Reviews Archives

John Singer Sargent A Magician Of Light Dulwich Picture Gallery

This intimate exhibition of eighty watercolours from the Anglo-American artist John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) has opened at Dulwich Picture Gallery.

Fahrelnissa Zeid: In Pursuit of the Exotic Tate Modern – Edward Lucie-Smith

I confess I had a few reservations about the Fahrelnissa Zeid retrospective now at Tate Modern.

Richard Smith Abstraction On The Periphery Of Recall By Edward Lucie-Smith

The small exhibition of work by Richard Smith currently at the Flowers Gallery in Cork Street offers, among other things, a demonstration of just how drastically once huge reputations can fade. Smith died last year, at the age of 84.

Royal Academy Annual Summer Exhibition Where Old Meets? – Edward Lucie-Smith

Right now, in terms of the shows, it’s offering the public, the Royal Academy is on a roll. There’s been one great, news-making exhibition after another, under the guidance of its Director of Exhibitions, Tim Marlow, who came to them from White Cube. Those whom Munnings would have dismissed as lunatics have taken over the […]

London Art Exhibition Picks June 2017 By Paul Carey -Kent

Paul Carey-Kent Offers Artlyst his choice of the best London Art Exhibitions to see in June 2017

Sgt Pepper Reimagined At 50 Liverpool Creates A Festival To Remember

Sgt Pepper At 50 is the 50th anniversary of the original album by The Beatles and through this festival has become a newly ‘re-imagined album’ of artworks, theater, music and dance pieces.

HOKUSAI A Most Influential Alien By Edward Lucie-Smith

Until the Modern epoch, and indeed right up to the present day, Hokusai was by far the most influential non-European artist to impact European art.

British Modern Masters Explored In New York Exhibition At Rosenberg & Co

Everyone in Britain was torn apart by World War ll. Artists were hungry, dislocated and like everyone else had lost their sense of safety and home. Rosenberg & Co.’s current exhibition ‘British Modern Masters’ presents the artistic release of the emotional build up of what British artists had seen or perhaps done during the war.

Wayne Thiebaud Beneath The Icing On The Cake – Edward Lucie-Smith

The now very senior Wayne Thiebaud (b. 1920) has often found himself classified as a Pop artist, largely because a large part of his subject matter – still lifes of commonplace objects (in his case often items of mass-produced food) – overlaps with the kind of things that members of the American Pop movement chose to depict.

Richard Deacon: Accidents Will Happen – Major New Exhibition Middelheim Museum Antwerp

Sometimes the best art is born out of a mistake. It is this type of accidental trial and error that keeps the Turner Prize winning artist Richard Deacon on his toes, as a practitioner of fresh ideas and innovations.

Philip Guston Laughing At Nixon While Living With Trump – Edward Lucie-Smith

Hauser & Wirth have demonstrated an impeccable sense of timing by presenting their Richard Milhouse Nixon show, ‘Laughter in the Dark, Drawings from 1971 & 1975’, first seen in their New York gallery in 2016 – that is to say actually before Donald Trump won the American presidency in December of that year.

An Intimate Look At Photo London By Paul Carey Kent

Paul Carey-Kent has sifted through Photo London the UK’s leading photography fair to put together this themed pick of what caught his eye. The most impressive Photo London yet runs 18-21 May. Art Fairs are not by their general nature intimate experiences, but photography as a medium is certainly capable of intimacy. So it was interesting to hunt down the latter within the former…

Photo London Returns For Edition Three With A Swagger

Photo London returns for its third edition with a swagger this year, confidently asserting its position as a premier international photo event. Like it or not, it has become the event around which all photography in London now revolves, and in this edition, it goes someway towards justifying its gravitational pull.

Phyllida Barlow Great Henges Bright Coloured Forms Venice Biennale – Sue Hubbard

I remember, some time ago, a film in which a young interviewer asked Louise Bourgeois, then in her 90s, what it was like to become famous at her advanced age. The tiny, bird-like figure replied acerbically: “I ‘ave been ‘eer all along.” Phyllida Barlow has, also, been here all along.

Venice Biennale 57 From An Artist’s Perspective Hedley Roberts Picks Twelve

Artist Hedley Roberts Picks Twelve of the best from the`57th Venice Biennale

Giacometti An Artist Of Distance Not Intimacy By Edward Lucie-Smith

Tate Modern’s new Giacometti show, following hot on the heels of a recent show dedicated to the same artist at the National Portrait Gallery, is nevertheless welcome for the comprehensive view it gives of one of the major stars of the Modern Movement.

