Bridget Riley – A Seductive Collaborative Invitation – By Edward Lucie-Smith
The new Bridget Riley show at David Zwirner is a knockout.
22 January 2018
Edward Lucie-Smith
Things I Hate About The British Art World Today – Edward Lucie-Smith
The British contemporary art world is apparently in a healthy state at the moment.
31 December 2017
Edward Lucie-Smith Chooses Ten Exhibitions That Made A Difference In 2017
What were the best exhibitions in 2017? What’s on my list of ten? The answers to this pair of questions really depend on which set of attitudes you choose to embrace. For me, choices No 1 and No 2 were nothing to do with contemporary art.
14 December 2017
French Impressionists: Refugee Painters In London – Edward Lucie Smith
Like quite a lot of grand museum exhibitions in London recently, this new show at Tate Britain doesn’t quite tell its announced story.
1 November 2017
Duchamp And Dali Two Iconic 20th-Century Artists – Edward Lucie-Smith
Duchamp And Dali – Royal Academy: This provocative little show at the R.A., done in parallel with the same institutions big retrospective for Jaspers Johns, asks a number of questions about both the past history of the visual arts avant-garde, and about its current travails.
10 October 2017
Two Friezes – More Is Less By Edward Lucie-Smith
The two Frieze art fairs held simultaneously in London every year are now, according to received opinion, the biggest temperature taking, temperature raising events in the whole of the UK art calendar.
6 October 2017
Society Running on Empty at White Cube by Edward Lucie-Smith
From the Vapor of Gasoline, the odd title of the new mixed exhibition at White Cube Mason’s Yard comes from a slogan Jean-Michel Basquiat scrawled across one of his paintings. The phrase, so the exhibition list tells one ‘conjures [up] a society running on empty’. That may well be so, but one has to remember that the painting concerned was produced in 1985, more than thirty years ago, at the very height of Basquiat’s success in the New York art world, then much closer to being globally dominant than it is now.
25 September 2017
Ralph Steadman’s Ark – Species Threatened With Extinction By Edward Lucie-Smith
Ralph Steadman has just published a very handsome new picture book, folio size, entitled Critters, about species threatened with extinction.
24 August 2017
Matisse vs The Multi-Cultural Multi-Ethnic 21st Century Art World – Edward Lucie-Smith
I went to see the R.A.’s new Matisse show, but not at the press view, as I was abroad. I did go very shortly after it opened. Not unexpectedly, it was jammed with visitors, and I mean jammed. You had to dodge round backs to get a proper view of some of the smaller items, notably the drawings.
11 August 2017
Arabic calligraphy Another Islamic Winner Saatchi Gallery – Edward Lucie-Smith
Hot on the heels of the Princess Zeid show at Tate Modern, which runs until October 8th, is a much smaller and shorter-lived exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery, by an artist also Middle Eastern, royal, and female, which runs only until August 18th. The artist is splendidly entitled Khawala Bint Ahmed Bint Kahalifa Al Suwaida.
1 August 2017
Jamaican Spiritual Art And Its Relationship To Religion By Edward Lucie-Smith
A small confession to make here: I wrote a brief text for the catalogue of this show because Jamaica is where I originally come from. The subject of the exhibition is Jamaican art, manifested in its relationship to religion.
8 July 2017
G.F. WATTS – Not Quite Michelangelo By Edward Lucie-Smith
The G F Watts Gallery, near Guilford, with one of very few art spaces in Britain that is basically dedicated to a single artist. Equivalents, perhaps, are Leighton House in Kensington, the Stanley Spencer Gallery in Cookham, and maybe – just maybe – Damien Hirst’s splendid new gallery in Newport Street, Vauxhall. There, however, the great Damien has been careful to show work by artists other than himself, though most of what is on view comes from his own collection.
6 July 2017
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.
22 June 2017
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… Read More
9 June 2017
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.
30 May 2017
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.
26 May 2017
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.
5 April 2017
Fourth Plinth Commission “Good For A Disposable Laugh” – Edward Lucie-Smith
The next two occupants of the so-called Fourth Plinth Commission in Trafalgar Square have just been announced and, true to form, the British visual arts establishment has laboured and given birth to a mouse. Or, to be fair, to two mice, one of them just slightly larger than the other. I speak not in terms of size, but in those of probable effect.
