★★★☆☆: Gauguin has been out in the cold for a while now. At this juncture in the twenty-first century, to praise a upper-middle class man who abandoned his family of six to become a painter and who proceeded to fetishise the culture of Polynesia to the point of engaging in sexual relations with minors (in western eyes) and fictionalising their society, seems counter to the direction in which the study of art has been moving.
★★★★☆: 'I like Antony Gormley. I think you would be hard pushed to find someone who didn’t - at the very least they’d be indifferent towards him. And that, in a nutshell, is the issue...'
★★★★★: In these days of uncertainty and crisis, it is refreshing to find a show that explodes with quite so much joy and optimism as this display of modernist British prints at Dulwich. Springing forth from the anxiety ridden 1930’s, the bright colours and geometric forms of these works speak of new hope for a twentieth century Britain and make this exhibition one of the must-see shows of 2019.
★★★☆☆: It is no coincidence that this show arrives at the end of Tate Modern’s recent Pierre Bonnard retrospective, after all, Vuillard and Bonnard were contemporaries, friends and colleagues. This show represents the Holburne Museum’s attempt at jumping onto the French post-impressionist bandwagon, and, whilst it doesn’t fall entirely short of the mark, one feels it could have done with a little extra thought.
A shift in thought almost unrivaled in the development of European civilisation, Romanticism spread its way through every form of culture - sometimes like a delicate mist, seeping into the psyche, other times bursting forth with volcanic vigour. Today we still live in the hangover of this revolution of thought and, with its developments incorporated into our quotidian existence, it is easy to overlook the seismic influence it had and has on the way we think, act, and create.
Morgan Haigh 