Tag Archive | exhibitions
Edward Burra: an utterly unique vision
Back in January I wrote an appreciation of the work of Edward Burra, inspired partly by Andrew Graham-Dixon’s excellent film on the artist broadcast in the autumn and partly by regret at not being able to get to the first major retrospective of Burra’s work for 25 years at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester. However, last […]
The Art Books of Henri Matisse
It’s been on at the Walker since last October, but last week I finally got round to seeing the exhibition of art books by Henri Matisse that comprises 63 original illustrations with text from four of Matisse’s most significant art books, including Jazz (1947), perhaps the most celebrated artist’s books in the history of modern […]
The genius of illumination
When I was in London recently I went along to see the British Library exhibition Royal Manuscripts: The Genius of Illumination. I’d never been to the Library before, despite it being only a stone’s throw from Euston, and I wanted to see this exhibition after having watched Illuminations: The Private Lives of Medieval Kings, the BBC4 series presented […]
In Dickens’ footsteps (2): Dickens and London exhibition
…the great heart of London throbs in its Giant breast. Wealth and beggary, vice and virtue, guilt and innocence, repletion and the direst hunger, all treading on each other and crowding together, are gathered round it. Draw but a little circle above the clustering house-tops, and you shall have within its space, everything with its […]
Lucian Freud Portraits: Painted Life
The geometry of innocent flesh on the bone – Bob Dylan It was to be his last painting. As always, in his inimitable style, after a cursory charcoal sketch he went straight to paint, working from the centre of the canvas outwards. It was a double portrait, another of the many that he had painted […]
David Hockney: A Bigger Picture
We had bought our tickets weeks ago: a good move, since David Hockney’s show, A Bigger Picture, at the Royal Academy is now sold out for its entire run. And show it is: this realisation hit me when I entered the gallery devoted to the arrival of spring. This huge room brings to mind Hockney’s […]
Two paintings, one near-forgotten Liverpool artist
Walking back from a hospital appointment this morning, I called in at the University’s Victoria Gallery to take another look at two of my favourite paintings currently out of storage and on display. One is Lucian Freud’s portrait of Harry Diamond, Paddington Interior, painted in 1970, and the other, facing it on the adjacent wall, […]
Vermeer: Women, Secrets and Silence
Vermeer’s Women: Secrets and Silence has been showing since October at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. I wrote in my previous post about the Edward Burra exhibition that I probably won’t get to see - this Vermeer show is another. It finishes this week and has been hugely popular, with crowds packing into the small exhibition space […]
Edward Burra: Hastings to Harlem and back
I confess that when I first encountered Edward Burra’s vibrant paintings of African-Americans languidly hanging out on the streets and in the the jazz clubs of Prohibition New York I assumed that Burra was black – a member of the Harlem Renaissance, perhaps. I couldn’t have been more wrong, as I later discovered. Burra was […]
