Tag: Critic

Nature Morte, Nature Vivante: Cézanne & Morandi in London

Travelling through a still, dead, January landscape to a wintery London to be met with the lively, cicada-filled warmth that radiates from the canvases of Paul Cézanne is a restorative experience. Whilst the country lies in its dormant state, still and unchanging, there is a deep joy to be found in surrounding oneself with the fluttering, flicking leaves, the sultry mistral breezes, and the quiet lapping of diminutive Mediterranean waves that Cézanne mastered in his late age. The Art Institute of Chicago had this large retrospective last year before the works were shipped to the Tate Modern where they currently constitute the winter ‘blockbuster show’ but, whilst my first intention was the review and record this major exhibition, it was a much smaller, quieter show that I saw a day later which brought a certain clarity to the particular way of seeing both artists explore.

The Turner Prize: An Obituary

Reports of the Turner Prize’s longevity are greatly exaggerated. The fatal blow to Britain’s previously vaunted, and often controversial, contemporary art medal came in 2019 when the four nominees demanded to be recognised as an impromptu ‘collective’ and thus all claim the prize money as a group. Provocative gestures have been the bread and butter of the Turner since its inception in 1984, however, this ‘collective’ decision came in for much criticism as it rather defeated the point of the award and its enormous prize pool. The function of the prize is not only to highlight interesting and innovative artists at work in the UK but also to grant the winner a windfall of money with which to support their future career. In short, it is a prize for a breakthrough artist, an opportunity for their contribution to the culture of these islands to be brought to the wider attention of the public and a showing of criticism and debate in the arts. There being one winner is an important element of the exercise, it demonstrates that not all art is born equal.

A Welshman in Naples: Thomas Jones & the Reason for Art

...In 1763 another young Welshman, fresh from abandoning an Oxford degree in Theology, arrived in London to seek tutelage from Wilson. Even today the London-Welsh club together like ex-pats the world over, so it is no surprise that Wilson appears to have warmed to his fellow Welshman immediately and took him on as an apprentice. Thomas Jones (the name is…not unusual), was born in the wilds of Mid Wales in 1742 to a landowner of middling status, by 1765, under the guidance of Wilson, Jones was already exhibiting landscapes in the ‘grand manner’ of Claude and Poussin at the Society of Arts (which three years later would become the famous Royal Academy of Arts).'...

Review: ‘The Making of Rodin’, Tate Modern

★★★☆☆: After more than a year of semi-solitary existence, interspersed with the occasional out-door meeting with select family and friends, the appearance of other people has become increasingly alien. And with the government mandated distance to be maintained at all times, the usual interactions of hands and arms and the close-up reading of each other's faces have become not only a distant memory but even, at times, a life threatening action. And so, it was a delight to find that my first exhibition visit out of the trap after the (hopefully) final lockdown was one filled with such humanity and tactility. 

Art in the Time of Coronavirus

...In the face of a cacophony of disaster, works of art can have an appealing quality - they are their own contained universes, created from, but often unaffected by, our own. The finite edges of a painting, the constancy of a sculpture, or the familiar reproduction of symphonic notes, offer a fixed point against which to observe and contextualise our own moment of flux...

London Stations: Part One – Paddington, Euston & Waterloo

London has what must be the most varied and exciting set of railways termini of any city in the world, one would expect not less of the capital of the country that gave birth to the modern railway. Thanks to foresighted Victorian planning laws, they all sit in a ring around the centre of London, they make no ugly scars through the urban fabric but rather stand as the old gates of The City used to, each with their own character and each with its own unique purposes. For E.M. Forster each possessed, in its architectural fabric, the latent spirit of those far away destinations to which their rails stretched. 110 years after Forster’s ode to these palaces of arrival and departure, from the age of steam to the age of electric, what spirit, if any, do London’s stations still possess?

Ashes to Ashes: Fires, Cathedrals, and Resurrections

On the 11th June 1144 Abbot Suger of the Abbey of St Denis, Paris, gathered the bishops of France for the dedication of his newly built choir and east end. This marked a sea-change in architecture, gone was the heavy solidarity of the Romanesque and in came the lightness and delicacy of the Gothic. In the years after the meeting of the bishops, many of their home cathedrals would burn down only to rise from the ashes in the new gothic style of Suger’s St Denis.

Nicolas Poussin: The Unresolved Cadence

Artists fall in and out of fashion all the time, that is the way of the canon, an artist who has been admired in equal measure from their own time to the present day is a rare thing indeed. Nicolas Poussin (1594 - 1665) is one such artist. Lorded by his contemporary Bernini as the only French artist who who really mattered, he won posthumous favour with both Ingres and Delacroix (possibly the only thing on which those two agreed), as well as Cezanne who said he only truly understood himself after spending time with a Poussin. Even the wunderkind of Modernism, Pablo Picasso, was known to copy Poussin’s works.