Tag: Modern Art

The Last Day: The National Gallery on the Eve of Lockdown

The National Gallery has been part of my life for a long time now, from the excitement of boyhood day trips up to London with my father to the hours spent in each room as a student, those grand halls on Trafalgar Square have been a reassuring constant all my life. So, when the Coronavirus outbreak arrived and the lamps went out in cultural institutions all over Europe, it was only a matter of time before Britain's artistic treasure trove was locked away. 

Review: Léon Spilliaert at The Royal Academy

★★★★★: Belgium, land of beer, chocolate, charming medieval towns and cosy city breaks. If this is your idea of the diminutive Benelux nation then Léon Spilliaert is here to make you think again. Prepare to be drawn into an intoxicating world of insomniac melancholy that will forever change the way you see the home of Tintin and waffles.

Review: Picasso on Paper at the Royal Academy.

★★★★☆: Works on paper can often be seen as room-filler when a gallery can’t quite muster enough ‘proper works’, paintings and sculptures, to fill their space. They are normally objects that exist primarily in the realm of art historians, tools for them to unlock the secrets of an artist’s grander works. However, in the eternal struggle to find an original angle on that godfather of modernism, Pablo Picasso, the RA have dedicated an enormous show just for his works on and using paper. 

Review: Gauguin’s Portraits at The National Gallery

★★★☆☆: 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. 

Review: ‘Cutting Edge: Modernist British Printmaking’ at Dulwich

★★★★★: 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.

Review: Édouard Vuillard at The Holburne

★★★☆☆: 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.