Depuis ses débuts dans les années 70, France Mitrofanoff n’a cessé de peindre. D’abord inspirée par le mouvement Cobra, avec ses créatures étranges, elle s’en dégage pour peindre dès Villes, constructions chaotiques où se cachent les habitants, ombres dissimulées derrière les murs. Plus récemment elle a porté son regard sur la nature, en particulier les arbres….
Category: Art
Interview with artist France Mitrofanoff
French artist, France Mitrofanoff, has a vast body of work behind her, having commenced her career in the 1970s, a time when she was painting monsters. Her interest turned to modern cities under construction. I remember her eerie-looking inhabitants, staring out at me from dark corners of the canvas. In the past decade she…
My Favourite Things : Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace’
Battle of Moscow (Borodino) 7th Sept 1812 by Louis-François Lejeune Christmas is nearing and every year I find myself irritable and exhausted and walking over to my bookshelves for literary solace. Dancing over rows of black paperwork classics, my fingers slow over my favoured volumes, all epics. Worlds of past existence inhabit my weighty…
Inspired by the East at the British Museum
Young Woman Reading 1880 by Osman Hamdi Bey Reading the British Museum press release of Inspired by the East: How the Islamic World Influenced Western Art, I was preparing myself for a big show. The exhibition was promoted as “Covering five centuries of artistic interaction”, and since it was a paying show for the…
Into the Night at the Barbican
Shadow Theatre at Le Chat Noir, Paris. I always look forward to the Barbican Gallery’s exhibitions. Theme-based with enticing titles, they always capture my imagination. The last show I covered there, entitled Art, Intimacy and the Avant-Garde (see here LOVE IN A CREATIVE CLIMATE) in January of this year, was riveting. With the theme of power…
‘Rembrandt’s Light’ lights up Dulwich
A new show has opened for autumn at the Dulwich Picture Gallery. It’s called Rembrandt’s Light. It’s intelligent, empathetic, surprising and at one point breathtaking, and I urge you all to go and see it as soon as possible. Dulwich, the UK’s earliest purpose-built public picture gallery (it was founded in 1811), was designed…
Kollwitz’s War and Grief at the British Museum
‘Woman with Dead Child, 1903. Käthe Kollwitz (1867-1945) Käthe Kollwitz, née Schmidt, is not a name I had come across in the art world until the British Museum’s show. Born in 1867, in Königsberg, East Prussia, Kollwitz established herself as a leading, influential graphic artist by the time the First World War came about….
Dulwich Printmaking Show Impresses
Dorrit Black, Music, 1927-28 I had never heard of the Grosvenor School of Modern Art until I set foot in the Dulwich Picture Gallery. Founded by wood engraver, Iain Macnab in 1925, the Grosvenor School was different from other London-based art schools of the time. There were no exams, students enrolled on courses when they could,…
Elizabeth Llewellyn In Fine Voice in Opera Holland Park’s ‘Manon Lescaut’.
It had been quite some time since I had last seen Manon Lescaut, Puccini’s early opera. Not since 2014 when leading man, Jonas Kaufmann, the Tom Jones of opera, topped the bill, playing an overly confident De Grieux at the Royal Opera House. Nevertheless I lapped up his ill-fated love affair with Latvian soprano,…
The Art of Recycling: THE ROYAL ACADEMY SUMMER EXHIBITION 2019
The RA Summer Exhibition, with its whiff of the London season, the cocktail party and the 19th-century Paris salon, is always a bit of an oddity, and all the better for it, IMHO.
