Reviews
Van Gogh's Letters: The Artist Speaks, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
The Arts of Islam, Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris
Van Gogh was a prolific letter writer who illustrated his correspondence with sketches for fully-fledged pictures still to come
Inside Reviews
European Fields: Hans van der Meer, Host Gallery, London
Sunday, 8 November 2009
Rooney who? This is European football's grass roots exposed
Jann Haworth, Art Gallery, Wolverhampton (Rated 3/ 5 )
Tuesday, 3 November 2009
Pop Art given a good stuffing
Wild Thing: Epstein, Gaudier-Brzeska, Gill Royal Academy, London
Sunday, 1 November 2009
Of three pioneering sculptors celebrated in a stirring show, it is the one who died young who is the star
The Artist's Studio, Compton Verney, Warwickshire
Wednesday, 28 October 2009
Some room for improvement
The Sacred Made Real: Spanish Painting and Sculpture 1600-1700, National Gallery, London
Sunday, 25 October 2009
Sacred images pull more punches in two dimensions than in three, as an exhibition both absorbing and repellent powerfully shows
Yinka Shonibare: Willy Loman – The Rise and Fall, Stephen Friedman Gallery, London (Rated 1/ 5 )
Thursday, 22 October 2009
It's an old adage, but it's worth repeating: a human being looks taller, and gets to see further, when he climbs up on another man's shoulders. What can this possibly mean when applied to the practice of artists? It's quite simple. When you make a work, you give it added gravitas by claiming that it refers to, or incorporates elements from, great works of the past. They needn't be works by visual artists alone. They could be by writers too. Samuel Beckett, for example, has been flogged to death in this respect. As a consequence you half-suggest – it is really super-subtle – that you are claiming some kind of parity of achievement, or perhaps that by this simple fact of incorporation of elements from the past, you are even surpassing what you have borrowed from or alluded to.
Beatles to Bowie: the 60s exposed, National Portrait Gallery, London (Rated 4/ 5 )
Tuesday, 20 October 2009
The Sixties? It was the decade when popular music in Britain threw off the shackles of America, became shaped and defined by photographic imagery as never before, and when the worlds of pop and fashion eagerly jumped into bed together. This comprehensive show at the National Portrait Gallery, which looks at Britpop year by year, gives us many of those defining images by Beaton, Bailey and others, and much else too – umpteen examples of the new pop and fashion magazines that flourished in that decade; sheet music; archival film of such pioneering TV shows as Ready, Steady, Go!; record covers, and all this to the accompaniment of the music of that decade.
Maharaja: the splendour of India's Royal Courts, V&A, London
Monday, 19 October 2009
It would be difficult to find a more visually ravishing show than this one in the whole of London. The objects – from palm leaf fronds on the end of tapering silver stems to cool an emperor's brow, to the silver accoutrements of an elephant; from gorgeous Indian miniatures showing shapely young female royals depending, languorously, from the end of a kite, to paintings of tremendous royal processions that seem to go on and on and on, at such a languid pace, until we run out of wall space – are dazzling, and the setting, from first to last, coyly razzmatazz.
Ed Ruscha: 50 years of painting, Hayward Gallery, London
Sunday, 18 October 2009
Words and images collide in an amazing half-century of work by a master of the modern consumer age
Miroslaw Balka, Tate Modern, London
Sunday, 18 October 2009
Confused people in the dark need to think outside the box
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FIVE BEST EXHIBITIONS
The Sacred Made Real
(National Gallery, London)
Spanish painting and sculpture from the 17th century: super-real images of Christ and his saints, with glinting tears and rivers of blood. Spellbinding.
(020-7747 2885) to 24 Jan
Angels of Anarchy
(Manchester Art Gallery)
Frida Kahlo, Meret Oppenheim, Dorothea Tanning, Lee Miller, Claude Cahoon: mid-20th-century women artists and their relationship to surrealism.
(0161-235 8888) to 10 Jan
Exhibition #1
(Museum of Everything, London)
A marvellous collection of outsider and folk art: strange worlds, intense craft, with Henry Darger, Madge Gill and many more.
(020-7957 5325) to 20 Dec
Sculpture in Painting
(Henry Moore Institute, Leeds)
What happens when one visual art swallows another? Examples of paintings that depict sculptures, from Titian via Hogarth to Vuillard, de Chirico and on.
(0113-246 7467) to 10 Jan
Wild Thing
(Royal Academy, London)
Jacob Epstein, Eric Gill, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska: three avant-garde Modernist sculptors pursue stone carving and pagan energies.
(020-7300 8000) to 24 Jan