Revisiting the Decameron – Flowers Gallery Online – Edward Lucie-Smith
An online show called Revisiting the Decameron, curated by Laura Gascoigne, has recently gone up on the Flowers Gallery web-site. It runs until 9th of August.
13 July 2020
Archives: Reviews
Sean Scully: Rhythm, Restraint, Splendor – Raphy Sarkissian
Painting, sculpture, architecture: here is a triumvirate wherein painting and sculpture remain in commanding dialogue with architecture throughout the impressive output of Sean Scully, as exemplified in the exhibition titled INSIDEOUTSIDE currently on view at the Villa Waldfrieden and the Cragg Foundation Sculpture Park in Wuppertal
11 July 2020
Zoobs Ansari – Elephant West – Edward Lucie-Smith
As this exhibition demonstrates, Zoobs Ansari’s work covers a lot of contemporary themes. On the one hand, there is the experience of the outsider, living in a culture that is not his own. Secondly, there is the fascination of show-business
26 June 2020
London’s Masterpiece Art Fair Moves Online – Edward Lucie-Smith
The Masterpiece Art Fair, a regular feature of the summer season in London, is now up online and will be available there until 28 June.
25 June 2020
Vincent Van Gogh A Durable Art Legend – Two New Books – Edward Lucie-Smith
Two books from Thames & Hudson about Vincent Van Gogh, one of the most durable legends in art. One offers his life-story, as told in letters written by himself, most of them to his brother Theo, who became a moderately successful art dealer. The other, by Mariella Guzzoni, is entitled Vincent’s Books: Van Gogh and the Writers Who Inspired Him.
17 June 2020
Bryan Robertson Promoter Of New Art – Edward Lucie-Smith
Andrew Lambirth’s The Life of Bryan, recently published by Unicorn, describes itself rather demurely as a celebration, rather than as a biography.
11 June 2020
BP Portrait Award Survives Online – Edward Lucie-Smith
As the National Portrait Gallery closes its doors, not just in response to the Coronavirus epidemic, but in preparation for a three-year rehab, the annual BP Portrait Award survives online, as a virtual show. The 2020 exhibition is now up for view on the web.
26 May 2020
Photographer Don McCullin Online At Hamiltons – Edward Lucie-Smith
The ways of the art market are pretty strange. Hamiltons, a leading gallery here in London that specialises in photography, have just put a new series of images up on the web, black and whites from various stages in his career by Sir Don McCullin
18 May 2020
Home Alone Together Twenty Five Artists – Revd Jonathan Evens
Home Alone Together: We are told that home is where the heart is, but also that, while we can travel the world in search of what we need, we must return home in order to find it. Home has been described as the centre and circumference, the start and finish, of most of our lives.
17 May 2020
Botanical Mind Online: Art, Mysticism and the Cosmic Tree – Revd Jonathan Evens
Spring 2020 was to have been an appropriate season for the launch of one of the Camden Arts Centre’s most ambitious exhibitions to date. The Botanical Mind: Art, Mysticism and the Cosmic Tree is a major thematic group exhibition investigating the significance of the plant kingdom to human life
11 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
Infamous Colony Room Relived In New Book – Edward Lucie-Smith
Darren Coffield’s well-presented Tales from the Colony Room, Soho’s Lost Bohemia, memorialises an epoch in the London world of the arts that now seems very far away, even though the once-famous Colony Room closed its doors as recently as December 2008.
23 April 2020
Artemisia Gentileschi A Retrospective – Edward Lucie-Smith
The much-anticipated Artemisia Gentileschi exhibition at the National Gallery in London has now been indefinitely postponed, to the disappointment of many.
16 April 2020
Piranesi Drawings – Neoclassical Visions – Edward Lucie-Smith
This handsome soft-cover catalogue published by Thames & Hudson for the British Museum was intended to commemorate an exhibition that hasn’t in fact taken place, due to the coronavirus.
9 April 2020
Edmund de Waal Books Thousands of Books British Museum – Marina Vaizey
Books written in exile by the exiled. It is this phenomenon, the triumph of the human spirit in dire circumstances, that is the focus of a gesamtkunstwerk, a complete work of art, by Edmund de Waal which may be viewed at the British Museum when it reopens
26 March 2020
Titian: A Pity To Miss – National Gallery – Edward Lucie-Smith
The Titian show at the National Gallery in London has arrived at a particularly inauspicious moment. Major public galleries in Europe are shutting their doors because of the coronavirus. The National Gallery has now temporarily closed.
