In room 46 of the London National Gallery, two portraits hang, one by classical painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, the other by Pablo Picasso. Ingres’s portrait is of society beauty, Madame Moitessier (1856). Picasso’s portrait, several metres away, is of his mistress, Marie-Thérèse Walter, entitled Woman with a Book (1932). You may wonder why these works have been given…
Category: Art Exhibition
Hang about: Andreas Gursky (White Cube, Bermondsey); ‘For the Record’ (Photographers’ Gallery)
A few Saturdays ago, I went to two photography exhibitions. When you see two shows more or less together like this – even though they are nothing to do with each other – it’s hard to stop unlooked-for, and occasionally revelatory, connections popping into your head and affecting how you perceive the work. Both the…
Field work: Zadok Ben-David, ‘Natural Reserve’ at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew
Art emergency! If you are planning – or even vaguely considering – a visit to Kew Gardens over the next week or so, make sure you take in its current exhibition: ‘Natural Reserve’, the latest show from Zadok Ben-David. I first came across Ben-David’s art through being a Peter Gabriel fan. Even since his early…
An Illuminating Show of Post War British Art at the Barbican
With Postwar Modern. New Art in Britain 1945-1965, the Barbican reappraises the art that was created on these shores from the end of WW2 to 1965, a time when artists were grappling with the devastation of WW2 and its aftershocks. UK industrial cities had been badly bombed and the wholesale destruction of Nagasaki by the atomic bomb,…
Material worlds: ‘Barbara Hepworth: Art & Life’ at the Hepworth, Wakefield
As you can see from the first image below, this marvellous exhibition is about to close at the Hepworth. However, it rapidly gains new life as a touring show: first to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art from 9 April to 22 October 2022, then to Tate St Ives from 26 November 2022 to…
Louise Bourgeois Continues to Astonish and Fascinate with Woven Child at Hayward Gallery
Most people will have heard of and seen Louise Bourgeois’s giant spider, Maman .You couldn’t miss it in 2000, where it soared above visitors’ heads in the Turbine Hall, Tate Modern. Supported on slender legs of steel of over thirty feet in height, Maman, far from being a monster, was a symbol of maternity, protection, strength, and creation. Maman…
Life Between Islands Lights up Tate Britain
Life Between Islands at Tate Britain is a large show, so give yourself time to peruse the wealth of Caribbean-British art from the 1950s to the present. The exhibition opens with the old guard artists, who came to settle in Britain between the late 1940s and 1970s. Aubrey Williams’s expressionist art grabbed my attention in the first…
Spirit levels: ‘Unsettling Landscapes’, St Barbe Museum & Art Gallery, Lymington
How appropriate that on this occasion, during the walks between the car and St Barbe Museum & Art Gallery, the chill in the coastal air was icy enough to penetrate my fleece, and the wind strong enough to bend the bare branches of the trees further in, over our heads. St Barbe has an admirable…
Hogarth and Europe. A rewarding show at Tate Britain
Hogarth’s ‘Marriage-A-La-Mode 2 – The Tête à Tête 1743 I am always happy to revisit Hogarth’s work. His irreverent paintings and prints seem more alive today in our age of political correctness. Hogarth and Europe at Tate Britain contains sixty Hogarth works, some of them new to the…
Poussin and the Dance at the National Gallery, London
Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) A thought-provoking exhibition which offers a different view of Poussin’s early work in Rome and displays his paintings in a sympathetic and joyous environment. Guest review by Sarah Mulvey Detail from a Bacchanalian Revel Before a Term, ca.1632-33, London, National Gallery I am spellbound before Poussin’s painting of the Adoration of the Golden Calf in the…
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