This collection of more than 50 portraits painted by Francis Bacon is certainly intense – although perhaps not for the reasons one might have expected. Some of Bacon’s most famous and celebrated canvases show extremes of violence and distortion: the full-on body horror of the early figures at the crucifixion, or the melting abyss of…
Tag: National Portrait Gallery
Moving images: ‘Yevonde – Life and Colour’, National Portrait Gallery, London
‘Madame Yevonde’ (born Yevonde Philone Cumbers) was a professional photographer whose versatile, pioneering career – lasting some 60 years until her death in 1975 at the age of 82 – reflected the relentless pace of change during the twentieth century. When visiting this major exhibition devoted to her work, it feels like walking through several…
Hockney at his most intimate and honest
David Hockney: Drawing from Life – a magnificent, intimate overview of Hockney’s oeuvre and imagination as a master draughtsman and also a meditation on friendship, change and the ageing process
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…
An added poignancy to Howard Hodgkin’s ‘Absent Friends’
Howard Hodgkin: Absent Friends – National Portrait Gallery, London The title of the National Portrait Gallery’s new exhibition of portraits by British artist Howard Hodgkin has an added poignancy: called ‘Absent Friends’, the show opens just two weeks after the artist died at the age of 84, and thus Hodgkin himself is an absent friend…
ARTMUSELONDON 