Most great artistic movements begin as a reaction to the art and times that precede them. Impressionism in the 19th century. Surrealism, Dadaism and the YBAs in the 20th c. Baroque began in Rome around 1600 in response to the austere 17th-century Protestant culture of the Netherlands.
15 February 2020
In 1972 John Berger suggested that “The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.” The male gaze, he argued in Ways of Seeing, for centuries defined the way we looked at the female subject.
9 February 2020
Being asked to write about an art fair is a bit like being commissioned to write about Waitrose and compare tins of baked beans with sardines or chocolate biscuits.
22 January 2020
Fog was rising over the Wiltshire fields and the majestic beeches of Roche Court Sculpture Park dripping with November rain when we arrived for the opening of Tess Traeger’s photographs.
26 November 2019
In 1998 the first sales of the Dora Maar collection were put on sale in Paris. They revealed a life dedicated to photography, painting and poetry, executed in the city’s avant-garde milieu of the 1930s.
20 November 2019
If you are planning an imminent trip to the Netherlands, there are two must-see exhibitions on at the moment. Pieter de Hooch in Delft: From the Shadow of Vermeer at the Museum Prinsenhof, Delft and Rembrandt-Velázquez: Dutch & Spanish Masters at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
14 October 2019
On my way to Tate Modern in the rain, last night, I smiled, thinking just how much Susan Hiller would… Read More
1 October 2019
It’s rare to walk into an exhibition and be bowled over (forgive the pun). To encounter work that touches the heart as well as the mind in these insouciant times. Frank Bowling’s exhibition at Tate Britain is one such rare show, reminding us of what painting can do.
2 June 2019
May you live in interesting times is the overarching theme of this year’s Biennale. Dystopia and dissonance are everywhere played out in the themes of climate change and post-human CGI that take us to some dark places.
14 May 2019
Chantal Joffe Victoria Miro London: In his seminal 1972 book Ways of Seeing, the late John Berger claimed that: ‘A woman must continually watch herself…From earliest childhood, she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself…
27 April 2019
In these grim times, we need all the art we can get. Public art feeds the soul as well as the mind. It provides spaces for contemplation in a gritty difficult world.
21 March 2019
My favourite thing is to go where I’ve never been’ wrote the photographer Diane Arbus, the poor little rich Jewish girl who walked on the wild side.
23 February 2019
With his Bob Dylan mop of curls and pug nose, he looks every inch the rebellious teenager that he was.
16 February 2019
Jock is late for our meeting in the Academicians Room at the RA. Very late. He was stuck on a bus. I’ve known him for more than 20 years and figure that if we don’t have time to talk now we can always meet up in his home in Bethnal Green where, for ages, a group of us met to watch films on a Friday night
28 January 2019
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.
17 January 2019
A small jewel of a city that dates back to the Middle Ages, Antwerp is Belgium’s only port.
5 June 2018
I have admired much of Tacita Dean’s earlier work. Her blackboard drawings, including her piece on the deluded round-the-world-yachtsman, Donald Crowhurst.
20 May 2018
Yesterday the art world not only lost one of its finest and most loved abstract painters, but I lost a great friend.
12 April 2018
Film is Tacita Dean’s medium. Not that catch-all of so many contemporary artists, video, but analogue film with all its implicit nostalgia and history. Although Tacita Dean emerged in the 90s, at the height of conceptualism, she’s always been essentially a Romantic.
17 March 2018
The 20th century saw God lose his central role within the scheme of human belief and philosophy.
2 March 2018
There is a conundrum at the heart of the work of Emil Nolde.
20 February 2018
Modern psychology has shown considerable interest in understanding the self. Investigations into the problems of selfhood spread during the 20th century from clinicians and humanistic psychologists to be explored in laboratories and by artists.
7 February 2018
There was a time when the London Art Fair was the glitziest thing in the capital’s art world calendar.
20 January 2018
We know it’s late September because the Turner Prize is with us again.
26 September 2017
Trying to get hold of Rachel Whiteread to talk about her new exhibition at Tate Britain, her largest to date is rather like attempting to gain an audience at the White House.
11 September 2017
The artist’s studio is both a practical workshop and the workshop of the mind, a place of reflection and play, of doubt and hard work. At first a modest collector of modest means, Matisse filled his studio with objects collected on his travels to create a stage-set of languid sensuality, returning to the same paintings, prints, sculptures and textiles for inspiration over and over again like old friends, each time finding new points of stimulation.
1 August 2017
Everyone has a “somewhere else” in their lives Howard Hodgkin said in 1992. “My somewhere else is India”. Howard Hodgkin was 32… Read More
5 July 2017
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.
16 May 2017
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.
8 May 2017
The other night I went to the private view of Lucy Beech and Edward Thomasson’s performance that forms part of Tate Britain’s Art Now, an ongoing series of contemporary exhibitions.
28 April 2017
Congratulations to Frank Bowling now Sir Richard Sheridan Franklin Bowling Kt ,OBE, RA, the Guyana-born British artist. His paintings relate to Abstract expressionism, Color Field painting and Lyrical Abstraction. In honour of this award, Artlyst is rerunning Sue Hubbard’s excellent review of his show at Tate Britain in 2019.
9 October 2020
In the notable annals of contemporary art, one accolade stands as a career topper, and that is the Turner Prize. This year, the Towner Gallery in Eastbourne
5 December 2023
