Watching last week's TV coverage of the service at St Paul's Cathedral commemorating the seventieth anniversary of the Blitz I caught a glimpse of Mark Alexander's The Red Mannheim (detail above); I can't think of many greater privileges for an artist. Its presence seemed particularly resonant given the nature of the work, which was ... Read More...
Painting
In Anthony Burgess’ short story The Endless Voyager, a businessman throws away his passport and wallet mid-transit and, unable to enter any country, spends the rest of his life shuttling from airport to airport. He eventually goes mad. Today, of course, such a traveller might stave off purgatorial insanity by ... Read More...
The Foundling Museum in Bloomsbury is one of London's less well known. It's been refurbished in recent years, so when I dropped in I was curious to see if it had improved from the rather uncommunicative building I'd toured 20-odd years ago. Happily it's been a sensitive and quietly effective ... Read More...
The best criticism can show something familiar in a new and revealing light. And there's little that's as familiar to us as Leonardo's work; to re-purpose some lines of RS Thomas's, his paintings 'are tired of returning the hard stare / of eyes. The sculptures are smooth / from familiarity'. ... Read More...
Last Monday, the Bank Holiday, we went to Tate Britain to visit the Romantics exhibition. It was surprisingly and pleasantly quiet, at least before lunch. But we didn't get far before being captivated by the jet fighters in the Duveen Galleries, a Sea Harrier (above) and a Jaguar (below). They immediately appealed ... Read More...
In his second volume of autobiography, A Dubious Codicil, Michael Wharton describes the Shaftesbury Avenue studio of cartoonist Michael ffolkes, as “a strange room of narrow triangular shape crammed with an astounding assortment of treasures” and draws particular attention to:...A huge photograph of a painting by the nineteenth-century French Salon ... Read More...
The blockbuster Banksy vs Bristol exhibition (the opening day of which I reviewed here), was largely the business of walking round Bristol Museum going “Yes, heh heh, very smart, but is it art, dammit, is it art?” It was striking therefore to find a Banksy-vandalised Damien Hirst (about whom the ... Read More...
If you visit Longleat and safely negotiate the lions and herpes-infested monkeys, you can enter the vast Elizabethan mansion and – via a circuitous route taking in such stately home essentials as the Saloon, the Red Library and the Dress Corridor – finally arrive at the Grand Staircase, at the ... Read More...
In Anthony Burgess’ short story The Endless Voyager, a businessman throws away his passport and wallet mid-transit and, unable to enter any country, spends the rest of his life shuttling from airport to airport. He eventually goes mad. Today, of course, such a traveller might stave off purgatorial insanity by ... Read More...
