Tag: painting
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The artist from behind
What’s happening when artists choose to portray themselves in their work? The self-portrait was an invention of the Renaissance, but it’s just as common today, in painting (Jenny Saville’s work, now on show in a big retrospective at the National Portrait Gallery, is a striking example) and in many other forms. Perhaps the most famous…
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Gwen John on foot for Rome
I’ve been reading Celia Paul’s painfully honest book Letters to Gwen John, a series of imaginary messages to her fellow-artist, dead for almost a hundred years. She shares many circumstances with Gwen, and feels many close affinities, both creative and emotional. In one of the letters, she describes a continental journey that Gwen made in…
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Glenys Cour: can mlynedd o liw
Ar 6 Ionawr 2024 ymgasglodd cryn nifer o gyfeillion a chyd-artistiaid yn ei thŷ yn y Mwmbwls i ddathlu pen-blwydd Glenys Cour yn 100 mlwydd oed. Eisteddai Glenys yn ei chadair arferol yn y lolfa, gyda’i golygfa wych dros Fae Abertawe, wrth i gyfeillion ddod ati fesul un, plygu drosodd neu benlinio, a dymuno’n dda…
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‘Exhabiting that corricatore of a harss’: Anselm Kiefer and James Joyce
No one could accuse Anselm Kiefer of being a miniaturist. The White Cube in Bermondsey is a large space and it’s packed full with the huge displays of his new exhibition, a response to his long-time admiration for James Joyce’s unreadable masterwork, Finnegans wake. The Cube isn’t a cube at all, but an oblong. When…
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Prussian Blue
Like a teenager, C. has fallen hopelessly in love, with a visitor from the Continent. I didn’t see it coming. And the worst thing is that I’m not sure it’s a temporary infatuation that will soon pass. It’s taken a firm hold on her affections. Only time will tell whether everything will end in tears.…
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The Last Bard: loops of an invented tradition
By now the ‘invented tradition’ is itself a tradition. Since Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger published their edited collection The invention of tradition in 1983, we’ve become familiar with the idea that rituals, histories and beliefs that seem age-old were actually recent fictions devised with specific purposes in mind. One of the chapters in The…
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The Black Flag
The Glynn Vivian Art Gallery is closed for ‘firewall’ fortnight, but when it reopens you could do worse than pay it a visit. There are several excellent temporary exhibitions, as well as some seldom-seen items from the permanent collection, including a small display of art on the theme of protest. Its centrepiece is a striking…
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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…
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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…
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The portraits of Kyffin Williams
This article is based on a talk given to The Arts Society: Brecknock in Theatr Brycheiniog, Brecon on 11 September 2018 to mark the centenary of Kyffin Williams’s birth. Introduction My starting point is a talk given by Peter Lord as the Kyffin Williams lecture for 2018 at Oriel Môn, entitled ‘The portraits of Kyffin…