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
Archives: Reviews
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
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
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
Bloomberg New Contemporaries South London Gallery – Review – Jude Cowan Montague
I confess straight away that I didn’t have as much time as I would have liked to spend on this exhibition. It has a split location, the new building of the South London gallery being located across the main road.
15 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
Chiharu Shiota: Immersive Elegant Scarlet Threads – Blain|Southern – Edward Lucie-Smith
Today London’s official art world is full of enthusiasm for so-called ‘minority art’, made by artists of guaranteed ‘minority origin’. On the whole, however, the artists so defined and officially promoted don’t come from Asia.
4 December 2018
Iain Baxter& &Information – Hales Gallery – Jude Cowan Montague
That famous aphorism ‘the medium is the message’ was spouted by Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian professor, philosopher and public intellectual back 1964, when his book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, set the stage for my current train journey where I overhear the students discussing their A levels.
2 December 2018
Five Academicians: Glasgow Print Studio – Clare Henry
You have to be reasonably senior to be an Academician of any sort. Put five together? The result is an exciting and extremely varied show.
2 December 2018
Fernand Léger A Mechanical Visual Language – Tate Liverpool – Alice Lenkiewicz
It was captivating to see the Fernand Léger exhibition (until 17 March 2019) at Tate Liverpool.
29 November 2018
Robert Rauschenberg Light-Hearted Works With Serious Meaning – Edward Lucie-Smith
The Robert Rauschenberg show Spreads: 1975-83 just opened at Thaddaeus Ropac here in London comes complete with a museum-worthy hardcover catalogue, and is indeed, though this is a commercial space, the kind of exhibition that any museum specialising in contemporary art might be proud to put on.
28 November 2018
Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair 2018 Round-Up – Jude Cowan Montague
It was a personal pleasure to visit this fair, now in its third year. The ambitious project has taken over the huge warehouse scale structure at Woolwich.
26 November 2018
Gordon Matta Clark: The Chaos Of The 1970s – Edward Lucie-Smith
Gordon Matta Clark died quite some time ago now – in August 1978. And he died quite young, aged only 35. However, like a number of artists from about the same epoch
26 November 2018
Josef Albers Life And Work – A New Book – Review Edward Lucie-Smith
Once you struggle through the fairly formidable Introduction to this biography – a chapter devoted to orientating the reader concerning Josef Albers’ major achievement, the long Homage to the Square series of paintings
20 November 2018
Paul Lock: You Simply Are – Review Noho Showrooms – Simon Tarrant
Gauguin once reportedly exclaimed of self-taught artist Henri Rousseau’s self-portrait, “There is the truth and future! There is painting!”
19 November 2018
Hilma af Klint: Paintings For The Future – Guggenheim Museum NY – Ilka Scobie
Hilma af Klint’s abstract paintings first dazzled me when I encountered her work in the 2013 Venice Bienalle.
18 November 2018
Perdita Sinclair An Impressive Visual Interpretation Of Micro-science – Jude Cowan Montague
Angiosperms (roughly flowering plants) produce an incredible variety of seeds that are dispersed in creative, innovative ways, sometimes involving tricksy relationships with particular animals.
15 November 2018
Alex Katz And Richard Smith Two Current London Exhibitions – Edward Lucie-Smith
Despite its title, Coca-Cola Girls, Alex Katz’s new show at Timothy Taylor doesn’t really belong in the realm of Pop Art. It does, however, have something in common with the concurrent Richard Smith show at Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert.
14 November 2018
Mantegna and Bellini In Presence of the Triumphs – National Gallery – Edward Lucie-Smith
This exhibition at the National Gallery is a landmark event. It brings together a rich selection of paintings, and some drawings, by two of the greatest masters of the Italian Renaissance.
11 November 2018
Peter Howson: The play is over – Flowers Gallery – Revd Jonathan Evens
‘Life-destroyer’, ‘get lost’, ‘monkeys’, ‘in bad faith’, ‘malediction’, ‘concealed dungeon’, ‘poison head’, ‘parasite’, ‘disenchantment’, ‘lechery’. The titles of Peter Howson’s latest work, in translation from often Latin or Anglo-Saxon words or phrases, give a graphic sense of the content.
10 November 2018
Bradley, Burden, Fischer and Pascali Four London Shows – Edward Lucie-Smith
Here, lumped together for the sake of convenience in an overcrowded Autumn season, are four London galleries.
7 November 2018
Lorenzo Lotto Metaphors Through Gestures And Symbols – Edward Lucie-Smith
Tucked away in a group of spaces on the gloomy ground floor of the National Gallery is a superb exhibition that seems likely to attract less attention than it should in fact get.
6 November 2018