Visual arts
Yuletide Scenes: Giotto's NativityThursday, 24 December 2015
Some time in the late 1280s, the artist Cimabue was wandering in the Tuscan countryside when he chanced upon a boy shepherd. According to Vasari, whose Lives of the Artists is the source for most such stories, the boy was “portraying a sheep from... Read more... |
Yuletide Scenes: Ben Nicholson's Christmas Night, 1930Wednesday, 23 December 2015
On this dark, silent night as the world holds its breath in anticipation, everything is still but for the occasional whisper of a breeze ruffling the curtains. It is so quiet that a deer, that most nervous of creatures, has tiptoed all the way up to... Read more... |
Yuletide Scenes: David Jones' Nativity with Shepherds and Beasts RejoicingTuesday, 22 December 2015
David Jones’ black and white drypoint – a drawing made by incising lines on a copper plate with a diamond-tipped needle and then printing from the plate – is a view of the nativity which is fresh, full of wonder and a highly intelligent naïveté. It... Read more... |
Yuletide Scenes: Piero della Francesca's NativityMonday, 21 December 2015
At first sight Piero della Francesca’s The Nativity appears to be a simple picture, especially when compared with more flamboyant depictions of the scene by artists such as Gentile de Fabriano, Botticelli and Rubens. Like a director staging a play... Read more... |
Another Minimalism, Fruitmarket Gallery, EdinburghFriday, 18 December 2015
Minimalist sculpture has, for decades, been making gallery visitors self-conscious. How should you react to a metallic piece by Donald Judd which has evidently been machined rather than modelled? Can you really walk all over an arrangement of lead... Read more... |
Rose English, Camden Arts CentreTuesday, 15 December 2015
I think of Rose English as the performer who made Miranda Hart’s success possible. I remember seeing her back in the 1980s, improvising solo at a theatre in Chenies Street. She had the audience curling up with embarassed laughter as she took off her... Read more... |
Collected through Love: The Michael Woodford BequestSunday, 13 December 2015
Art collectors are rarely what one might expect. Everyone has their particular enthusiasms, quirks and foibles, which make their collections unique and reflective of their tastes. In my career as a curator I have learnt never to have preconceptions... Read more... |
Fabio Mauri: Oscuramento, Hauser & WirthSaturday, 12 December 2015
Following his inclusion in this year’s Venice and Istanbul biennials, Italian artist Fabio Mauri has leapt into the limelight. He is from the same generation as Mario Merz; but whereas Merz and his Arte Povera colleagues have long since enjoyed an... Read more... |
Secrets of the Mona Lisa, BBC TwoThursday, 10 December 2015
There’s a lot of breathless frontloading in television documentaries. The headlines promising shock and awe coming up are posted in the opening edit as a way of hooking in the remote-wielding viewer. Very often as presenters stump around history’s... Read more... |
Peggy Guggenheim: Art AddictTuesday, 08 December 2015
The New Yorker Peggy Guggenheim (1898-1979) was the classic poor little rich girl: insecure, a woman with scores, perhaps hundreds of lovers, longing for love, the writer of tell-all memoirs. What sets her apart is that she was also the creator of... Read more... |
The Amazing World of MC Escher, Dulwich Picture GalleryTuesday, 08 December 2015
Walls that are floors, floors that are walls, and stairs that go up to go down: in the brain-befuddling art of MC Escher (1898-1972) the mundane everyday meets a world of paradox in which the rules of gravity, space and material reality are thrown... Read more... |
Julia Margaret Cameron, Victoria & Albert Museum / Science MuseumMonday, 30 November 2015
Reputations and popularity rise and fall and rise again in cycles, and so with the redoubtable Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–1879). Now considered one of the finest photographers ever, she was an amateur gifted with incredible tenacity, intellectual... Read more... |
