Don McCullin And Antony Gormley Art As Art – Edward Lucie-Smith
I’ve always had a huge respect for the work of Don McCullin, and it was, therefore, a pleasure to see an article by him
1 September 2021
Edward Lucie-Smith
Frida Kahlo: A Question Of Ethnicity – Edward Lucie-Smith
A recent Opinion piece on the website Hyperallegenic fiercely condemned Frida Kahlo, long one of the patron saints of contemporary feminist art.
18 July 2021
What The Art World Will Look Like Post Plague – Edward Lucie-Smith
What’s up for art here in London, once the pandemic is finally over? Will we all be able to go back to the state of things as they were, in the jolly days before the plague?
17 February 2021
Joseph Wright of Derby A New Book By Matthew Craske – Edward Lucie-Smith
The new book on Joseph Wright of Derby by Matthew Craske is a massive tome. Published by the Paul Mellon Center for British Art, it is entirely worthy of the artist’s high reputation.
19 November 2020
Artemisia Gentileschi Exhibition Opens At London’s National Gallery – Edward Lucie-Smith
The Artemisia Gentileschi exhibition has opened at the National Gallery at long last. It is accompanied by a handsome, fully illustrated hardcover catalogue. The hassle is that you have to book your slot to see it.
1 October 2020
The Crystal Palace Reimagined Using 360º Technology – Edward Lucie-Smith
The Royal Parks organisation in London has just put a remarkable site up on the Web. It enables the user to explore the long-gone Crystal Palace in Hyde Park.
20 May 2020
The Last Leonardo Art Porn For Millennials – Edward Lucie-Smith
Ben Lewis’s book The Last Leonardo, subtitled ‘A Masterpiece, A Mystery and the Dirty World of Art’, has now appeared in paperback after its publication in hardcover last year.
6 May 2020
London’s New Art Scene Creative Britain 1962-68 – Edward Lucie-Smith
Here’s a handsome new volume, well-illustrated, but more social history than art book, which tells of the emergence of London as an international art scene, during the years that followed World War II.
30 April 2020
Art And Corona What happens Afterwards – Edward Lucie-Smith
As the contemporary art world goes dark, and as galleries – official spaces and commercial ones – slam shut their doors, one inevitably starts to wonder what the art world will be like once all this is over—the British art world, and also the global one.
22 March 2020
Andy Warhol Multiple Identities – Tate Modern – Edward Lucie-Smith
Andy Warhol (1928-1987) has, even since his death more than thirty years ago, retained a central position in the world of contemporary art.
12 March 2020
Art Auguries: The Shape Of Things To Come – Edward Lucie-Smith
On Monday, January 13 the Times (London) published a chirpy article by Ben Luke promising wonders to come in London’s official galleries during the coming year. I have to say that the prospects he offered didn’t look so wonderful to me – that is to say where contemporary art is concerned.
15 January 2020
Ten UK Exhibitions You Should Have Seen In 2019 – Edward Lucie-Smith
From a critic’s point of view, It is pretty difficult, to sum up, the year 2019. It was, for example, a year when greater and greater emphasis was placed on doing full justice to women artists.
18 December 2019
Troy – A State of Mind – Edward Lucie-Smith
The latest in an excellent series of significant exhibitions at the British Museum – much better than the smaller ones the B.M. does in the cramped spaces of what used to be the reading rooms of the British Library – is about the legendary city of Troy, long besieged and finally at last taken and destroyed by a coalition of Greek states.
21 November 2019
Steve McQueen: Year 3 – Tate Britain – Edward Lucie-Smith
I increasingly get the feeling that the two London Tates are struggling to know what to do with the huge central spaces that are a characteristic feature of both buildings. The new show at Tate Britain – Steve McQueen: Year 3 – is symptomatic of this, though it is in many ways a more successful solution to the problem than some of the previous ones.
19 November 2019
Three London Shows November 2019 – Edward Lucie-Smith
As the nation plunges towards Brexit, and, as the official galleries – specifically the two big London Tates – grow more and more self-satisfied and increasingly inclined to offer displays of civic virtue as substitutes for anything you can actually describe as art, one turns towards the commercial galleries for solace.
