30 July 2020
Ai Weiwei A Disturbing History Of Bombs IWM Marina Vaizey
Ai Weiwei IWM: History of Bombs. Little Boy, Fat Man, Daisy Cutter, Snake Eye, Grand Slam, Tomahawk, Tsar Boba, are seemingly innocuous even childlike...
Reviews
19 July 2020
Wartime London Explored in Paintings – Marina Vaizey
London was never invaded, but London has been at war. The look of London during the Blitz and after is captured in this marvel...
16 July 2020
Anish Kapoor Bringing Heaven To Earth – Houghton Hall – James Payne
"Anish Kapoor is a magician," says Lord Cholmondeley in his introduction to this exhibition. His ancestral seat, Houghton Hall is presenting the largest ever...
13 July 2020
Revisiting the Decameron – Flowers Gallery Online – Edward Lucie-Smith
An online show called Revisiting the Decameron, curated by Laura Gascoigne, has recently gone up on the Flowers Gallery web-site. It runs until 9th...
11 July 2020
Sean Scully: Rhythm, Restraint, Splendor – Raphy Sarkissian
Painting, sculpture, architecture: here is a triumvirate wherein painting and sculpture remain in commanding dialogue with architecture throughout the impressive output of Sean Scully,...
26 June 2020
Zoobs Ansari – Elephant West – Edward Lucie-Smith
As this exhibition demonstrates, Zoobs Ansari’s work covers a lot of contemporary themes. On the one hand, there is the experience of the outsider,...
25 June 2020
London’s Masterpiece Art Fair Moves Online – Edward Lucie-Smith
The Masterpiece Art Fair, a regular feature of the summer season in London, is now up online and will be available there until 28...
17 June 2020
Vincent Van Gogh A Durable Art Legend – Two New Books – Edward Lucie-Smith
Two books from Thames & Hudson about Vincent Van Gogh, one of the most durable legends in art. One offers his life-story, as told...
11 June 2020
Bryan Robertson Promoter Of New Art – Edward Lucie-Smith
Andrew Lambirth's The Life of Bryan, recently published by Unicorn, describes itself rather demurely as a celebration, rather than as a biography.
26 May 2020
BP Portrait Award Survives Online – Edward Lucie-Smith
As the National Portrait Gallery closes its doors, not just in response to the Coronavirus epidemic, but in preparation for a three-year rehab, the...
18 May 2020
Photographer Don McCullin Online At Hamiltons – Edward Lucie-Smith
The ways of the art market are pretty strange. Hamiltons, a leading gallery here in London that specialises in photography, have just put a...
17 May 2020
Home Alone Together Twenty Five Artists – Revd Jonathan Evens
Home Alone Together: We are told that home is where the heart is, but also that, while we can travel the world in search...
11 May 2020
Botanical Mind Online: Art, Mysticism and the Cosmic Tree – Revd Jonathan Evens
Spring 2020 was to have been an appropriate season for the launch of one of the Camden Arts Centre’s most ambitious exhibitions to date....
6 May 2020
The Last Leonardo Art Porn For Millennials – Edward Lucie-Smith
Ben Lewis’s book The Last Leonardo, subtitled ‘A Masterpiece, A Mystery and the Dirty World of Art’, has now appeared in paperback after its...
30 April 2020
London’s New Art Scene Creative Britain 1962-68 – Edward Lucie-Smith
Here's a handsome new volume, well-illustrated, but more social history than art book, which tells of the emergence of London as an international art...
23 April 2020
Infamous Colony Room Relived In New Book – Edward Lucie-Smith
Darren Coffield’s well-presented Tales from the Colony Room, Soho’s Lost Bohemia, memorialises an epoch in the London world of the arts that now seems...
Artemisia Gentileschi A Retrospective Online – Edward Lucie-Smith
The much-anticipated Artemisia Gentileschi exhibition at the National Gallery in London has now been indefinitely postponed, to the disappointment of many.
9 April 2020
Piranesi Drawings – Neoclassical Visions – Edward Lucie-Smith
This handsome soft-cover catalogue published by Thames & Hudson for the British Museum was intended to commemorate an exhibition that hasn’t in fact taken...
26 March 2020
Edmund de Waal Books Thousands of Books British Museum – Marina Vaizey
Books written in exile by the exiled. It is this phenomenon, the triumph of the human spirit in dire circumstances, that is the focus...
19 March 2020
Titian: A Pity To Miss – National Gallery – Edward Lucie-Smith
The Titian show at the National Gallery in London has arrived at a particularly inauspicious moment. Major public galleries in Europe are shutting their...
16 March 2020
Drawn To Another World Alexander Hinks – The Cello Factory
What is this ‘other world’ Alexander Hinks is drawn to and asks that we be drawn into? His current exhibition at ‘The Cello Factory’ spans...
12 March 2020
Andy Warhol Multiple Identities – Tate Modern – Edward Lucie-Smith
Andy Warhol (1928-1987) has, even since his death more than thirty years ago, retained a central position in the world of contemporary art.
9 March 2020
Among The Trees A Sense Of Loss – Edward Lucie-Smith
Among the Trees which just opened at the Hayward Gallery, is an ambitious exhibition that has all the best intentions, and somehow fails to...
4 March 2020
Aubrey Beardsley: A Sensual Sometimes Erotic Divertissement – Edward Lucie-Smith
As the exhibition catalogue notes, the Beardsley show that just opened at Tate Britain is the first comprehensive survey of his work to have...
27 February 2020
Young Rembrandt: Influencer Of His Generation – Edward Lucie-Smith
I’ve always liked the exhibitions at the Ashmolean in Oxford. They offer sensible examples of art historical explanation - something that can’t always be...
25 February 2020
David Hockney: Two Major Shows Open In London – Edward Lucie-Smith
As the National Portrait Gallery prepares for its long sleep - three years with its doors firmly shut - it is not surprising to...
18 February 2020
Los Angeles Gallery Visit February 2020 – Edward Lucie-Smith
I am just back from a quick trip to Los Angeles, which gave me a lot to consider - chiefly about how different the...
7 February 2020
Brandt And Moore: A Shared British Vision – Hepworth Wakefield – Sara Faith
A new exhibition at the Hepworth Wakefield features two very British artists with crossover interests. The photographer Bill Brandt (1904-1983) and sculptor Henry Moore...
5 February 2020
Radical Figures: A New Art Movement? – Edward Lucie-Smith
The rather splendid show of new figurative painting, now on view at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, boasts that it is the first event of...