Visual arts
Constable: A Country Rebel, BBC FourSunday, 07 September 2014
Presenter Alastair Sooke looked alarmingly fit, careering round the British countryside and the streets of Paris on his bicycle, talking all the while (and never out of breath) as he described the artistic trajectory of John Constable. In the... Read more... |
Horst: Photographer of Style, Victoria & Albert MuseumFriday, 05 September 2014
If events in the Middle East, the prospect of the school run or the onset of autumn are conspiring to lower your spirits, then escape to the V&A and immerse yourself in the dreamy elegance of Horst P. Horst’s magical fashion photographs spanning... Read more... |
Time, Weather, Place: Folkestone Triennial 2014Monday, 01 September 2014
The crusty old Scottish artist Ian Hamilton Finlay died in 2006, but there’s a new art work by him at this year’s Folkestone Triennial. You won’t be able to see it with the naked eye, but you can through a pair of binoculars. If you peer through a... Read more... |
First Person: Disabled artists take on the worldSunday, 31 August 2014
The audience comment I most want to hear during next week's Unlimited Festival is: this show has transformed my perception of disability. We got that over and over and over during the first Unlimited Festival, which ran as part of the Cultural... Read more... |
Bright Lights, Brilliant Minds: A Tale of Three Cities, BBC FourThursday, 21 August 2014
Eight seconds in and my toes were already curling. Perhaps it was the authority with which the voiceover delivered some juicy clunkers. “If you wanted to be an artist in 1908, Vienna is where you’d come to make your name,” it intoned. Wow, who’d... Read more... |
Edinburgh Art Festival: Scotland to outer spaceSaturday, 16 August 2014
Like a canny political campaigner, the Edinburgh Art Festival offers “something for everyone”. In this singular year for Scotland, the festival weaves together strands concerning the independence referendum, the Commonwealth and the centenery of the... Read more... |
The Beauty of Anatomy, BBC FourWednesday, 13 August 2014
If the idealised human body forms the heart of the classical tradition in Western art, the close study of nature is its lifeblood. It is inevitable then that artists have sought better to understand anatomy, and there are many examples of artists... Read more... |
Ryoji Ikeda: spectra, Victoria Tower GardensSaturday, 09 August 2014
The extraordinary beams of light shooting miles into the air from Victoria Tower Gardens may be the most viewed piece of conceptual art ever. Spectra, visible from high points miles away like Primrose Hill, is the extraordinary work of Paris-based... Read more... |
Art of China, BBC FourThursday, 31 July 2014
If, like me, you switched this on feeling sheepish about your sketchy knowledge of Chinese art, you would have welcomed as a ready-made excuse the news that some monuments synonymous with Chinese culture are relatively recent discoveries. It seems... Read more... |
What Lies Beneath: The Secret Life of PaintingsWednesday, 30 July 2014
The doctoring of political images became something of a tradition in the last century, with Stalin, Hitler and Mao all airbrushing their enemies from photographs. The latest infrared technology has revealed that something similar may have happened... Read more... |
First World War Galleries, Imperial War MuseumTuesday, 22 July 2014
The Imperial War Museum is one of the most extraordinary museums in the world. Its contents and presentation triumph over the three words of its title, each usually causing dread rather than enthusiasm: imperial (discredited unless to do with Roman... Read more... |
First Person: Curating Shelagh WakelyFriday, 18 July 2014
I’ve curated nearly 70 exhibitions in my time. The most challenging was Elizabeth Frink’s retrospective at the Royal Academy. Weighing in at several tons, the large bronzes are virtually impossible to shift, so I had no room for manoeuvre. To get... Read more... |
