Tag: sculpture

Remembering Camille Claudel

July 2, 2021 0 Comments
Remembering Camille Claudel

The Auguste Rodin exhibition now at Tate Modern takes you beyond easy assumptions about the artist, based on the best-known works and a few fragments of biography.  Rodin’s escape from the conventional beauties of classicism into reconstructing real human bodies came in 1876 with The age of bronze.  Its realism scandalised the critics.  But that’s […]

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The memory of Sir Thomas Picton

August 23, 2019 9 Comments
The memory of Sir Thomas Picton

One of the many noxious elements making up the miasma of Brexiter thinking is exceptionalism.  The idea that Britain is naturally superior to other countries, and that it is strong enough to stand alone against every foe, has deep roots – much deeper than the Battle of Britain, so often trundled out by politicians.  If […]

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Rachel Whiteread and Walter Sickert

October 29, 2017 1 Comment
Rachel Whiteread and Walter Sickert

It might be a sign of increasing age, but these days I prefer the quieter Tate Britain to the glitz and gargantuism of Tate Modern.  Last weekend we went there early to see the retrospective of the sculptor Rachel Whiteread.  Most of the works are shown together in a single undivided room and there weren’t […]

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Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and Ezra Pound

November 6, 2016 1 Comment
Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and Ezra Pound

It’s exactly a hundred years since John Lane published Ezra Pound’s ‘memoir’ of the French sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, who died in action at Neuville-Saint-Vaast on the Western Front on 5 June 1915, aged 23 years. I first came across Gaudier-Brzeska and his work as a student in the early 1970s.  I’d got into the habit […]

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A Coxwold tomb

May 29, 2016 1 Comment
A Coxwold tomb

Philip Larkin’s poem ‘An Arundel tomb’ – the one that ends with the much-misinterpreted line ‘What will survive of us is love’ – starts with this stanza: Side by side, their faces blurred, The earl and countess lie in stone, Their proper habits vaguely shown As jointed armour, stiffened pleat, And that faint hint of […]

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Anselm Kiefer and Rembrandt van Rijn

November 3, 2014 2 Comments
Anselm Kiefer and Rembrandt van Rijn

Visit the big retrospective of Anselm Kiefer in the Royal Academy and it’s unlikely that you’ll quickly forget it. Which is apt, because memory, personal and especially collective, is the big theme that runs through all his work since he began his career as an artist in 1969. For Kiefer memory is seldom direct or […]

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