art
The assassin waits
In my lockdown tour of Europe I’m still enjoying my virtual stay in the city of Delft. I’ve walked a little way from the Nieuwe Kerk to the Prinsenhof in Sint Agathaplein. Today the Prinsenhof is a museum, and a very good one, but in the late sixteenth century it was the government headquarters of […]
Carel Fabritius’s ‘A view of Delft’
You can take a train to Delft – or you could, in pre-Virus times – walk to the corner of Oude Langendijk and the Oosteinde in the city centre, look to the north-west, and see what the painter Carel Fabritius saw there on a bright summer’s day in 1652. A few things have changed, it’s […]
Durer’s ‘A heavenly body’: painting apocalypse
Albrecht Durer surely had the sharpest eye of any painter. Think of his watercolour A big piece of turf, made in 1503, half a millennium before the hyperrealist painters of our own time. Or the astonishing sketch of his own head and hand on the reverse of the painting in Paris known as Portrait of […]
Cefn Bryn and the painters
Looking out of the window of my lockdown attic, I’ve a south-west view of south Gower. If I stretch my neck I can see the eastern end of the ridge of Cefn Bryn, the long sandstone backbone of the peninsula. All through the bright days of April the sun has set, often spectacularly, on one […]
One hill, two painters
Peter Wakelin’s book Refuge and renewal: migration and British art, written to accompany his exhibition of the same name – its run in MOMA Machynlleth was sadly curtailed by coronavirus – is a rich source of information about artists who fled to Britain to escape the Nazis. A name he mentions in passing on three […]
Laura Cumming and Degas’ ‘The Bellilli Family’
Many people have praised Laura Cumming’s book On Chapel Sands: my mother and other missing persons (Chatto & Windus, 2019). It begins, like a novel, with a sudden disappearance: of her three-year-old mother, in summer 1929, from a sunny beach on the Lincolnshire coast. Like a detective story it pieces together what happened, and tries […]
Lucian Freud and Celia Paul
Lucian Freud isn’t one of those big artists whose star quickly fades after death. To judge by a visit to the Royal Academy exhibition of his self-portraits (it finishes tomorrow), his work still attracts plenty of public interest. The paintings were arranged chronologically, so you could follow easily the track of Freud’s development, and how […]
A fruit bat, displayed
This is one of those important, but well-concealed exhibitions that attracts large numbers of visitors mainly by word of mouth. When I was there, in the cramped basement of the Wallace Collection last weekend, I was surprised to be sharing the space with many others. Most of them seemed as smitten as I was by […]
A reader walks out
In the huge and magnificent William Blake exhibition now on in Tate Britain there are many images that were new to me, even though I’d seen the earlier big Tate shows of his artistic work, in 1978 and 2000. One of them comes from a series Blake produced during the last three years of his […]
More poetry is needed
These are dark times. Walking through the streets of central Swansea, it can seem that the dark is rising. More shops close with every month, leaving empty and boarded windows. In some parts only charity, pawn and vape shops appear to be in business. Never-ending cuts have reduced what were once thriving public and third […]