Pavilion of Humanity Where Objection is Exhibited At The Venice Biennale

I had the privilege to share this incredible Art journey with Michal Cole.

Kazem Hakimi: Chip Shop Photographer’s Breakthrough Show Reveals The Real Oxford

Artlyst has attended Modern Art Oxford, for the opening of ‘Kazem Hakimi: Portraits from a Chip Shop’, a fascinating and very personal exploration of a local community.

Mat Collishaw: Forms Of Illusion And Truth By Sue Hubbard

Desire is at the basis of most human behaviour from sex and procreation to the pursuit of beauty and death. According to Freud our psyches see-saw between the two conflicting points of Eros and Thanatos. Mat Collishaw has always been interested in origins and in what goes on behind the veil of social givens and norms.

Picasso As Minotaur: Gagosian London By Edward Lucie-Smith

The Picasso: Minotaurs and Matadors show now on view at Gagosian Grosvenor Hill neatly pips Tate Modern to the post. On 8th May Tate Modern unveils Picasso 1932 – Love, Fame Tragedy, its first ever solo show devoted to this most celebrated of all Modern Movement artists.

Richard Long At Houghton Hall Norfolk An Inspired Pairing

Richard Long, the four-times Turner Prize nominee and one-time winner (1989), is one of the leading figures of conceptual and land art. His latest exhibition at Houghton Hall in Norfolk is an inspired pairing. The location flawlessly blends his work in terms of scale, locality and sentiment. Each piece is given space to breathe and […]

David LaChapelle – Materialistic Beauty And Everlasting Youth – First Venice Solo Show

Lost+ Found is David LaChapelle’s first solo show in Venice. The exhibition expanding over four floors presents a survey of LaChapelle’s work from his early career till today.

Michelangelo Plaster Casts More Convincing Than Sebastiano – National Gallery – Edward Lucie-Smith

The current Michelangelo & Sebastiano show at the National Gallery here in London is very much the kind of exhibition that one feels a great institution ought to be doing: spaciously presented, tirelessly scholarly, you couldn’t wish for a better introduction to these major names in Italian Renaissance art.

Henryk Hetflaisz – An Illumined Brush Captured In Time

Henryk Hetflaisz’s latest collection of photographs elevates the viewer into the realm of mystic form and enduring light.

The Selfie – Narcissism Or Serious Form Of Art? By Edward Lucie-Smith

From Selfie to Self-Expression at the Saatchi Gallery represents a return to form, after a recent series of dead-on-arrival exhibitions held in this space. It’s good to be able to say welcome back.

Queer Art At Tate – My Take By Edward Lucie-Smith

The hosannas are already ringing out for Tate Britain’s new show Queer British Art, 1861-1967.

Ellsworth Kelly – Processes Of Chance – Tate Liverpool By Alice Lenkiewicz

On entering the ground floor gallery at Tate Liverpool, I look around and see eleven works by the American artist Ellsworth Kelly, three of which I recognise and one that seems familiar from the cover of one of my art books.

London Art Exhibitions Recommended By Paul Carey-Kent April 2017

Paul Carey-Kent Gives us his choices of the best London Art Exhibitions for April 2017

The Other Art Fair – But What About The Others? – Edward Lucie-Smith

I’ve always liked the Other Art Fair, on in London from now till April 2nd. But I’ve never quite known what to say about it.

Everyman His Own Artwork – Tate Modern – Edward Lucie-Smith Review

By the time you get round to reading this – I’m writing on the evening after the press preview – Tate Modern will have launched its latest enterprise – A BMW Tate Live Exhibition entitled Ten Days, Six Nights. It here’s now. It won’t be here long. In other words, blink and you’ll miss it.

Maggi Hambling – Oil and Cigarettes On Canvas – Simon Tarrant Reviews

Maggi Hambling here, boomed a deep rasping well-spoken voice down my mobile, ‘I was told to call you back so here I am doing as I am told’. And as unlikely as it may seem that the indomitable Hambling would ever do as she was told, I find myself interviewing her mid-Howard-Hodgkin exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery.

Howard Hodgkin Portraits The Insider’s Insider Review By Edward Lucie-Smith

Howard Hodgkin died just two weeks before the opening of the current retrospective of his work at the National Portrait Gallery.