John Craxton: A Modern Odyssey. Review by Barbara Lewis. John Craxton managed to emerge from school without passing a single exam, not even in art. Instead, charm, daring, connections, irrepressible talent and luck served him better than any merely formal qualifications.
exhibitions
CONFESSIONS OF A HIGHLAND ART DEALER: Kate Ashton reviews a memoir full of hope and persistence by Tony Davidson
Claudette Johnson’s exhibition Presence. Review by Jenny Vuglar. Johnson first came to attention in 1982 while a student at The Polytechnic Wolverhampton. Britain’s ‘black cultural renaissance’ began, not in the famous institutions of London but in the Polytechs of the north: Wolverhampton, Trent, Sunderland.
Sarah Lucas: Happy Gas. Review by Graham Buchan. It is clear from this retrospective of Sarah Lucas’s thirty-five year career that an obsession with tits, toilets, cigarettes, shoes and chairs informs much of her work.
Paula Rego: Crivelli’s Garden. Review by Graham Buchan. Two years ago Tate Britain mounted a major retrospective of Paula Rego’s work and it was a great exhibition. Now the National Gallery shows a single piece of Rego’s work, albeit a big one: Crivelli’s Garden is nearly ten metres wide and two metres high.
Hilma af Klint & Piet Mondrian: Forms of Life. Review by Graham Buchan. I recommend this show because any exhibition which redresses the balance in favour of a neglected artist is to be commended even if, as I think, af Klint’s work is not altogether good.
Extérieurs. Review by Barbara Lewis. Annie Ernaux in 2022 became the first French woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature after producing a body of work that charts her progress from working class origins, feelings of shame during her years being educated at private school that she was not sufficiently bourgeois, to her career as a teacher, then full-time writer.
By Barbara Lewis • art, exhibitions, photography • Tags: art, Barbara Lewis, exhibitions, photography