19 November 2019
Cy Twombly, Gagosian – Song Dong, Pace – Edward Lucie-Smith
Two London shows from big commercial galleries reflect different but related aspects of the current international scene. One, at Gagosian Grosvenor Hill, is for the internationally known American artist Cy Twombly.
8 October 2019
Best Art Of The 21st Century? – In Your Dreams – Edward Lucie-Smith
Recently the Guardian newspaper here in Britain offered yet another of those ‘best of’ lists to which both the print press and websites of various kinds are now addicted. In this case, what it listed was ‘the best art of the 21st century’.
29 September 2019
Company Curiosities: A Clash of Cultural Objects – Edward Lucie-Smith
I have personal reasons to be interested in this book – Company Curiosities, by Arthur Macgregor. A direct ancestor of mine, not however mentioned in the text, was Chairman of the British East India Company in some of its glory days at the end of the 18th century.
31 July 2019
Donald Sultan Huxley-Parlour Sam Jackson Charlie Smith London 2X Reviews – Edward Lucie-Smith
This is the time of year when London’s grandee galleries – official and commercial – are so busy presenting us with blockbuster shows that lesser lights tend to get squeezed out, at least where publicity is concerned. Here are a couple of exhibitions on a somewhat lesser scale that it would be a pity to miss. One, at Huxley-Parlour in Swallow Street, offers the work of the American artist Donald Sultan, one of the stars of the return to painting (as opposed to other forms of artistic expression) that took place in American art in the 1980s.
25 June 2019
Sorolla: National Gallery And Mike Nelson – Tate Britain – Edward Lucie-Smith
Two shows have just opened at major London institutions –Sorolla at the National Gallery and Mike Nelson at Tate Britain. Different as they are, they both give one cause to reflect on the current situation in British art. Indeed, about what is happening to British culture in general.
27 March 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
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
Looking Forward To Art In 2019 – Edward Lucie-Smith
Looking forward to the art year ahead of us – 2019 – there are certain things one notices immediately, in the announcements so far made by various official and semi-official institutions based here in Britain and more specifically in plans announced by galleries here in London.
31 December 2018
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
2018 A Melancholy Year For Art Exhibitions In Britain – Edward Lucie-Smith
It has been in many ways a somewhat melancholy year for art, here in Britain – or should I say: ‘here in London’? -since pretty well all the shows I will mention here took place in a capital city that seems to be drifting steadily away from the rest of Britain.
20 December 2018
Modern Couples Shaped By The Society Of Their Time – Barbican – Edward Lucie-Smith
The Modern Couples show currently at the Barbican has eyes slightly too big for its own – or at any rate for my stomach. Nevertheless, it is, in the present climate for the visual arts, an event that is both timely and important.
5 November 2018
Hugh Mendes Autorretrato – John Loker At 80 – Reviews – Edward Lucie-Smith
As the title of this fascinating new show at Charlie Smith London suggests, Hugh Mendes is here offering multiple self-portraits, in the form of portraits of other people.
18 September 2018
Julian Schnabel: A Light That Failed – Edward Lucie-Smith
Julian Schnabel currently occupies an ambiguous position in the art world, which his new solo exhibition at Pace is likely to do little to clarify.
22 May 2018
The Art Of Smug Turner Prize 2018 – Edward Lucie-Smith
This year’s list of finalists for the Turner Prize has just been announced. While the names on the shortlist are virtuously unfamiliar, the general artistic direction is not.
30 April 2018
Edward Lucie-Smith Bids A Final Farewell To The Avant-Garde
The contemporary art world seems an increasingly strange place to be.
21 February 2018
Philip Pearlstein: A Figure Of Speech – Video Interview By Edward Lucie-Smith
Last month Edward Lucie-Smith filmed this exclusive video for Artlyst with the well known NY figurative painter Philip Pearlstein, at the Saatchi Gallery, London.
5 February 2018
Andreas Gursky: Presentations Of The Real World – Hayward Gallery – Edward Lucie-Smith
For those of us who remember the state of the Hayward Gallery before the just completed rehab, the current Andreas Gursky show, which celebrates its re-opening
27 January 2018