Visual arts
Edvard Munch: Love and Angst, British Museum review - compassion in the age of anxietyThursday, 11 April 2019
Munch’s The Scream is as piercing as it has ever been, and its silence does nothing to lessen its viscerally devastating effect. It was painted in 1893, but it was a lithograph produced two years later – now the star of the biggest UK exhibition of... Read more... |
Mary Quant, Victoria & Albert Museum review - quantities of QuantSaturday, 06 April 2019
Mary Quant first made her name in 1955 with the wildly fashionable King’s Road boutique Bazaar. Initially selling a “bouillabaisse” of stock it was not until a pair of pyjamas she made was bought by an American who said he’d copy and mass produce... Read more... |
Pitzhanger Manor review - letting the light back inTuesday, 02 April 2019
When in 1800 the architect Sir John Soane bought Pitzhanger Manor for £4,500, he did so under the spell of optimism, energy and hope. The son of a bricklayer, Soane had – through a combination of talent, hard work and luck – risen through... Read more... |
At Eternity's Gate review - Willem Dafoe excels in hyperactive biopicSaturday, 30 March 2019
It's all go – no, make that Van Gogh – when it comes to the Dutch post-Impressionist of late. Opening the same week as the Tate Britain's blockbuster exhibition about his years in London comes the artist-turned-filmmaker Julian... Read more... |
Van Gogh and Britain, Tate Britain review - tenuous but still persuasiveWednesday, 27 March 2019
Soon after his death, Van Gogh’s reputation as a tragic genius was secured. Little has changed in the meantime, and he has continued to be understood as fatally unbalanced, ruled by instinct not intellect. Van Gogh’s characterisation of himself as a... Read more... |
Mike Nelson, The Asset Strippers, Tate Britain review – exhilarating reminder of industrial mightThursday, 21 March 2019
Mike Nelson has turned the Duveen Galleries into a museum commemorating Britain’s industrial past (pictured below right). Scruffy workbenches, dilapidated metal cabinets and stacks of old drawers are pressed into service as plinths for the display... Read more... |
Only Human: Martin Parr, National Portrait Gallery review - relentlessly feelgoodTuesday, 19 March 2019
The Magnum photographer Martin Parr has spent decades observing contemporary human activity world-wide as – perhaps – a mesmerised observer, an anthropologist, a tourist, addicted to the vagaries of the human condition. This anthology at the... Read more... |
An encounter with John Richardson, Picasso's biographer who has died at 95Thursday, 14 March 2019
When I interviewed John Richardson, who has died at the age of 95, he was edging through his definitive four-tome life of the minuscule giant of Cubism. Of the various breaks he took from the business of research and writing, one yielded The... Read more... |
Kader Attia / Diane Arbus, Hayward Gallery review - views from the marginsTuesday, 12 March 2019
Feelings run high at the Hayward Gallery in a fascinating pairing of two artists from widely differing backgrounds. Kader Attia muses on unhappy, conflicted relationships between cultures in visual meditations on variations of colonialism. Diane... Read more... |
Louise Bourgeois, Kettle's Yard, Cambridge review - a slender but choice selectionMonday, 11 March 2019
Pink walls, slightly dusky in the subdued light of a room shielded from the wintry sun, suggest the bodily concerns of this show, which through the touring collection Artists' Rooms, boldly reviews Louise Bourgeois’s career in a single, modestly... Read more... |
Dorothea Tanning, Tate Modern review – an absolute revelationSaturday, 09 March 2019
Tate Modern’s retrospective of Dorothea Tanning is a revelation. Here the American artist is known as a latter day Surrealist, but as the show demonstrates, this is only part of the story. Tanning’s career spanned an impressive 70 years – she died... Read more... |
Franz West, Tate Modern review - absurdly exhilaratingThursday, 28 February 2019
Franz West must have been a right pain in the arse. He left school at 16, went travelling, got hooked on hard drugs which he later replaced with heavy drinking, got into endless arguments and fights, was obsessed with sex and, above all, wanted to... Read more... |
