Moreintelligentlife.com is the website of Intelligent Life magazine. Articles about Arts, Lifestyle, Travels, and Ideas

~ Posted by Simon Willis, May 10th 2012

More and more galleries are producing apps for their exhibitions. Some are modest, like the one for the Lucian Freud show at the National Portrait Gallery, which doesn't go beyond the exhibition itself. Others have bells and whistles. For its Abstract Expressionist exhibition in 2010, MoMA in New York produced an app with videos, interactive maps and audio commentary on the paintings. The problem was that artists like Barnett Newman and Jackson Pollock made very big pictures, and the scale is lost on screen. The other problem is that if you're looking at a dark painting by Rothko on an iPad, you also see your own face reflected back at you.

The app for "Leonardo da Vinci: Anatomist", which is on at the Queen's Gallery in London, is the best yet. You get illustrated mini-essays about every stage and aspect of Leonardo's career as an anatomist, each one ending with a video from a curator, historian or surgeon. You get animated comparisons with modern anatomical understanding, which occasionally show where Leonardo went wrong, but more often show how right he was.  read more »

~ Posted by Robert Butler, May 3rd 2012

They thought it might go for $80m. But last night in New York, Munch's "The Scream" went for $107m—the highest price paid for a work of art at an auction. If you couldn't get there, you could always watch it online. Sotheby’s said they were streaming the sale live from 7pm, or midnight BST. At 11.45 last night, the live stream was a shot of an empty podium and the tops of people's heads as they walked past, no ambient sound, and no sign when that might arrive. Twitter was doing a better job. Someone tweeted a picture of the queue. Someone tweeted the photo of their press pass. Someone tweeted the view from a hotel foyer: "The #Carlyle is swimming with art barons, vampires and 300 yr. old women."

At midnight a smooth-looking man in black tie stepped forward. The sound came on and went off again. Was that deliberate? Soon the twitter stream was announcing "#Sothebys live stream dead." The problem was too many people wanted to watch. My computer was getting snatches of audio and video, stuttering and jumping, but the numbers on the screen were out of synch with the audio.  read more »

~ Posted by Samantha Weinberg, March 9th 2012
 
An artist who put an angel with a 57-metre wing span on a hill overlooking the A1 is unlikely to be lacking in ambition. Last night Antony Gormley, creator of the "Angel of the North", showed fellow alumni of his old college (Trinity, Cambridge) round his London studio, where he is preparing for three shows—all of which open within the next six weeks.  read more »

~ Posted by Nicholas Barber, January 12th 2012  read more »

~ Posted by Lucy Farmer, January 11th 2012

There are only four weeks left to see the Leonardos at London's National Gallery, one of the exhibitions of the decade. You can still get in if you queue; probably for three hours before it opens at 10am (bring a folding chair and a torch). If you do get in, here are some tips.
 
Lower your expectations
Not of the quality, but the quantity. Leonardo was slow: only 18 paintings survive, and you are about to see seven that are finished and two that aren't. And these don't include the "Mona Lisa". Watch the 20-minute film beforehand. It tells how Leonardo left Florence for Milan when he was 30 to become court painter to the duke, Ludovico Sforza in 1482. The work he did over the next two decades is on show here. As well as the paintings you’ll also see more than 50 drawings (quite a few of which belong to the Queen).  read more »

~ Posted by Robert Butler, December 14th 2011

Olivia Weinberg writes that David Hockney's forthcoming exhibition of British landscapes "could establish Hockney as one of the most important landscape artists of our time". Well, naturally impatient, we thought we'd check out some of these landscapes on the BBC's new site Your Paintings. This project, launched in June, is putting online more than 200,000 oil paintings from the national collection. These are pictures housed in 3000 galleries, museums, hospitals, universities, even fire stations, around Britain. A press release went out this morning saying another 40,000 had just gone online, taking the total so far to 104,000.  

Go to Your Paintings, type in Hockney's name, and a slideshow of nine paintings appears, including two wintry Yorkshire townscapes from the Fifties: "Bolton Junction, Eccleshill" and "Moorside Road, Fagley". But nine Hockneys isn't many. There are 134 Sickerts, 113 Rubens and 63 Canalettos. The slight number for Hockney reflects several facts: the Tate's collection hasn't yet been uploaded, many of his paintings are in private hands and big-name contemporary artists tend to have priced themselves beyond the reach of hospitals and fire stations.   read more »

William Turnbull will turn 90 in January. His career as an artist has spanned more than 60 years. During the second world war he served as a pilot in the RAF, and saw a world of aerial landscapes. This view informed many of the abstract paintings he produced in the early 1960s—bright block colours with thin lines to represent a river, and textured marks that may be trees or the sea. Painting was his first interest, but during his time at Slade art school in London after the war he found that he preferred sculpture, the medium he is best known for. He was captivated, he has said, by the idea that with a bag of plaster dust he “could make something out of nothing”.    

