If all the stories about Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920) are true, you wonder how he found time to produce any art. Certainly, booze, drugs and women played a big part in Modigliani’s life after his arrival in Paris in 1906, his increasingly erratic behaviour fuelled no doubt by his frustration at the almost complete lack…
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.
‘Marnie’ at English National Opera
‘Marnie’ at ENO – a compelling and enigmatic psycho-thriller
London through French eyes
Impressionists in London: French Artists in Exile, 1870-1904 Tate Britain, London. 2 November 2017 – 7 May 2018 1871. France is ravaged by the Franco-Prussian war. Paris is under siege and rife with insurrection. Thousands flee the country in search of refuge and a new life away from war and revolution. Amongst those that fled…
Handel’s Rodelinda at English National Opera
Richard Jones’s sombre version of Handel’s Rodelinda, returning to the Coliseum after a three-year break, is a far cry from the frothiness of ENO’s Partenope, which I reviewed back in March. Grimoaldo, not content with stealing the throne from rightful king Bertarido, has designs on his queen, Rodelinda; his sidekick Garibaldo, meanwhile, sets his cap…
Portrait of an artist at work
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…
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…
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