24 September 2016
The experience of exile, deracination, was fundamental to Wifredo Lam’s career as an artist, even more so that it was too – say – the experience of the Russian emigré artists who left Russia after the Revolution, or that of the born-elsewhere Americans who played such a prominent role in the Abstract Expressionist movement. Lam made a successful career as […]
22 September 2016
The new Abstract Expressionism show that just opened in the main galleries of the Royal Academy at Burlington House, is an absolutely splendid affair. If you can only see one exhibition during a day out in London, see this one, and leave Tate Modern on the other side of the Thames to its own populist devices. The range and quality […]
9 September 2016
The V&A’s new, all singing all dancing exhibition has a cumbersome title: You Say You want A Revolution? – Records and Rebels 1966-1970. As the title itself indicates, it does nevertheless cover a very short space of time – less than a decade. I can’t say I was fully part of the revolution in question. Already too old in 1966, […]
The person who rode herd on Frances Bacon during the time that he was represented by the Marlborough Gallery – insofar, that is to say, as anyone could, in fact, ride herd on that raffish old queen – was an upright (some say uptight) lady called Valerie Beston. Since her death, there has been a trust founded in […]
I’m looking forward to the Art Business conference due to be held at Church House here in London on Thursday 1st December and hope to report on what is said there. However, looking at the programme, some aspects of it seem to dodge important issues. It’s all well and good, for example, to discuss the art market in Dubai and the […]
In recent years the word ‘appropriation’ has become a fashionable, obliquely commendatory term used in discussions of contemporary art. The implication is that making use of a borrowed image is somehow a radically original thing to do. The less you change that image, the better. In particular, used in this context, the word also implies the existence of an unspoken conspiracy between […]
Deep in August, gazing at the rather forlorn contemporary art landscape that is standard for this time of year, when major exhibition openings are lacking, I’m left wondering why in fact it seems a good deal more forlorn than I expect. This, despite the fact that the new extension at Tate Modern continues to attract thousands upon thousands of visitors. Also […]
4 August 2016
Raqib Shaw seems like one of those grandee artists who have suddenly appeared out of nowhere. That is, till you do a bit of research on the Web, and discover just what, and how much, you’ve been missing. Calcutta born, raised in Kashmir, now living and working in London, he’s had solo shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Miami, […]
August is nearly here – the time when the contemporary art world in London begins its annual snooze, to wake up, hopefully refreshed, some time in mid-September. It’s the moment to draw breath, sit down and take stock. It’s hard to think of any comparable six months when events have been more tumultuous. In the art world itself, there […]
16 July 2016
A number of the major commercial galleries in London now offer shows which are, in terms of interest and quality, very much on a level with what one finds in London’s major public galleries. The new exhibition at Blain/Southern in Hanover Square offers a good example of this. Entitled Carlo Carrà, Metaphysical Spaces, it considers the career of one of the […]
6 July 2016
Georgia O’Keeffe, now the subject of a large solo show just opened at Tate Modern, is a slightly odd case in the story of American art. She became famous very early, thanks to the efforts of her patron, lover and eventual husband Alfred Stieglitz, who, in addition to being a leading Modern Movement photographer, was […]
In this latest opinion piece Edward Lucie-Smith gives us the low down on London’s ‘most significant’ cultural building since the new British Library No-one can doubt that Tate Modern, with its vast new extension, a wonky brick castle designed by Herzog and de Meuron, intends to change the art world. More specifically, the world of contemporary art, now […]
10 June 2016
Alex Katz (b. 1927) is a senior figure, in all senses of that term, in the American art world, but perhaps not quite such a big deal here in London as some of this compatriots and contemporaries. If you are Jasper Johns (b. 1930) you get the Courtauld Gallery, side by side with major Impressionists and Old Masters. If you are Chuck […]
There are increasing signs of conflict between the two wings of the avant-garde – currently so-called – in the visual arts. I say ‘so-called’ because in fact neither wing has a firm claim to this much-coveted description. On the one hand there is the increasingly crazy and shady world of the big art fairs and major auction rooms. On […]
Art16, the Olympia Art Fair this year was considerably more fun than its immediate predecessor. It was more spacious in feeling, better laid out, better lit. Large art fairs often leave me, when I finally stagger out of them, feeling in urgent need of two things – a stiff drink and a quiet lie-down. This time I had none of those symptoms. […]
18 May 2016
Mona Hatoum’s work, as collected together in this retrospective, neatly straddles recent preoccupations at the great institution where it currently resides. There’s quite a lot to do with performance art, though the artist seems to have moved away from this in recent years. There are political echoes from the ever-turbulent Middle East. Hatoum was born in Beirut to a Palestinian family in […]
Beers London presents The Fantasy of Representation, an exhibition exploring figurative representation in painting featuring the artist’s Hurvin Anderson, Francis Bacon, Gary Hume, Alexander Tinei, Dale Adcock, Scott Anderson, Sverre Bjertnaes, Alison Blickle, Daniel Crews-Chubb, Blake Daniels, Eckart Hahn, Aaron Holz, Adam Lee, Jenny Morgan, Justin Ogilvie, Lou Ros, Andrew Salgado, and Dominic Shepherd. ‘In […]
Polemically Small is a monumental show for BritWeek 2011, organised in association with The Future Can Wait and Edward Lucie-Smith. The group show of over 100 works on paper from London and elsewhere in the UK based based on the idea that small, today, is often much better than big, this exhibition will be a […]