Exhibitions
The exquisite pottery of Lucie Rie
Lucie Rie had no time for high-flown talk about the art of ceramics. ‘I like to make pots – but…
How two Dutchmen introduced marine art to Britain
In March 1675 the Keeper of His Majesty’s Lodgings at Greenwich received an order for ‘Three pairs of shutters for…
Thoroughly unsettling, never simplistic: Mike Nelson – Extinction Beckons, at the Hayward Gallery, reviewed
You enter through the gift shop. Mike Nelson has turned the Hayward Gallery upside down and back to front for…
Humanity, clarity and warmth: Alice Neel, at the Barbican Art Gallery, reviewed
If you want to be taken seriously as a contemporary painter, paint big. ‘Blotter’, the picture that won the 34-year-old…
The musical émigrés from Nazi-Europe who shaped postwar Britain
Halfway up the stairs to the Royal College of Music’s exhibition Music, Migration & Mobility is a map of NW3,…
Unmissable: Donatello – Sculpting the Renaissance, at the V&A, reviewed
‘Donatello is the real hero of Florentine sculpture’, so Antony Gormley has proclaimed (hugely though he admires Michelangelo). It’s hard…
The county that inspired a whole way of painting: Sussex Landscape, at Pallant House, reviewed
In a national vote on which county’s landscape best embodies Englishness, every county would presumably vote for itself. But when…
A crash course in all things Hispanic: RA’s Spain and the Hispanic World reviewed
‘Spain must be much more interesting than Liverpool,’ decided the 12-year-old Archer M. Huntington after buying a book on Spanish…
The grisliest images are the earliest: Bearing Witness? Violence and Trauma on Paper, at the Fitzwilliam Museum, reviewed
‘Graphic’ scenes of violence are now associated with film, but the word betrays an older ancestry. The first mass media…
Other artists’ still lifes may be showier, but none are as companionable as Giorgio Morandi’s
There are various staples of still life painting, some symbolic, some not. Skulls and musical instruments suggest the transience of…
Did this Lithuanian invent abstraction? M.K. Ciurlionis, at Dulwich Picture Gallery, reviewed
Trivia question: name a famous Lithuanian. Google came up with four I’d never heard of and one I had: Hannibal…
Brueghel’s peasant paintings were the D.C. Thomson comics of the 17th century
‘Psst! Someone’s coming!’ the skinny man with the ragged breeches and the bandaged jaw warns his fat companion out of…
Mesmerising and eye-opening: Courtauld Gallery’s Fuseli and the Modern Woman reviewed
It’s not until you see this exhibition of drawings by Henry Fuseli that you realise that most artists have really…
Does gender matter? Making Modernism, at the Royal Academy, reviewed
The catalogue to Making Modernism opens with an acknowledgment from the Royal Academy’s first female president, Rebecca Salter, that in…
The careers of artists like Carolee Schneemann and Stephen Cripps are unthinkable today
During the 1964 debut of Carolee Schneemann’s ‘Meat Joy’ in Paris, a man in the audience tried to throttle the…
Thrilling: Hieroglyphs – unlocking ancient Egypt, at the British Museum, reviewed
‘Poor old Mornington Crescent, I feel sorry for it with this highly made-up neighbour blocking the view it had enjoyed,’…
The genius of Cezanne
Pity the poor curators of major exhibitions struggling to find fresh takes on famous masters. The curators of Tate Modern’s…
Do we need another Lucian Freud exhibition?
Do we need another Lucian Freud exhibition? After years of exposure to his paintings of naked bodies posed like casualties…
Brilliant and distinctive but also relentless: William Kentridge, at the RA, reviewed
William Kentridge’s work has a way of sticking in the mind. I can remember all my brief encounters with it,…
Biomorphic forms that tempt the viewer to cop a feel: Maria Bartuszova, at Tate Modern, reviewed
Art is a fundamentally childish activity: painters dream up images and sculptors play with stuff. It was while playing with…
Fresh and dreamy: Edward Lear, at Ikon Gallery, reviewed
‘It seems to me that I have to choose between 2 extremes of affection for nature… English, or Southern… The…
When Lee Miller met Picasso
During the liberation of Paris in August 1944, the photographer Lee Miller made her way to Picasso’s studio on rue…
Promethean grandeur: Maurice Broomfield – Industrial Sublime, at the V&A, reviewed
When Maurice Broomfield left school at the age of 15, he took a job at the Rolls-Royce factory, bending copper…
Guston is treated with contempt: Philip Guston Now reviewed
Philip Guston is hard to dislike. The most damning critique levied against the canonical mid-century American painter is that he…
A victory of the imaginatively crafted over the conceptual: In the Black Fantastic reviewed
‘These artists are offering other ways of seeing,’ says Ekow Eshun, curator of In the Black Fantastic, and from the…
