Cezanne Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery, 26 October 2017 – 11 February 2018 Paul Cézanne’s gardener, M. Vallier, peers out from under the wide brim of his straw hat, his eyes shaded from the sun. He sits cross-legged on a chair in a shaft of light in the garden of the artist’s house in…
Author: ArtMuseLondon
ArtMuseLondon is a site for reviews of art exhibitions and music in London, and general cultural musings, written by people with a keen interest and an honest, accessible approach.
Soutine’s Portraits: Cooks, Waiters and Bellboys at the Courtauld Gallery
Chaim Soutine and Amedeo Modigliani met in Paris in 1915. Both were Jewish immigrants but otherwise their backgrounds were very different: Modigliani came from a middle class, liberal family from Livorno in Italy, whereas Soutine had been raised in a desperately poor, very Orthodox shtetl near Minsk (now Belarus). The two occupied the same lodgings…
Jasper Johns: ‘Something Resembling Truth’
Last autumn London’s Royal Academy of Arts gave us Abstract Expressionism, a mighty exhibition celebrating the output of the stellar artists of the genre – Pollock, Rothko, de Kooning and their contemporaries. This year, in what may be a deliberate sense of continuity, the RA’s major winter exhibition focuses on the work of the American…
Objects from the inside out: Rachel Whiteread at Tate Britain
It’s not often that one gets to see the inside of a hot water bottle, but there are plenty of opportunities to do so at the major new exhibition of Rachel Whiteread’s work at Tate Britain. She calls these ‘Torsos’ and describes them as “headless, limbless babies”. Cast in a variety of materials – plaster,…
High-rise Harmonielehre
A concert in a carpark, orchestra and audience gathered on level 8 of a 1980s brutalist hulk of concrete in Peckham, south-west London. It all sounds rather J G Ballard-esque, and indeed the way in to the venue is a grubby, litter-strewn entrance beside the PeckhamPlex cinema. There’s a bouncer in attendance and some heavy-duty…
East meets West: Prom 41
‘Passages’ by Ravi Shankar and Philip Glass Britten Sinfonia with Anoushka Shankar, sitar, Karen Kamensek, conductor, Alexa Mason, soprano Tuesday 15th August 2017 The Late Proms, introduced in 2012, offer a slightly different musical experience to the main concerts and often feature non-mainstream classical music, jazz or specially-themed concerts (such as the Ibiza Prom and…
Rowan Hudson Trio at The Bull’s Head
I admit it, I’m a jazz ingenue. I know very little about the genre and even less about how to write a convincing review of a jazz gig or album. People say the rubric of classical music is complex and inaccessible; for me, jazz is even more complicated – there are genres and sub-genres aplenty….
A visit to Turner’s house
Five minutes walk from St Margaret’s station on a quiet residential road of large late-Victorian villas stands Sandycombe Lodge, former home of one of Britain’s greatest painters, J M W Turner.
Matisse in the Studio
Strange things lurk in artists’ studios, amidst the creative clutter. The Expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka kept a life-size mannekin of his former lover Alma Mahler with him for company. Several big names have stored guns in their studios, for no particular reason; certainly not to shoot themselves with (suicides are rare among artists). The…
Trapped in a Smash at Wilton’s
There are some words that make a concert-goer’s heart sink. For me these include “experimental”, “fusion”, “cross-over”, “wunderkind” and – after last night’s concert at Wilton’s Music Hall – “virtuoso harmonica player”. It’s rare for me to feel trapped at a concert, fervently wishing for it to be over, but last night was such an…
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