Résultats de "Edward Lucie-Smith" dans Toutes les catégories

Eco-art exhibitions are part of the trend of our times. Radical Nature, the show at the Barbican Art Gallery in London, demonstrated some of the possibilities and paradoxes of enterprises of this sort. Basically what the organizers had to do is to move the outside indoors. This set them both practical and, in their own terms at least, moral problems.

Pablo Gargallo is often described as "Cubist" sculptor, partly thanks to his signature technique of hollowing out or reversing volumes, and partly due to his links with Picasso, one of the two undoubted inventors of cubism. In the strict sense, the idea of cubist sculpture is an oxymoron. Despite its undoubted early links to the African tribal sculptures that partly inspired Picasso’s transition to a new and radical style, cubism was essentially an attempt to find a better and more complete way of representing forms on a flat surface.

There is room for a book on this subject, among the vast mass of publications about the visual arts that flow from British and American publishing houses every year. Gay art, from being a quasi-forbidden topic, is now fashionable, not least among would-be up-to-the-minute academics.

The artist Ingres was a supreme bourgeois who also succeeded in being one of the supreme rebels of 19th-century art. Like Caravaggio, his opposite in most respects, he is historically recalcitrant.

In Chinese culture, calligraphy is so closely allied to traditional modes of ink-and-brush painting as to be almost indistinguishable from them. There is no definite border between the two art forms, as this exhibition amply demonstrates.

'AIDS art' is essentially an American invention. It has now manifested itself in a large number of different locations, but is almost invariably based on a model of artistic activity that evolved in the United States - one that was a response to the impact made by the epidemic on sections of American society.

The Antonello da Messina exhibition now at the Scuderie del Quirinale in Rome is one of those rare occasions that takes place only once in a lifetime. In fact, an exhibition devoted to Antonello will almost certainly never happen again. Like Vermeer, whom in some respects he resembles through his quietism, he is known through very few paintings - less than 50 in all. About two-thirds of these have been gathered together for the exhibition.

Lucio Fontana is rightly regarded as one of the most important Italian artists active in the 20 years after World War II, important not only in Italy, but in a pan-European sense. It is, however, also important to remember additionally that he was born in Argentina and spent quite important parts of his early career there, working first as an assistant to his father, Luigi, a sculptor, and then independently.

The Tate Britain’s "display", Seeing Africa - it was hardly big enough to be called a proper exhibition - raised more questions than it answered. Consisting of paintings and sculptures drawn from a single private collection, it aimed to explore the subject of Africanisme through images of African people and African landscape made by European painters who traveled to the Dark Continent at the height of the colonial epoch. That is to say between the 1870s and the 1950s.

The magnificent Veronese show that opened at the National Gallery in London in 2014 met with a curiously subdued response from local reviewers. They recognized that it was a magnificent event of its kind, and one that was especially appropriate because the gallery has an important group of works by this 16th-century Venetian painter in its own collection, among them the famous Family of Darius Before Alexander.

The Gale Dictionary of Psychoanalysis defines ‘self-representation’ as “the image the subject has of him or herself based on his or her own interpretation.” The hugely influential 20th century psychoanalytic researcher and philosopher Jacques Lacan enlarges on this by speaking of “the finally donned armor of an alienating identity that will mark [the subject’s] mental development with its rigid structure.” Not surprisingly, psychoanalysts see this construct as a manifestation of the ego, and also as something intimately linked to narcissism.

Eminent art historian and writer Edward Lucie-Smith discusses an ambitious digital art book series called 100 London Artists, designed to celebrate London as an art city.

This year sees the 300th anniversary of the foundation of St. Petersburg, an event that is being widely celebrated here in London as well as in Russia. And today The Times of London carried a story about the "widespread sleaze" that is hampering the restoration of Russia's former capital city. Though Oleg Kulik is not a Petersburg artist, these two facts help to provide a context for his career. Western interest in and curiosity about Russia is acute. The tendency is, however, to look at the Russian past, not at the present.

Every now and then, an exhibition comes along that hits you in the solar plexus. The compact Daumier show at the Royal Academy in London is one of those. It is housed in the moderately sized Sackler Galleries on the top floor of the building, not in the main exhibition rooms below, where it would be swallowed up. Most of the works on view are quite small. Very few are more than medium sized. For the most part, the color is subdued. Indeed, some of the paintings seem monochromatic until you examine them more closely, The range of subjects is, if not exactly restricted, not hugely wide.

When Beryl Cook died, she was the subject of a large number of obituaries. Some of them were predictably condescending, which I suspect she would not have minded a bit. The really telling thing, however, is what has happened since then on the web. If you go to the site maintained by The Times, still regarded as the British paper of record, and look for the paper’s obituary archive, you will find a section within it devoted to "Artistic Genius". The subtitle is "Artists and makers who changed the way we see".

The tendency for art to detach itself from any duty to reflect observed reality manifested itself in avant-garde art production almost from the beginnings of the Modern Movement in art. It is already present in pure form in Malevich’s drastically reductive Black Square, which consists of exactly that, a black square on a white ground. It is interesting to note the way in which this work was exhibited when it was first put before the public.

Hammershoi is, in a certain sense, the Danish Vermeer, an artist whom he occasionally paraphrased. That is to say, a quietist painter obsessed by subtle effects of light, forgotten very soon after his death, but rediscovered and turned into a demi-god by a later generation.

The word avant-garde, so much used in connection with the various manifestations of contemporary art, is starting to have a strange, ironic ring to it. One might even claim that it is starting to signify what is behind the times, rather than in front of them. Like all such terms, it is in fact a metaphor, rather than a direct description. Borrowed from old-fashioned military terminology, it seeks to describe a situation where social norms are being perpetually challenged by artists. In the military sphere, where it originated, it is long out of use.

An anthology of essays and reviews by the eminent art historian and writer, Edward Lucie-Smith. The articles cover a broad span, from the Italian Renaissance of Giotto and Antonello da Messina, Leonardo, and Michelangelo, progressing to Rubens, Velázquez, and Ingres, with essays on William Hogarth, John Constable, and John Everett Millais for British art. With the experience of his landmark publications on modern art, which remain in print, the author sweeps the listener on a fabulous journey of perception.

The story of David Burliuk, now generally regarded as the father of Russian Futurism, is in some ways one of the strangest in the history of the Modern Movement in art. He was immensely influential in the years immediately before the Russian Revolution, at a time when the whole of the Russian cultural world was in ferment. And fairly soon after that, he was almost forgotten in his own country. This exhibition is, among other things, an attempt to correct an injustice.