Reviews Archives

Phyllida Barlow vs Elizabethan Treasures – Edward Lucie-Smith

Phyllida Barlow has long been one of the heroines of the professional contemporary art establishment here in Britain

Don McCullin A Major Retrospective – Tate Britain – Jude Cowan Montague

A major retrospective of the war photographer Don McCullin at Tate Britain showcases his images from Vietnam, Northern Ireland and more recently Syria alongside pictures of poverty in the East End and working-class life in northern England. McCullin’s trajectory is key to the level of emotion that I feel when I see his landscapes There’s […]

Is This Art Today? 4 London Shows – Edward Lucie-Smith

A group of recently opened shows, very different from one another, raise questions about the direction the visual arts are now taking.

Upcoming Curators Review Zabludowicz And New Art Projects London

Exhibitions at the Zabludowicz and New Art Projects reviewed by upcoming curators who are students of the How to be an Independent Curator course at Central Saint Martins University of the Arts London.

All the Rembrandts Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam – Sue Hubbard

With his Bob Dylan mop of curls and pug nose, he looks every inch the rebellious teenager that he was.

Tracey Emin: Personal Real And Imaginative – Jude Cowan Montague

I visited the white, white cube for the Emin show a day after the people-jammed preview opening. I’m a little allergic to crowds so rely on the Facebook grapevine for a feel of how sardine-packed the gallery felt. With queues stretching around the block.

New London Exhibitions February 2019 – Edward Lucie-Smith

There’s a conflict of impulses in the art world just now. On the one hand, there is a desire to reflect what’s going on in society.

Glasgow Exhibitions Winter 2019 – Clare Henry

GLASGOW’s reputation has risen & fallen over the years. 1990 saw a peak. The city is now in a trough.

Bill Viola And Michelangelo A Fairground Magical Mystery Tour – Edward Lucie-Smith

The catalogue for the new Bill Viola show at the Royal Academy – also featuring a group of Michelangelo’s best, most finished drawings – is careful to point out that it is not really proposing a rivalry, or even a close kinship, between the two artists.

Utopia Through Nostalgia The Koppel Project Hive – Jude Cowan Montague

Molly Brocklehurst curated this small group show to a grand idea that stems from her own work as a painter; to use art to examine the philosophical and existential reality of looking back at memory itself.

Richard Pousette-Dart An Elegant Affair With A Covert Past – Edward Lucie-Smith

Richard Pousette-Dart (1916-1992) is now one of the less-clearly remembered of the New York Abstract Expressionists, especially here in the UK. He was however amply exhibited in America during his lifetime

Pierre Bonnard: A French Painter Carrying Forward A Great Inheritance – Edward Lucie-Smith

Bonnard was one of those betwixt and between artists, part of the Modern Movement

Rebecca Scott Beneath The Silk and Gloss – Jude Cowan Montague

Rebecca Scott’s huge oil paintings of defaced magazine pages: it’s a visceral exhibition by a confident painter, secure in her style, able to wow us with colour.

London Art Fair 2019 Returns With Solid Foundations – Sue Hubbard

The New Year revels are over. It’s January, and the art world is back to work. The first sign of this stirring is the London Art Fair 2019 that returns to the capital from 16-20 January.

Lynette Yiadom Boakye In Lieu Of A Louder Love – Ilka Scobie

A couple of years after Lynette Yiadom Boakye dazzled New York with her solo show at the New Museum, she returns to the city with 35 new paintings.

Mayfair’s Golden Oldies: Bernard Jacobson At 50 and Stephen Buckley @ Mayor Gallery – Edward Lucie-Smith

The Bernard Jacobson Gallery in the heart of London has had a long connection with artists’ prints and printmaking since it first opened its doors, on a different site to the current one, in 1969.

Pailthorpe And Mednikoff The Birth of Psychorealism – Edward Lucie-Smith

This Christmas and New Year it was an exhibition at the sternly Modernist – yes, with a big M – De La Warr Pavilion at Bexhill-on-Sea. The artists on view were not precisely contemporary: a strange half-forgotten pair called Grace Pailthorpe and Rueben Mednikoff.

