Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Salvator Mundi’, which last year smashed the record for the most expensive artwork ever sold at auction, was not considered one of the jewels of Charles I’s art collection. During the Interregnum, when ‘the late king’s goods’ were disposed of by the republican government, it was sold to a mason –…
Category: Art Exhibition
LUBAINA HIMID WINS TURNER PRIZE 2017
#TURNERPRIZE The Turner Prize 2017 has been awarded to Lubaina Himid, it was announced this evening at a ceremony in Hull Minster, in partnership with Tate and Hull UK City of Culture 2017. The £25,000 prize was presented by DJ, producer and artist Goldie during a live broadcast on the BBC. A further £5,000 is…
Modigliani at Tate Modern
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…
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…
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,…
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…
Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2017
The RA Summer Exhibition has been part of my cultural landscape for years. As a teenager I used to go to the members Private View with my parents, enjoying an illicit glass of fruit-laden Pimms while perusing the weird and wonderful of the world’s most democratic art exhibition (yes, anyone can submit work for inclusion…
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