24 March 2017
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.
23 March 2017
Eduardo Paolozzi – Halfway In Halfway Out Whitechapel Review By Edward Lucie-Smith
The current Paolozzi exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery is, for an old stager like me, a bit of a puzzle. There was a time when Paolozzi was a very big deal – one of the major innovators in British art, the destined successor to the first generation of major British Modernists, chief among them Henry Moore.
20 March 2017
Revolution And Architecture – The Lights That Failed By Edward Lucie-Smith
The Design Museum’s new exhibition, Imagine Moscow: Architecture, Propaganda, Revolution, is in many respects a great improvement on its rather incoherent opening show (or collection of shows).
16 March 2017
David Hockney According To Himself – Review By Edward Lucie-Smith
It seems a long time since Tate Britain had a real blockbuster show. Even the Turner Prize, once a focus of popular attention, has received less and less publicity recently, to the point where the dissidents of the Stuckist Movement can no longer be bothered to picket it, even when the annual prize exhibition is held here in London, and not banished to some deserving gallery in the provinces.
8 February 2017
Maria Balshaw: What’s A Great Contemporary Art Museum Without A Living Shaman
When Maria Balshaw takes over from Sir Nicolas Serota at Tate (not yet officially confirmed as I write this, but a racing certainty), she takes over an empire that seems to be in excellent health.
13 January 2017
The Millennial Death Of Conceptual Art By Edward Lucie-Smith
Edward Lucie-Smith discusses the relevance of Conceptual Art in the millennial age.
2 January 2017
Is Figurative Painting An Essential Form Of Art Making? By Edward Lucie-Smith
Painter’s Painters at the Saatchi Gallery picks up the theme of figurative painting as a still essential and central form of art making and tries to give it a new spin.
10 December 2016
Rauschenberg Prodigious Powers Of Innovation And Self-invention By Edward Lucie-Smith
I’m always left in two minds about Robert Rauschenberg. On the one hand, there is his enormous influence on the course of today’s contemporary art. Everywhere you look, you see things that came from him. He is a prophetic artist in all sorts of different ways: installation, junk sculpture, fascination with new technologies, performance art, collaborations
5 December 2016
Rivalrous Artists: Sebastian Smee The Art Of Rivalry Reviewed By Edward Lucie-Smith
The Art of Rivalry is a relief in art critical terms. It is well and clearly written, with no pretentions. Sebastian Smee is currently the art critic for the Boston Globe, where he has been since 2008.
22 November 2016
Gavin Turk Both A Trickster And A Culture Hero By Edward Lucie-Smith
Damien Hirst has become a major patron, in addition to being a celebrated artist. When he stages a show at his Great Newport Street Gallery, which is one of the most handsome art spaces in London, though not alas one blessed with good links to public transport, pretty well everything you see will be items that belong to him. This is the case with the aptly entitled Who What When How & Why, a solo show for his fellow YBA Gavin Turk. It’s a significant alliance in more ways than one.
22 November 2016
Bourgeois Bliss in Somerset Edward Lucie-Smith Gets His Wellies On
I’ve just made a visit – a first but not the last, I hope – to the much talked about… Read More
15 November 2016
Radical Ensor At The RA – Review By Edward Lucie-Smith
When I visited the Royal Academy’s in many ways excellent new show devoted to the Belgian Symbolist/Expressionist painter James Ensor, I… Read More
14 November 2016
Sean Scully – Paint Speaks Louder Than Words By Edward Lucie – Smith
Sean Scully now increasingly seems like the most remarkable abstract painter of his generation – this, at a time when abstract art, abstract painting, in particular, is increasingly under attack.
4 November 2016
Paul Nash – A Modernist Paradox by Edward Lucie-Smith
The elegant new Paul Nash retrospective just opened at Tate Britain offers a welcome contrast to some of the dismal offerings that have been unveiled there in the recent past. It celebrates an important British artist and does so in a thoroughgoing way.
28 October 2016