If you’re thinking of committing an art crime, now’s your moment. In June budgetary pressures forced the ‘temporary’ closure of the Met’s Art & Antiques Squad and the transfer of expert staff to the Grenfell Tower fire investigation, and there’s no knowing when, if ever, they’ll be back. So it’s bye-bye blue light, hello green light to thieves, fakers, fraudsters […]
WHOLESALE GRATIFICATION In the last issue I noted the gradual but relentless erosion of space allocated to historical pictures in Tate Britain. This contraction will now accelerate because the collection is to be re-hung, yet again, on this occasion thematically – a policy undoubtedly designed to demonstrate the State Art Commandment that all roads shall lead to the Usual Suspects. […]
ALEXANDER ADAMS rehearses recent arguments concerning freedom of expression before arriving at his own conclusion. “One person with a belief is equal to a force of 99 who have only interests.” JOHN STUART MILL On February 14th, 2015 an Islamist gunman attacked a café in Copenhagen where a debate on free speech was being held. […]
New York City, home to great collections of art, is never short of key works by important artists to measure against one another. Autumn 2011, three displays have coincided to allow people to compare the skills of a modern master with those of a predecessor who influenced him. Willem de Kooning (1904-1997) revered J.A.D. Ingres (1780-1867) for both his devotion […]
The effects of Liverpool’s time as City of Culture in 2008 are still becoming apparent as various building projects reach completion. Liverpool has many excellent museums, to which number the Museum of Liverpool is due to be added. My visit to Liverpool was before the museum’s opening on July 19th, so I made do with two significant shows which will […]
How often have we seen – of late – exhibitions of Modern masters with didactic subtitles? These subtitles tell us why we should visit this exhibition when we have seen so many on this particular artist before. It is the subtitle that gives us the curatorial slant. What happens is not that famous artists get “played out” but that curators […]
An article about Graham Sutherland’s bequest of art to Wales (The Jackdaw, no. 90) raised a number of points which further research has – partially – answered. To recap: Sutherland donated work to a purpose-formed Graham Sutherland Trust (the “Trust”) in 1976, which displayed the art in a gallery housed in Picton Castle, Pembrokeshire. When the cost of maintaining the […]
Most YBAs achieved prominence by recasting genuine avant-garde art in a palatable commercial form, influenced by advertising and pop culture, and served up to a credulous public largely ignorant of the original sources of the art. (Something Julian Stallabrass discusses in his book High Art Lite.) Jenny Saville was seen as one exception by virtue of the facts she studied […]
If you have heard of Belgian painter Paul Delvaux (1897-1994) then it is likely to have been in connection with Surrealism. He gets a couple of illustrations in thematic surveys of Surrealism, rarely more. Unless you locate a specialist publication on the artist, it is hard to get an overview of his development. Delvaux is poorly represented in British public […]
The house-museums of two Belgian masters of the 19th Century shed light on artistic and social concerns of the era. As case studies they exemplify dominant thematic trends in both halves of that century – Romanticism in the first half and Realism in the second. Antoine Wiertz (1806-1865) was born to an impoverished family in Dinant, Wallonia (later Belgium). After […]
