoolFriday, 04 November 2011
What a curious curate’s egg Tate Liverpool has pulled out of its hat with Alice in Wonderland. And what a complete rag-bag of minor, uninteresting artists. It starts with a disparate mix of recent works by a few better-knowns – neatly beginning at... Read more... |
TV Gallery: Frozen PlanetSunday, 30 October 2011
What we're used to seeing whenever the BBC launches on one of its epic explorations of the natural world is moving pictures. But as well as training film cameras at their subects, from the largest mountains and glaciers to the smallest organisms,... Read more... |
The Heart of the Great Alone: Scott, Shackleton and Antarctic Photography, Queen's GalleryThursday, 27 October 2011
Many of the images will be all too familiar. Captain Scott writing a diary in his quarters. Three of Shackleton’s men scrubbing below decks. The Endurance lit up in the long polar night. The ice cave shaped like an italic teardrop and shot from... Read more... |
Building the Revolution: Soviet Art and Architecture, 1915-1935, Royal AcademyWednesday, 26 October 2011
I’m not sure I’ve ever felt so ambivalent about a show, and so strongly both pro and con. The pros first, then. This is an astonishing, revelatory exhibition of avant-garde art and architecture in the Soviet Union in the brief but hectic period from... Read more... |
