portraits
Ego: The Strange and Wonderful World of Self-Portraits, BBC FourFriday, 05 November 2010
Albrecht Dürer painted himself as Jesus (pictured below). Luckily, he was blessed with the looks, the hair and the initials – echoing the geometry of his golden locks the A straddles the D in his inscribed paintings. And when this German messiah of... Read more... |
Thomas Lawrence: Regency Power and Brilliance, National Portrait GalleryFriday, 22 October 2010
Thomas Lawrence was a child prodigy; from the age of 11 he supported his family by making pastel drawings of the fashionable elite who spent the season in Bath. The next step for an aspiring young artist was to learn how to paint in oils and... Read more... |
The Genius of British Art, David Starkey, Channel 4Monday, 04 October 2010
“Henry VIII is the only king whose shape we remember,” David Starkey tells us in the first of a new series of “polemical essays” on British art. To demonstrate, he reduces the king’s form to its bare Cubist geometry. He sketches a trapezoid for the... Read more... |
Art Gallery: Pordenone Montanari, An Italian DiscoverySunday, 26 September 2010
Our culture is hungry for stories of buried treasure, for the lost archive. So when something of startling value is brought blinking into the light after many years, it answers a romantic urge. Of course it doesn’t happen much any more, not in a... Read more... |
A Gothic homage to late fashion iconThursday, 23 September 2010
A grisly "shadow portrait" of the late fashion muse and stylist Isabella Blow goes on show today at the National Portrait Gallery. Crafted from taxidermied animals, including a raven, a species of rat linked to the black death and a snake, as well... Read more... |
Man with a Blue Scarf: On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian FreudFriday, 10 September 2010
Visit the room in the Louvre where the Mona Lisa hangs, and all you will be able to see is a glass-covered rectangle and hundreds of camera phones held high. Certainly you will be unable to examine the woman in the picture, or contemplate the work... Read more... |
Camille Silvy: Photographer of Modern Life, 1834-1910, National Portrait GalleryTuesday, 20 July 2010
Camille Silvy may be the least recognised of all the great photographic innovators of the 19th century. After a decade of almost ceaseless technical innovation, and astonishing output as the society portrait-photographer of the 1860s, he abruptly... Read more... |
Alice Neel: Painted Truths, Whitechapel GalleryFriday, 09 July 2010
What a troubled life Alice Neel led. The death of her first child, a daughter, who died of diphtheria in 1928 just before her first birthday; another daughter lost to her estranged husband’s family in Cuba two years later (as an adult and a... Read more... |
BP Portrait Award 2010, National Portrait GalleryThursday, 01 July 2010
Last month, the National Portrait Gallery unveiled a huge, new portrait of Anna Wintour. Painted by Alex Katz, the celebrated New York Pop portraitist, American Vogue’s scary editor-in-chief is shown with famous helmet bob intact, but minus her... Read more... |
The Stones in Exile: an Imagine Special, BBC OneSunday, 23 May 2010
Aptly, this new documentary about how the Rolling Stones fled from England to the South of France to record Exile on Main Street was premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, with a supernaturally healthy-looking Mick Jagger on hand to give it a... Read more... |
Fashion pop ups in unlikely placesThursday, 20 May 2010
While wandering back from a meeting with a hedgie on Haymarket, I noticed a banner emblazoned with the logo of Browns, clothes shop to the well heeled (to mix metaphors), above the entrance to what appeared to be a building site. It was indeed a... Read more... |
Bridget Riley: From Life, National Portrait GalleryThursday, 20 May 2010
Forget about art “being about the idea” for a moment. Drawing from life is still considered by many to be the litmus test for proper artistic skill, or at least the foundation from which great art can arise. And so the enquiry, “But can he really... Read more... |
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