Category: art
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Peter Lanyon’s gliding paintings
If you want to escape from the madness of central London – a frequent need, in my experience – you could do worse than visit the Courtauld Gallery. It’s usually quiet, its home is a handsome and quirky corner of Somerset House, and its permanent collection is exceptional for its quality and holding power. You…
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John Pawson’s visual inventory
Most of the books I’ve bought over the years lie on a table, sometimes for months, read or unread, before they find their way to the shelf. But there’s one, bought on impulse three years ago, that has never left the table. Every few weeks I pick it up and work through some of its…
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Horse, man, dog: two Nottingham paintings
In the Long Gallery of the Castle Museum and Art Gallery in Nottingham are two oil paintings that seem to speak to each other on the wall they share. They look similar – both use the formula horse-man-dog – but on inspection they seem very different in tone and implicit narrative. The earlier of the…
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Down among the artistocrats
Chatsworth, when I was an innocent boy, and later when an innocent parent, meant a fun day out. A chance to gawp at the baroque luxuries, scamper on the lawns and play games in the playground. At the time we absorbed the whole place on its own terms. One of the reasons was that Chatsworth…
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Goya and the Philippines junta: power mocked
The town of Castres has several claims to fame. At its centre handsome rows of old tanners’ and weavers’ houses overhang the river Agout. It was where the socialist leader and peacemaker Jean Jaurès was born in 1859. It has a flourishing ‘Top 14’ rugby side. And it contains the Goya Museum, which specialises in…
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Atalanta
For International Women’s Day, here’s a Greek woman of formidable talent and power. Since 1935 she’s lived in Swansea, in the collection of the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery. She’s hidden away from public view at the moment while the Gallery’s home is being modernised. She was absent from the big Christopher Williams exhibition curated by…
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Shani Rhys James
Who is Shani Rhys James? That seems to me to be the central question underlying all of her paintings. Many of the very best of them are gathered together in Distillation, a big retrospective of her works in Oriel Gregynog at the National Library of Wales. This is quite simply an overwhelming exhibition. It’s remarkable…
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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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Vivienne Williams
Still life as a genre has a long history. Pictures of plenty – fruits of nature arranged by human hand – are common on Roman painted walls and mosaics. Renaissance artists picked out collections of food, natural and prepared, from the incidental details of medieval paintings and placed them centre stage. The golden age of…
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Delft in four colours
Orange Orange is the Dutch colour. But to see it in Delft you need to lift your eyes above the roads and canals to the tops of the buildings. Big bright orange pantiles run in vertical rows down the small hipped roofs of many houses, each of which is different in size and height from…