How Egon Schiele Became Egon Schiele – Fondation Louis Vuitton – Jude Cowan Montague

When I visited art college studios as a jealous English student in the 1980s, the cool, edgy artists had pictures of skinny, edgy women in tea shirts, naked.

Irving Penn Paintings: A Kind Of Photographic Sub-Stratum – Edward Lucie-Smith

Irving Penn (1917-2009) was one of the great stars of 20th century American photography, at a time when the United States was becoming the world’s leader in this art form.

Philip Colbert / Marshmallow Laser Feast – Saatchi Gallery- Review Edward Lucie-Smith

In the current context of London exhibitions, the unabashed rock-‘n’roll energy of the Philip Colbert Hunt Paintings’ show, recently opened upstairs at the Saatchi Gallery

Jean-Michel Basquiat – Fondation Louis Vuitton – Review Jude Cowan Montague

Where are the black artists in the galleries? We think it’s bad now, what about during the 1980s? The early 1980s before Basquiat?

Thomas Gainsborough: A Thirst For Visible Originality – Edward Lucie-Smith

After various adventures away from its traditional subject-matter – the recent Michael Jackson show being a case in point, the National Portrait Gallery returns to familiar territory with a show devoted to Thomas Gainsborough, by general consensus one of the most brilliant portrait painters to have worked in Britain. Native-born into the bargain, unlike his predecessors Holbein and Van Dyck.

London Art Exhibitions January 2019 – Paul Carey- Kent

The noted writer and curator Paul Carey-Kent gives us his rolling ten recommended contemporary art shows in London now.

Breeeeze: Four Artists Consider The Ambivalence Of Domestic Space – Elizabeth Fullerton

“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction,” Virginia Woolf wrote in her famous essay on the subject, which discusses the subjugation of women in the home.

Edwin Landseer The Return Of A Moralistically Empathetic Artist – Edward Lucie-Smith

How times have changed! And how much they haven’t! A small but telling display of work by the celebrated Victorian artist Sir Edwin Landseer, now on view at the National Gallery, invites both comparison and cogitation.

Plaster Casters: Victoria & Albert Museum Cast Courts Reopen – Edward Lucie-Smith

The full re-opening of the Victoria & Albert Museum’s Cast Courts occurs at an apposite moment.

Richard Long: The Tide is High – Edward Lucie-Smith

There can be no doubt that Richard Long is one of the giants of British art. Or so a very impressive curriculum vitae would lead one to suppose. He is now in his early 70s. He made his reputation almost half-a-century ago, as what was then called a Land Artist

Tomas Saraceno: On Air – Palais de Tokyo Paris – Virginie Puertolas-Syn

Tomas Saraceno “On Air” an exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo is definitely one of the most extraordinary exhibitions I have ever seen. A once in a lifetime experience not to be missed if you are in Paris.

Chiharu Shiota: Immersive Elegant Scarlet Threads – Blain|Southern – Edward Lucie-Smith

Today London’s official art world is full of enthusiasm for so-called ‘minority art’, made by artists of guaranteed ‘minority origin’. On the whole, however, the artists so defined and officially promoted don’t come from Asia.

Iain Baxter& &Information – Hales Gallery – Jude Cowan Montague

That famous aphorism ‘the medium is the message’ was spouted by Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian professor, philosopher and public intellectual back 1964, when his book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, set the stage for my current train journey where I overhear the students discussing their A levels.

Five Academicians: Glasgow Print Studio – Clare Henry

You have to be reasonably senior to be an Academician of any sort. Put five together? The result is an exciting and extremely varied show.

Fernand Léger A Mechanical Visual Language – Tate Liverpool – Alice Lenkiewicz

It was captivating to see the Fernand Léger exhibition (until 17 March 2019) at Tate Liverpool.