During the summer of 1952, composer John Cage staged a happening that was going to change the world of music and art forever. At Black Mountain College in North Carolina, in the college dining hall, the audience listened to Cage read from an essay he had written on the relationship between music and Zen Buddhism….
Category: Exhibition review
Fortune’s Favours: ‘Sir Richard Wallace the Collector’ at the Wallace Collection, London
How to typify the Wallace? Can you, indeed? In spirit it’s maybe close to the passion of a collector such as Sir John Soane, who also founded his own public museum (there is something very English about this kind of obsession – think of the Ashmolean in Oxford, the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge). It’s something like the Frick in New York, only bigger, better, wider-ranging. There’s not an item in it that doesn’t have some claim to be exceptional – rare beyond belief if not unique, superlatively made, exquisitely beautiful.
MIXED MESSAGES IN MIXED MEDIA: MICHAEL JACKSON ON THE WALL National Portrait Gallery, London
In which your humble reviewer is left asking questions. When Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ video launched in 1983 it was a major media moment at a time when media moments were still a rarity. David Dimbleby, no less, introduced it on British TV, and back then in the 80s it blew our little sparkly socks off….
Aftermath: Art in the Wake of World War One at Tate Britain
Tate’s survey of the impact of the First World War on art opens with a series of iconic images of conflict. There is Jacob Epstein’s Terminator-like torso in bronze from his ‘The Rock Drill’ of 1913-14, as unnerving as ever. There are photographs of shattered cathedrals, actual helmets dented by shrapnel, and post-war Illustrated Michelin…
All too human curating at Tate Britain
Tate Britain’s new exhibition ‘All Too Human: Bacon, Freud and a century of painting life’ is about art based on everyday experience. A very British preoccupation, you might think, if the story of twentieth century painting in this country is anything to go by. Unfortunately, this interesting premise is marred by some very questionable curating decisions,…
Lousy king, outstanding connoisseur of art: Charles I at the Royal Academy
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 –…
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…
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…
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…
ARTMUSELONDON 