I went to the Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition at the Natural History Museum yesterday, which is always worth a look.
Apart from the fact that there are loads of great photos, there’s the fun of deciding whether the judges have made the right decisions. I’m always a bit disappointed when they choose a portrait [...]
Posts tagged with ‘exhibitions’
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Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition
1 December 2007 – 11:23 am
Renaissance Siena at the National Gallery
13 November 2007 – 10:23 pm
I went to the Renaissance Siena: Art for a City exhibition today. It’s late C15th and early C16th art. I gathered from the audio-guide that by then, Siena had already had its golden age, and was dropping behind places like Florence and Rome as an artistic centre.
So the artists in the show—Matteo di Giovanni, Francesco [...]
Georg Baselitz at the Royal Academy
6 November 2007 – 4:36 pm
Baselitz is a German painter and sculptor. I thought that I knew nothing about him at all, but when I got to the exhibition several of the paintings turned out to be familiar.
Baselitz was born in East Germany, his father had been a member of the Nazi party, and he was studying at an art [...]
Big trees at Kew
31 October 2007 – 1:38 pm
I went to Kew Gardens to see the Henry Moore sculptures. Which were OK, I guess. It’s not easy to display such a lot of very large sculptures—28 in all—but Kew is big enough that there’s plenty of room for them, so it’s quite a good match. I wandered around desultorily looking at them but [...]
Visiting the crack
21 October 2007 – 9:08 am
Last week I went to see the crack at Tate Modern, which is the latest big artwork in the Turbine Hall. You can read what the Tate thinks it’s about here. I found it less impressive in reality than I expected. I’d heard about it before I went, and it looked exactly as I expected [...]
China, the Olympics, and antiquity diplomacy
28 September 2007 – 12:10 am
I was just watching Question Time on the BBC, and the panel were asked what ‘we’ should do about Burma. Simon Schama was on the panel, and he suggested that, if China was stubborn about blocking any action via the UN, we should have a mass boycott of the Beijing Olympics, since Burma is a [...]
‘Sacred’ at the British Library
19 September 2007 – 4:03 pm
I went yesterday to see Sacred at the British Library. I nearly missed it; the exhibition closes at the weekend. I’m glad I didn’t, as it was extraordinary.
It’s an exhibition of sacred texts from Islam, Christianity and Judaism, and the selection is seriously impressive. For example, the show includes the Lindisfarne Gospels and a bit [...]
‘Crafting Beauty in Modern Japan’ at the BM
29 July 2007 – 4:08 pm
I went to see Crafting Beauty in Modern Japan at the British Museum last week.
The exhibition presents works by members of the Japan Art Crafts Association (Nihon Kōgeikai), many of them designated ‘Living National Treasures’ in Japan, a title conferred by the Japanese government on exemplary individuals who carry on Japanese traditions.
In other words, it [...]
Dutch Portraits at the National Gallery
20 July 2007 – 10:46 pm
I went to see Dutch Portraits: The Age of Rembrandt and Frans Hals yesterday. It was pleasantly quiet; I guess the prospect of lots and lots of paintings of men in black suits with white ruffs and little pointy beards doesn’t produce a frisson of excitement in your average Londoner.
And from that point of view, [...]
Anthony Gormley at the Hayward
11 July 2007 – 2:48 pm
Last week I went to Blind Light, the Gormley show at the Hayward. Gormley must be the third most famous artist in Britain, I should think*, particularly on the back of two spectacular public works: Angel of the North and Another Place.
For those of you who don’t know his work—foreigners and the like—he has [...]
‘Surreal Things’ at the V&A
10 June 2007 – 10:17 pm
Last week I went to ‘Surreal Things: Surrealism and Design‘ at the V&A. It explores the influence of Surrealist art on design, and demonstrates how quickly surrealist imagery was recycled as a design style; initially in very chic and expensive contexts and then in mass-market commercial design. And demonstrated in the process that it’s a [...]
Self-Portraits from the Uffizi
30 May 2007 – 5:21 pm
The full title of this exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery is Artists’ Self-Portraits from the Uffizi. But I don’t think it’s overly pedantic to point out that self-portraits are pretty much always by and of artists. The Uffizi has a collection of 1600 self-portraits, apparently; 50 of them are currently in Dulwich, arranged in [...]
‘Canaletto in England’ at Dulwich Picture Gallery
12 March 2007 – 11:31 am
I almost forgot to blog about the Canaletto exhibition at DPG which I went to on Friday. As the title suggests, it focusses on Canaletto’s time in England. I knew he’d painted a few paintings of London, but I was surprised to learn that he lived here for nine years.
Not surprisingly, the show has been [...]
Gilbert and George at Tate Modern
2 March 2007 – 5:08 pm
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 [...]
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 [...]