The Boy Who Loved The Sea and Other Stories
Jenny Vuglar visits the strange worlds created by Paula Rego currently on show at the Jerwood Gallery, Hastings
art
Auguste Rodin at One Canada Square. Review by Jane McChrystal.
Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) was the consummate commercial artist. He devised a formula for making lots of money out of his work long before Andy Warhol proclaimed “Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art”.
Rachel Whiteread, Tate Britain, London. Review by Barbara Lewis.
For an artist whose career is based on confronting the spaces we either ignore or deliberately avoid, the now-demolished BBC office that reputedly inspired Room 101 in George Orwell’s 1984 is perfect subject-matter.
Art is Comic, MIMA, Brussels. Review by Barbara Lewis.
Art is Comic, billed as a light-hearted response to terror, is the latest exhibition to embrace rough, industrial brickwork as the perfect backdrop for popular artists with hundreds of thousands of followers and an outwardly casual attitude towards failing politics and social injustice.
Matisse in the Studio, Royal Academy of Arts, London. Review by Barbara Lewis.
“Matisse in the Studio” does not deliver the sensational overdoses of colour and the full-on confrontation with genius of the Tate blockbusters, but there is a place for this more digestible insight into the transformative way Matisse saw based on examining his use of “objets d’art” as inspiration.
The Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy, 2017, Burlington House, Piccadilly. Review by Jane McChrystal.
On the whole, the curators have given the works the space they need and brought a coherent approach to displaying them in relation to each other, which provides the viewer with a largely satisfying experience.
Stanley Spencer Poems
Thomas Ovans browses an ambitious anthology of poems inspired by the artist Stanley Spencer and finds that every picture may tell several stories
London Grip Poetry Review -Valentine
Following in Fitzgerald’s Footsteps: Brian Docherty reviews Ruth Valentine’s small but politically significant and beautifully illustrated new collection from Hercules Editions
Artemisia Gentileschi: Artist and Woman of Honour. Jane McChrystal.
Overlooked for centuries, her paintings were often wrongly attributed to her father, Orazio Gentileschi. In the same period her work sank to a level of obscurity equal to that one of her greatest influences, Caravaggio. His reputation was restored in the 1920’s. Artemisia Gentileschi had to wait a little longer.
The Yellow House: A novel about Vincent van Gogh. Review by Barbara Lewis.
The cliché is that first novels are always autobiographical. Dutch writer Jeroen Blokhuis instead hides behind the biographical in his verbal portrait of one of the greatest painters his nation has produced.
Wordstrokes: The Poetry of Art
Playing with ‘The Rules’: Brian Docherty considers an anthology whose poems could be viewed as case studies in ekphrasis – but also as much more than that.
Old Flo Returns to the East End of London, by Jane McChrystal.
On Thursday 16th November a group of local government dignitaries, representatives of the Canary Wharf Group PLC and arts professionals from the Henry Moore Foundation assembled in in a well-known cigar and jazz venue in Canary Wharf to celebrate the return of Old Flo.