Advocating life drawing at art school is a deeply conservative and reactionary position. Arguments in favour of life drawing usually fall into one of two camps (or sometimes both). I am utterly unconvinced by both. The first, and weaker, argument contends that it is necessary to learn the rules before you can break them. This… Continue reading Martin Lang: Against life drawing
Tag: Picasso
Laura Gascoigne: Crime Without Punishment
In May, policemen with shovels moved in again on 79-year-old mobster Robert Gentile’s Connecticut ranch. It’s the third time they’ve searched the property and the second time they’ve dug it up in the hope of finding the 13 masterpieces, including Rembrandt’s Storm on the Sea of Galilee, stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in… Continue reading Laura Gascoigne: Crime Without Punishment
The way we are now – why ‘avant garde’ is now an obsolete term
The Times – God bless its little cotton socks – has just been celebrating the triumphal return of the 1990s as a creative force. “Suddenly contemporary art” it crows, “was part of popular culture. The Royal Academy’s landmark Sensation show in 1997 was a turning point.” It was so indeed, but not exactly in the… Continue reading The way we are now – why ‘avant garde’ is now an obsolete term
Selling England by the pound
Today John Constable’s The Lock, painted in 1824, sold at Christie’s for £22.4 million. In the current art market of silly prices some lucky person got the bargain of their lives. Let us hope the picture will be placed in a museum, where people might enjoy it, instead of disappearing into a Swiss warehouse as… Continue reading Selling England by the pound