Visual arts
The Great War in Portraits, National Portrait GallerySunday, 02 March 2014
Telling a story through an exhibition can be a bad idea, partly because it seems a little pedestrian but mainly because it runs the risk of using art as illustration, glibly treating paintings as if they were objective visual records. In its title,... Read more... |
Strange Beauty: Masters of the German Renaissance, National GalleryWednesday, 26 February 2014
Strange Beauty: Masters of the German Renaissance finds the National Gallery in curiously reflective mood. Taking as its subject the gallery’s own mixed bag of German Renaissance paintings, the exhibition sets about explaining – and excusing – the... Read more... |
Bunkers, Brutalism and Bloodymindedness: Concrete Poetry, BBC FourMonday, 24 February 2014
Is Brutalism brutal? Pugnacious? Uncouth? The name was coined by English academic and architecture writer Reynor Banham – more on him in a moment – as a play on the French béton brut (literally raw concrete) and the English “brute”, and hence... Read more... |
The Edwardian Grand Designer, Channel 4Monday, 24 February 2014
Britain’s last castle, Drogo, may be only just over a century old, but repair work is going on in a big way – it’s currently the National Trust’s largest-scale restoration project. That provided the excuse for the Time Team special The... Read more... |
The Brits Who Built the Modern World, BBC Four / The Man Who Fought the Planners, BBC FourFriday, 21 February 2014
There really was astonishing talent on display in The Brits Who Built the Modern World (*****), as full a television panorama of the work of the five architects whose careers were under examination – Richard Rogers, Norman Foster, Nicholas Grimshaw... Read more... |
Listed: 10 American paintings before PollockSunday, 16 February 2014
The National Gallery recently embarked on a first: they acquired their first American painting. Men of the Docks, 1912, (main picture) may not be George Bellows’ most famous or best-regarded work; nonetheless, it’s a gritty and beautifully observed... Read more... |
theartsdesk in the Shetlands: Seasick VikingsSunday, 16 February 2014
“Would we be able to prosecute the Vikings today, should we? I mean are there parallels between what the Nazis did by plundering art and gold, or what the German soldiers did who raped Norwegian women when they occupied Norway?” Silke Roeploeg might... Read more... |
Berlinale 2014: Cathedrals of CultureFriday, 14 February 2014
Back at the Venice Biennale in 2010, the German film director Wim Wenders showed a 3D video installation titled “If Buildings Could Talk”.Exploring the theme of how architecture interacts with human beings, and attempting to capture the soul of the... Read more... |
Richard Hamilton, Tate Modern /ICAWednesday, 12 February 2014
Some artists are diminished by major retrospectives, including those artists we consider great. A gap opens up between what you see and what you hear, which is why you can never judge work with your ears, or at least your ears and nothing else. The... Read more... |
Hockney: Printmaker, Dulwich Picture GallerySunday, 09 February 2014
David Hockney has been a printmaker for almost as long as he’s been a painter. From one of his earliest ventures into print, a self-portrait colour lithograph aged 16 while at Bradford College of Art (the black pudding-bowl hair emulates early hero... Read more... |
Bailey's Stardust, National Portrait GallerySaturday, 08 February 2014
Several hundred photographs, of varying scales and most of them newly printed gelatin silver prints in superb tones of greys blacks and whites, take us into a world that has been subliminally familiar to us for nearly 50 years.Stardust is the title... Read more... |
Richard Deacon, Tate BritainWednesday, 05 February 2014
A retrospective is often a daunting prospect for all concerned, not least the poor visitor who must prepare for a gruelling marathon, visiting every forgotten cul-de-sac of an artist’s career. Putting together a retrospective of a living artist... Read more... |
