Reviews Archive

Navigating Downtown NYC Galleries During A Pandemic Autumn 2020 – Ilka Scobie

As museums and galleries open to eager viewers, I took the easy way out and have only ventured to walking distance galleries. Luckily, this...

Bruce Nauman, Damien’s New Show And Painter Mark Edwards – London Autumn Exhibitions – Edward Lucie-Smith

In the midst of the chaos in the London art world caused by the current pandemic an artist occasionally shows up who seems serenely...

Everyday Heroes: Southbank Exhibition Celebrates Low-paid Key Workers

How to celebrate the continuing vital and sacrificial contribution of key workers during the Covid-19 pandemic? Clap for Carers united the nation early on...

Entwining Spiritualism And Art – Three Shows – Revd Jonathan Evens

Once upon a time in modernism, the interlacing of art and religion was rendered invisible. Art was not just for art’s sake but was...

Sin At The National Gallery Dreamsongs Colnaghi – Edward Lucie-Smith

In present circumstances, both public and private galleries have had to think hard about what is practical and within their reach to do. Sometimes...

Royal Academy’s Free Of Bombast Summer/ Winter Exhibition – Sue Hubbard

The Royal Academy Summer Show has an unbroken record. Still, this year, due to the pandemic, it’s being held in the winter rather than...

Artemisia Gentileschi Exhibition Opens At London’s National Gallery – Edward Lucie-Smith

The Artemisia Gentileschi exhibition has opened at the National Gallery at long last. It is accompanied by a handsome, fully illustrated hardcover catalogue. The...

Some Fresh Blood: New London Grads Saatchi Gallery – Edward Lucie-Smith

London Grads Now, the new show currently on view at the Saatchi Gallery, won't be with us for long. It is due to close...

Quentin Blake and Victor Pasmore A Discursive Conversational Piece – Jude Cowan Montague

Quentin Blake and Victor Pasmore Hastings Contemporary: I'm standing for the first time inside the Hastings Contemporary

Guston, Riley And Matisse Essential Autumn Book Releases

Three very colourful large format art books on Philip Guston, Bridget Riley and Henri Matisse have arrived this week.

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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,...

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...

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...

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.

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...

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...

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...

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....

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...

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...

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 – 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.

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...

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...

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...

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...

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.