19 March 2020
Drawn To Another World Alexander Hinks – The Cello Factory
What is this ‘other world’ Alexander Hinks is drawn to and asks that we be drawn into?
His current exhibition at ‘The Cello Factory’ spans some four years of art-making. The paintings introduce themselves as unabashedly interested in transcendence, possibly unfashionable given an increasingly materialistic contemporary background.
16 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
Among The Trees A Sense Of Loss – Edward Lucie-Smith
Among the Trees which just opened at the Hayward Gallery, is an ambitious exhibition that has all the best intentions, and somehow fails to make its point. Or, rather, it makes a point that is perhaps different from what the organisers intended.
9 March 2020
Aubrey Beardsley: A Sensual Sometimes Erotic Divertissement – Edward Lucie-Smith
As the exhibition catalogue notes, the Beardsley show that just opened at Tate Britain is the first comprehensive survey of his work to have found a place there, since an exhibition of his drawings in 1924. That is to say, very nearly a century ago.
4 March 2020
Young Rembrandt: Influencer Of His Generation – Edward Lucie-Smith
I’ve always liked the exhibitions at the Ashmolean in Oxford. They offer sensible examples of art historical explanation – something that can’t always be said for official institutions that present equivalent exhibitions in London. The new Young Rembrandt show just opened at the Ashmolean is an excellent example of their approach.
27 February 2020
David Hockney: Two Major Shows Open In London – Edward Lucie-Smith
As the National Portrait Gallery prepares for its long sleep – three years with its doors firmly shut – it is not surprising to find it playing host to a major show of work by David Hockney.
25 February 2020
Masculinities: An Extremely Interesting, Timely Event – Edward Lucie-Smith
After a plethora of exhibitions featuring women, women’s art, women’s attitudes of the world, it comes as a relief to find a big London show that is all about men.
20 February 2020
Los Angeles Gallery Visit February 2020 – Edward Lucie-Smith
I am just back from a quick trip to Los Angeles, which gave me a lot to consider – chiefly about how different the LA art world is from the one we have here in London, though it is also in some respects very much the same.
18 February 2020
Caravaggio / Bernini: Baroque Wonderment Vivacity And Horror – Sue Hubbard
Most great artistic movements begin as a reaction to the art and times that precede them. Impressionism in the 19th century. Surrealism, Dadaism and the YBAs in the 20th c. Baroque began in Rome around 1600 in response to the austere 17th-century Protestant culture of the Netherlands.
15 February 2020
British Baroque: Vintage National Triumphalism – Tate Britain – Edward Lucie Smith
Entering the new British Baroque show (as one does) from Tate Britain’s central upstairs space, currently, home to a multitude of group photographs of pupils in London primary schools is to enter a different world. Different socially, different aesthetically. Above all, different, in the attitudes, the event expresses concerning what visual art is about.
9 February 2020
Brandt And Moore: A Shared British Vision – Hepworth Wakefield – Sara Faith
A new exhibition at the Hepworth Wakefield features two very British artists with crossover interests. The photographer Bill Brandt (1904-1983) and sculptor Henry Moore (1898-1986) first crossed paths during the Second World War when they both created images of civilians sheltering in the London Underground during the Blitz.
7 February 2020
Radical Figures: A New Art Movement? – Edward Lucie-Smith
The rather splendid show of new figurative painting, now on view at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, boasts that it is the first event of its kind since the New Spirit in Painting exhibition that made such an impact here in London in the now long-ago 1980s.
5 February 2020
Fugitive Artists Display Powerful Images At Turner Contemporary
‘We Will Walk—Art and Resistance in the American South’ is one of the most powerful and important shows I’ve seen. It is co-curated by the artist Hannah Collins, who initiated the project, and curator Paul Goodwin. The exhibition traces the history of African-American artists in the Deep South during the second half of the 20th century, a time of racial terror so savage, so traumatic but yet so recent.
5 February 2020
Rose Wylie: Harnessing A Rebellious Energy – Paul Carter Robinson
Rose Wylie has become one of the leading British contemporary artists of her generation. In the last decade, her work has come to the forefront both domestically and internationally, with a practice that is youthful, playful and fresh.
4 February 2020
American Pastoral Art Celebrated In New London Show – Edward Lucie-Smith
The new American Pastoral exhibition at Gagosian’s Britannia Street space is of museum quality, even if what’s on show doesn’t always seem to relate to the title.
29 January 2020