Art

THE FULL BANKSY EXPERIENCE

Nicholas Barber — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 15:08:18 +0000

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

NINE PAINTINGS NEED TWO HOURS

Lucy Farmer — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 17:28:11 +0000

~ 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 »

HOCKNEY IS JUST ONE IN 23,000

Robert Butler — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 13:02:25 +0000

~ 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 »

ART'S QUIET MAN

Lucy Farmer — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 10:25:17 +0000

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 »

POLITE PLEAS FOR CHANGE

Fri, 25 Nov 2011 16:39:35 +0000

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 »

GRAND CLASHES IN MINIATURE

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 18:02:38 +0000

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 »

MEDITATIONS ON MARTYRDOM

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 16:12:09 +0000

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 »

WEIGHING UP WARHOL

Tim de Lisle — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 14:27:59 +0000

Andy Warhol, the cover star of our November/December issue, died 24 years ago, peaked about 20 years before that, and could easily be half-forgotten by now. Instead he looms larger than ever. He accounts for 17% of the market in contemporary art. If you were a collector keen to get your hands on one of his best-known works, and happened to have some Venetian masters to off-load, you would have to sell five Titians to buy one Warhol. In "A one-man market", a leading feature writer and cultural commentator, Bryan Appleyard, works out how this happened and what it means.

Most people will never know what it’s like to live with a Warhol, but in May I spent a few days with one. I was staying at a hotel in Stockholm, the Rival, owned by Benny Andersson from Abba. On its wall is a set of Warhol prints of Ingrid Bergman. It’s great to see her: a beautiful face, a fine actress, a local heroine. But then you see her again and again, because she gazes down on the spot where you wait for the lift, and she discloses no hidden depths. The prints might as well be posters: you can understand why Andersson has them in his hotel, not his home. read more »

THE AUTUMN OF MAX BECKMANN

Cornelia Günther — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 16:22:14 +0000

The “Occupy Frankfurt” protests and the euro meltdown were not the only headlines in Germany’s financial capital in October. Also in the news was “Beckmann & America”, an exhibition of the late works of Max Beckmann, a German expressionist painter, at the Städel, Frankfurt’s most famous art museum.

For both the artist and the gallery, this exhibition is a homecoming. The Städel, founded in 1815, is one of nine museums on the south bank of the Main. It is next to the Städelschule, a fine-arts college where Beckmann taught from 1925 until 1933, when Hitler’s regime stripped him of his professorship. He moved to Berlin and then to Amsterdam after the Nazis classified his paintings as “degenerate art”. So it is meaningful that the Städel, which has been undergoing a big reconstruction since September 2009 (including an immense new underground extension), chose Beckmann to mark the reopening of the Peichl Bau, the museum’s wing for special exhibitions. This also happens to be one of three Beckmann shows in Europe this autumn. An exhibition in Leipzig concentrates on his portraits, and one in Basel, Switzerland explores his landscapes. read more »

A MAN IN LOVE WITH WALLS

Olivia Weinberg — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 11:26:04 +0000

Diego Rivera (1886-1957) was several people in one. A political partisan and rebellious spirit, he was also a painter, illustrator, architect, draughtsman, costume designer and sculptor. His private life was a whirlwind: Frida Kahlo was wife No 3, and 4 (they married, divorced and remarried). But Rivera’s real love affair was with the wall. Bursting with colour, packed with detail and full of fantasy, his murals are mind-boggling. Like meaty scenes from an epic novel, they are magical storyboards that find their way deep into the imagination.

Strongly influenced by the Mexican revolution, Rivera believed in art for all. He wanted his work to be accessible, on public walls, not just gallery ones. In 1931, the Museum of Modern Art in New York offered him a big solo show. Arriving six weeks early, he was given an empty gallery to create eight portable murals. Eighty years later, five of them are back where they began.

They appear alongside a selection of drawings, watercolours and prints plus Rivera’s controversial designs for the Rockefeller Centre, begun while in residence at MoMA. “Frozen Assets” is the most surprising mural on show. It’s American, not Mexican, and shows New York’s jagged skyline, an unemployment shelter and a bank vault. It’s a gutsy statement to make mid-Depression. When Rivera arrived in New York, almost a quarter of all Americans were unemployed. His work asked big questions. During a global crisis, how could art tackle social and economic problems? If only we had the answer.

~ OLIVIA WEINBERG

Diego Rivera: Murals for the Museum of Modern Art MoMA, New York, November 13th to May 14th