Dorothea Tanning The Doors of Perception – Tate Modern – Jude Cowan Montague
Dorothea Tanning is the artist, face hidden to me back then, who drew and painted a short series of paintings that I have loved since a child.
2 March 2019
Reviews
Upcoming Curators Review Exhibitions at Annka Kultys / Cell Project Space
Exhibitions at Annka Kultys and Cell Project Space reviewed by upcoming curators who are students of Sarah Sparkes’ course How to be an Independent Curator course at Central Saint Martins University of the Arts London.
27 February 2019
Franz West: Tate Modern And David Zwirner London – Edward Lucie-Smith
The Franz West show at Tate Modern, with a smaller spin-off at the London branch of Zwirner, the late artist’s long-time dealer, presents the critic with a series of dilemmas.
27 February 2019
Diane Arbus Street Of Secrets – Hayward Gallery – Sue Hubbard
My favourite thing is to go where I’ve never been’ wrote the photographer Diane Arbus, the poor little rich Jewish girl who walked on the wild side.
23 February 2019
Phyllida Barlow vs Elizabethan Treasures – Edward Lucie-Smith
Phyllida Barlow has long been one of the heroines of the professional contemporary art establishment here in Britain
21 February 2019
Don McCullin A Major Retrospective – Tate Britain – Jude Cowan Montague
A major retrospective of the war photographer Don McCullin at Tate Britain showcases his images from Vietnam, Northern Ireland and more recently Syria alongside pictures of poverty in the East End and working-class life in northern England.
20 February 2019
Is This Art Today? 4 London Shows – Edward Lucie-Smith
A group of recently opened shows, very different from one another, raise questions about the direction the visual arts are now taking.
20 February 2019
Upcoming Curators Review Zabludowicz And New Art Projects London
Exhibitions at the Zabludowicz and New Art Projects reviewed by upcoming curators who are students of the How to be an Independent Curator course at Central Saint Martins University of the Arts London.
17 February 2019
All the Rembrandts Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam – Sue Hubbard
With his Bob Dylan mop of curls and pug nose, he looks every inch the rebellious teenager that he was.
16 February 2019
Tracey Emin: Personal Real And Imaginative – Jude Cowan Montague
I visited the white, white cube for the Emin show a day after the people-jammed preview opening. I’m a little allergic to crowds so rely on the Facebook grapevine for a feel of how sardine-packed the gallery felt. With queues stretching around the block.
7 February 2019
New London Exhibitions February 2019 – Edward Lucie-Smith
There’s a conflict of impulses in the art world just now. On the one hand, there is a desire to reflect what’s going on in society.
6 February 2019
Glasgow Exhibitions Winter 2019 – Clare Henry
GLASGOW’s reputation has risen & fallen over the years. 1990 saw a peak. The city is now in a trough.
6 February 2019
Bill Viola And Michelangelo A Fairground Magical Mystery Tour – Edward Lucie-Smith
The catalogue for the new Bill Viola show at the Royal Academy – also featuring a group of Michelangelo’s best, most finished drawings – is careful to point out that it is not really proposing a rivalry, or even a close kinship, between the two artists.
31 January 2019
Utopia Through Nostalgia The Koppel Project Hive – Jude Cowan Montague
Molly Brocklehurst curated this small group show to a grand idea that stems from her own work as a painter; to use art to examine the philosophical and existential reality of looking back at memory itself.
28 January 2019
Richard Pousette-Dart An Elegant Affair With A Covert Past – Edward Lucie-Smith
Richard Pousette-Dart (1916-1992) is now one of the less-clearly remembered of the New York Abstract Expressionists, especially here in the UK. He was however amply exhibited in America during his lifetime
24 January 2019
Pierre Bonnard: A French Painter Carrying Forward A Great Inheritance – Edward Lucie-Smith
Bonnard was one of those betwixt and between artists, part of the Modern Movement
21 January 2019
Rebecca Scott Beneath The Silk and Gloss – Jude Cowan Montague
Rebecca Scott’s huge oil paintings of defaced magazine pages: it’s a visceral exhibition by a confident painter, secure in her style, able to wow us with colour.