He began sculpting in plaster before turning to bronze, wood and stone. In the mid-1960s he began to make work in steel. But whatever the material, his sculptures tend to combine the figurative and abstract—representing a body, a head or an animal but moulding the form to the limits of our ability to identify it. “Head”, from 1950, at first appears to be an obscure tangle of metal, but in the carefully created lines we can make out a cheek, an eye, an ear. His work is at once ancient and modern, and Turnbull has spoken of wanting to take his work “out of time”—a theme taken up in a new documentary about his life and work, “William Turnbull: Beyond Time”, now showing at the ICA in London.      read more »

The affluent emirate of Abu Dhabi appears to be revising its cultural policy. The Arab spring has ushered in a shift in consciousness across the region; citizens are re-considering their rights while rulers watch their step. Last month Abu Dhabi's Tourism Development and Investment Co (TDIC) announced that its Guggenheim and Louvre museums, which are part of a $27 billion development, would not be completed by 2014 as projected. No new dates for the openings have been announced, and the museums may proceed with a new agenda. What started as a tourism-driven project may be transformed into a local education initiative.

This political shift can be seen in the difference between the 2010 and 2011 keynote exhibitions of Abu Dhabi Art, a boutique art fair that takes place every November. Last year the main art exhibition was titled "RSTW", and it featured expensive works by Ed Ruscha, Richard Serra, Cy Twombly, Andy Warhol and Christopher Wool from the "private collection"—perhaps more accurately described as the "stellar inventory"—of Larry Gagosian, a New York-based dealer.

By contrast, this month, the same space hosts an exhibition titled "Emirati Expressions", which is the culmination of an education workshop conducted by Stephen Shore, an influential documentary photographer. The show includes work made in Abu Dhabi by Shore as well as the photography of artists who live in the United Arab Emirates. It's an unusual but smart model for a flagship exhibition, particularly for a nation with a fledgling art scene.  read more »

It seems an unlikely success story: identical twins of Indian origin, born in Britain, become famous artists for depicting their home city of Liverpool and other more controversial scenes in the style of Mughal miniature paintings. Yet this is the case of the Singh Twins, Amrit and Rabindra, now in their 40s. They recently completed a month’s tour of India, where they were feted in Delhi and Mumbai.  

Mughal miniatures are usually only a few inches big and rarely more than an A4 sheet of paper. The twins were inspired by the intricate and colourful miniatures they saw as teenagers, when their father drove them round India in a converted bus. But the work they now produce is on a grand scale of several feet. This gives their approach to this traditional and intricate style a colourful pop-art feel. The effect has earned acclaim, particularly in India, where Alka Pande, a Delhi-based curator and author, marvels at the way they have “taken Indian miniatures to a completely new level with reflections on contemporary life”.

They have been featured in exhibitions in Britain, America and Canada since the late 1980s, including a show last year at the National Portrait Gallery in London. In India there have been numerous shows, most recently “The Making of Liverpool—portraits of a city” (and an accompanying film) at Delhi’s Art Alive Gallery, and a series of Tarot-card images at Mumbai’s Sakshi Gallery and at the British Council in Delhi with Gallery Nvya.  read more »

A man, naked, his pale flesh splotched with blood, hangs from a rope tied around his waist. His body is bent double; hands tied to feet that are secured to the wood platform on which he stands. Beside him a fully dressed fellow in jolly striped trousers slowly tightens the screws of this torture device. The pour soul will die before he is torn in two. This is only one of the gruesome horrors perpetrated in “The Torture of the Maccabean Brothers”, painted in Cologne in the early 16th century. It is one of 22 late medieval and mainly German paintings in a selling exhibition now at the Richard Feigen gallery in New York, which opened earlier this month. The works belong to Sam Fogg, a London dealer; his gallery isn’t big enough to house them. At Feigen the walls have been painted a deep, rich blue which nicely sets off the gold in a number of the works. The effect is handsome, but it cannot disguise the fact these are not paintings for the faint-hearted.  read more »