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…
Category: Art
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…
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…
Giacometti at Tate Modern
Tate Modern is billing this exhibition as the first major retrospective of the Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966) in Britain for 20 years. That’s a bit rich, given that in the past year alone there have been substantial shows devoted to his work at the National Portrait Gallery and at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual…
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