I went yesterday to see the big Gilbert and George retrospective at Tate Modern. The Tate have done their usual thorough job of putting the exhibition online, so that link will give you a fair idea of what the exhibition’s like.
I enjoyed it more than I expected. Not that I expected to hate it, but [...]
Posts tagged with ‘art’
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Gilbert and George at Tate Modern
2 March 2007 – 5:08 pm
Art at Christie’s
6 February 2007 – 5:23 pm
I went to the preview today of an auction of Impressionist and Modern Art at Christie’s. It made me think I should go to see art at auction houses more often.
What you don’t get is a curated exhibition, with the pieces arranged around some kind of (hopefully) illuminating theme. It’s a rather random selection of [...]
the coming of 3D video games
20 January 2007 – 2:19 am
Technological change is extraordinarily rapid, yet somehow it seems to creep up on us. The internet went from being an obscure curiosity for the geeky to part of people’s everyday lives without most of us ever having a eureka moment when the change was brought home to us.
I have had a few such moments, though. [...]
Rodin at the RA
31 December 2006 – 3:15 pm
I went to the big Rodin exhibition at the Royal Academy today. It offered one of the simplest of art pleasures – looking at striking objects. His work has real presence, and not just because it’s made out of big lumps of bronze or marble. Their status as representational work seemed less important than the sheer [...]
‘Holbein in England’ at Tate Britain
27 November 2006 – 10:44 pm
I went to see the Holbein at the Tate today. It’s a large exhibition with a lot of Holbein’s work from collections all over the world. I can certainly recommend it, because Holbein was a remarkable and enjoyable portraitist. The finished paintings are outnumbered by drawings in a combination of coloured chalk and ink. As [...]
Adam Elsheimer at DPG
24 November 2006 – 7:08 pm
There’s an exhibition of Adam Elsheimer paintings at the Dulwich Picture Gallery. From the DPG site:
On hearing of Elsheimer’s early death Rubens wrote ‘Surely, after such a loss our entire profession ought to clothe itself in mourning. We will not easily succeed in replacing him; in my opinion he had no equal in small figures, [...]
Velazquez at the National Gallery
14 November 2006 – 6:49 pm
Well, I went to the Velazquez. Of course I spent most of the time finding angles to see the paintings between all the people, but I’m used to that. It was a good show, tracing his career from a couple of early paintings at age 17 (which were reassuringly stiff and clumsy) to his late [...]
One Day In History and At Home In Renaissance Italy
17 October 2006 – 3:46 pm
I think this is quite a fun idea — One Day In History.
Make history with us on 17 October by taking part in the biggest blog in history.
‘One Day in History’ is a one off opportunity for you to join in a mass blog for the national record. We want as many people as possible [...]
Modigliani at the RA
29 September 2006 – 10:37 pm
I went to see Modigliani and his models at the Royal Academy today. In a sense, there was nothing very surprising about the exhibition since Amedeo Modigliani only really seems to have painted rather stylised portaits and very pink nudes, including this one of Joan Collins from 1917:
It (she?) looked pinker in real life.
The stylised [...]
Grayson Perry on contemporary art
27 August 2006 – 10:58 pm
This is from the Perry autobiography, when he’s been accepted at Portsmouth Poly to do an Art foundation course:
I thought I was OK as an artist. I knew I was able but I had no sense that I was especially gifted. I don’t think a gift is apparent at nineteen in a contemporary artist. Contemporary [...]
‘Rebels and Martyrs’ at the National Gallery
27 August 2006 – 9:13 pm
I went to Rebels and Martyrs at the National today. Note to curators: white writing on mid-grey walls is just fucking annoying. I started wishing I’d picked up one of the folders with large-print writing for the poorly sighted because I was having to squint to read the info next to the paintings.
Having vented that [...]
Grayson Perry: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl
26 August 2006 – 7:17 pm
I’ve just read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl, which is the autobiography of Grayson Perry, the artist who won the Turner Prize in 2003. I quite like his art, but the main reason I bought the book was that I enjoy his columns for the Times (if that link doesn’t work, [...]
‘Rembrandt & Co: Dealing in Masterpieces’ at DPG
20 August 2006 – 5:13 pm
‘Rembrandt & Co’ is on at the moment at Dulwich Picture Gallery, as part of the 400th birthday celebrations. Rembrandt’s 400th birthday was July 15th. To quote them:
Dulwich Picture Gallery explores, for the first time, the story of one of the most important art dealerships in 17th-century Amsterdam. The exhibition will show 19 Rembrandts from [...]
The V&A online
9 August 2006 – 12:47 pm
The V&A seems to have put lots more of their stuff online since I last looked, and it’s all searchable. I wondered if there was a photo of the terracotta Virgin Mary and Child I wrote a poem about a few years ago, but it seems not. Lots of other good stuff though, like this [...]
Dada, modernism and suchlike
1 August 2006 – 12:50 pm
I seem to have gone a bit link-happy over the past 24 hours, producing a daily links post which is far too long. So I’ll single out one of them in case you miss it: Charles Simic on Dada.
I always think of continental Europe as being the natural home of modernism. The Great War, the [...]
17th century fly-by
7 July 2006 – 2:16 pm
A cool thing from the people at Digitally Distributed Environments:
See the whole panorama here.
Rembrandt’s Eyes by Simon Schama
3 July 2006 – 12:41 pm
I’ve only read two books by Schama; Citizens, his book about the French Revolution, and this biography of Rembrandt. Both have been excellent. They’re also quite hard work simply because he’s so thorough. Thoroughness is no doubt a virtue in a historian, but it does make for large books. Rembrandt’s Eyes is frankly too large [...]
Kandinsky at the Tate
29 June 2006 – 3:04 pm
‘Wassily Kandinsky’; what a great name. Tate Modern currently has an exhibition Kandinsky: The Path To Abstraction, which traces Kandinsky’s development from a painter of Fauvist/post-Impressionist type landscapes to a ‘pure’ abstract painter. It’s confined to the early part of his career, but then I wasn’t very familiar with his work beforehand, so I didn’t [...]
Constable at the Tate
19 June 2006 – 2:42 pm
Tate Britain currently has an exhibition Constable: The Great Landscapes. It focusses on the ‘five-footers’, which are landscapes five foot across and include his most famous works like The Haywain and Salisbury Cathedral From The Meadows. Not only have they collected togther all of the paintings, but also nearly all of the full-size oil sketches [...]
FSotW: Rake art
18 June 2006 – 8:16 am
Rake art, photographed from the air with a kite (click on the picture to see the whole set):
© Lenny. Via the always-excellent BLDGBLOG.