Visual arts
Ming: 50 Years That Changed China, British MuseumMonday, 29 September 2014
Here be dragons, and plum blossoms in moonlight, model chariots, 15th-century paper money, weaponry and armour, embroidered robes, blue and white porcelain, vivid portraits of the court eunuchs, obese emperors and impassive empresses. There is many... Read more... |
theartsdesk in Bamberg: Top Town, Top OrchestraSunday, 28 September 2014
As a town of 70,000 or so people, Bamberg boxes dazzlingly above its weight in at least two spheres. The Bamberg Symphony Orchestra, risen to giddy heights under its chief conductor of the last 14 years Jonathan Nott, is decisively among Germany’s... Read more... |
Constable: The Making of a Master, Victoria & Albert MuseumSaturday, 27 September 2014
This revelatory exhibition goes in search of the revolutionary magnificence which infused Constable’s compelling landscapes through an unusual prism. The narrative spine is clear. It follows Constable’s intense work playing upon as profound a... Read more... |
Was it right to censor Exhibit B?Wednesday, 24 September 2014
So, Exhibit B, the controversial “human zoo” using black actors to re-enact the role of ethnographic exhibits – semi-naked, chained, silenced by metal masks and degraded in metal collars – has been cancelled, due to the presence of protesters.... Read more... |
Anthony Caro: The Last Sculptures, Annely JudaMonday, 22 September 2014
Late Titian, Late Rembrandt, Late Picasso, Late Matisse…. What is it with Late that seems to give some artists a Golden Age irradiated by a kind of sublime carelessness, a genuine sense of anything goes? A life spent learning means that in the end... Read more... |
theartsdesk in Cadaqués: Inside DalíSunday, 21 September 2014
In 1959, the walk to Salvador Dalí’s house in Portlligat seemed very long. I was on holiday with my parents in Cadaqués, staying in our friends’ house high on a hillside with a view of the blue bay and the white houses surrounding it. Not that I... Read more... |
The Real Tudors, National Portrait GalleryFriday, 19 September 2014
For all the political hurly burly, social change and religious upheaval of the Tudor period and the intriguing personal histories of its monarchs, it is surely the portraits of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I that have done most to secure the Tudors in... Read more... |
Jasper Johns: Regrets, Courtauld GalleryThursday, 18 September 2014
In your ninth decade it may not come as a surprise to find death staring you in the face. But it might be unnerving if you’re an artist and a menacing “death's head” skull emerges, quite unexpectedly, in an image you’ve been staring at and working... Read more... |
Francesca Woodman: Zigzag, Victoria MiroMonday, 15 September 2014
Francesca Woodman killed herself at the age of 22, the biographical fact that colours her work and which it is de riguer to mention. She left behind paintings, it is said, as yet publicly unseen, and literally hundreds upon hundreds of negatives and... Read more... |
British Art at War: Bomberg, Sickert and Nash, BBC FourSunday, 14 September 2014
At the end of this absorbing documentary about the art – and life – of Paul Nash we visited his tombstone in a Buckinghamshire churchyard, accompanying writer and presenter Andrew Graham-Dixon as he laid sunflowers on the grave. He reminded us that... Read more... |
Late Turner: Painting Set Free, Tate BritainFriday, 12 September 2014
There is early Turner; there is late Turner. Early Turner is very much of his time: a history and landscape painter in the first half of the 19th century, looking back to the classicism of Claude and the Dutch Golden Age tradition of sombre marine... Read more... |
The Rules of Abstraction with Matthew Collings, BBC FourTuesday, 09 September 2014
Artist and critic Matthew Collings purported to set out the rules of abstraction through taking the viewer on a very bumpy ride through 20th century painting, with a nod to Cézanne to get us started. He set the scene by telling us that abstraction... Read more... |