18 January 2019
London Art Fair 2019 Returns With Solid Foundations – Sue Hubbard
The New Year revels are over. It’s January, and the art world is back to work. The first sign of this stirring is the London Art Fair 2019 that returns to the capital from 16-20 January.
17 January 2019
Lynette Yiadom Boakye In Lieu Of A Louder Love – Ilka Scobie
A couple of years after Lynette Yiadom Boakye dazzled New York with her solo show at the New Museum, she returns to the city with 35 new paintings.
16 January 2019
Mayfair’s Golden Oldies: Bernard Jacobson At 50 and Stephen Buckley @ Mayor Gallery – Edward Lucie-Smith
The Bernard Jacobson Gallery in the heart of London has had a long connection with artists’ prints and printmaking since it first opened its doors, on a different site to the current one, in 1969.
15 January 2019
Pailthorpe And Mednikoff The Birth of Psychorealism – Edward Lucie-Smith
This Christmas and New Year it was an exhibition at the sternly Modernist – yes, with a big M – De La Warr Pavilion at Bexhill-on-Sea. The artists on view were not precisely contemporary: a strange half-forgotten pair called Grace Pailthorpe and Rueben Mednikoff.
13 January 2019
How Egon Schiele Became Egon Schiele – Fondation Louis Vuitton – Jude Cowan Montague
When I visited art college studios as a jealous English student in the 1980s, the cool, edgy artists had pictures of skinny, edgy women in tea shirts, naked.
9 January 2019
Irving Penn Paintings: A Kind Of Photographic Sub-Stratum – Edward Lucie-Smith
Irving Penn (1917-2009) was one of the great stars of 20th century American photography, at a time when the United States was becoming the world’s leader in this art form.
7 January 2019
Philip Colbert / Marshmallow Laser Feast – Saatchi Gallery- Review Edward Lucie-Smith
In the current context of London exhibitions, the unabashed rock-‘n’roll energy of the Philip Colbert Hunt Paintings’ show, recently opened upstairs at the Saatchi Gallery
28 December 2018
Jean-Michel Basquiat – Fondation Louis Vuitton – Review Jude Cowan Montague
Where are the black artists in the galleries? We think it’s bad now, what about during the 1980s? The early 1980s before Basquiat?
28 December 2018
Thomas Gainsborough: A Thirst For Visible Originality – Edward Lucie-Smith
After various adventures away from its traditional subject-matter – the recent Michael Jackson show being a case in point, the National Portrait Gallery returns to familiar territory with a show devoted to Thomas Gainsborough, by general consensus one of the most brilliant portrait painters to have worked in Britain. Native-born into the bargain, unlike his predecessors Holbein and Van Dyck.
27 December 2018
London Art Exhibitions January 2019 – Paul Carey- Kent
The noted writer and curator Paul Carey-Kent gives us his rolling ten recommended contemporary art shows in London now.
26 December 2018
Breeeeze: Four Artists Consider The Ambivalence Of Domestic Space – Elizabeth Fullerton
“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction,” Virginia Woolf wrote in her famous essay on the subject, which discusses the subjugation of women in the home.
19 December 2018
Edwin Landseer The Return Of A Moralistically Empathetic Artist – Edward Lucie-Smith
How times have changed! And how much they haven’t! A small but telling display of work by the celebrated Victorian artist Sir Edwin Landseer, now on view at the National Gallery, invites both comparison and cogitation.
17 December 2018
Plaster Casters: Victoria & Albert Museum Cast Courts Reopen – Edward Lucie-Smith
The full re-opening of the Victoria & Albert Museum’s Cast Courts occurs at an apposite moment.
12 December 2018
Richard Long: The Tide is High – Edward Lucie-Smith
There can be no doubt that Richard Long is one of the giants of British art. Or so a very impressive curriculum vitae would lead one to suppose. He is now in his early 70s. He made his reputation almost half-a-century ago, as what was then called a Land Artist
10 December 2018
Tomas Saraceno: On Air – Palais de Tokyo Paris – Virginie Puertolas-Syn
Tomas Saraceno “On Air” an exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo is definitely one of the most extraordinary exhibitions I have ever seen. A once in a lifetime experience not to be missed if you are in Paris.
6 December 2018