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AND NOW, THE GALLERY...



“Art is a way of seeing that is superior to mere sight."
- Dubuffet

All the visual art reviews on this blog, in one handy go-to list! Under a title catchphrase purloined from here. (Some split into two parts.)

I would say I have, in general, triple interests in art. First I’m keen on Modernism, particularly the era of ‘High Modernism’ running roughly from 1905 to around the end of the Second World War. (Of course, as I say in just about every review I write, Modernism saw itself as multi-disciplinary and it’s only retrofitting that tries to reduce it to a visual arts medium. But that’s the way it’s packaged so that’s the way we tend to come across it.) (A general polemic on Modernism lies here.)

I’m also keen on (for want of a better term) ‘popular arts’ and/or art designed for reproduction; the world of comics, animation, prints, posters, illustration, graphic design and street art. (Do they all belong together? I like to think they do!)

Finally, I’m a fan of folk art, naïve art and outsider art. 

In practice  these three get jumbled up together, so I haven’t tried to separate them at all in the list below.


I openly confess to being no sort of expert about any of this. I hopefully imagine this means I come to an exhibition ‘clean’, with open eyes and not too much baggage. I’ve always held that the best way to find out about a band was to see them live; it’ll all be there before you, in once concentrated dose. Similarly, the best way to get the measure of an artist is to submerge yourself in an exhibition.


ANCIENT + ETHNIC ART


HAJJ: JOURNEY TO THE HEART OF ISLAM (1)
HAJJ: JOURNEY TO THE HEART OF ISLAM (2)
(British Museum, London)
The history, art and culture of the pilgrimage to Mecca that every Muslim must make once in their lives.

ON TOPPLING TOWERS 

A polemic disguised as a review of the ‘Babylon: Myth and Reality’ exhibition at the British Museum

SEDUCED: ART AND SEX FROM ANTIQUITY TO NOW 

...with a focus on erotic art from the East.

TERRACOTTA BOYS ON TOUR (‘THE FIRST EMPEROR: CHINA’S TERRACOTTA ARMY’) 

(British Museum, London)
Not really a proper review of this show, more a reaction to something silly written in the Guardian about it.

ABSTRACT + SEMI-ABSTRACT ART


'LEE KRASNER: LIVING COLOUR'
(Barbican, London)
American Abstract Expressionist, perhaps best known as the wife of Jackson Pollock, gets an overdue solo retrospective…


'SHAPE OF LIGHT; 100 YEARS OF PHOTOGRAPHY + ABSTRACT ART'
(Tate Modern, London)
On the inter-relationship between abstract art and photography, abstract photography, anti-photography and more!

(Royal Academy, London)
A two-part look at American Abstract Expressionism, taking in Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still, David Smith, Mark Tobey and more!

(Tate Modern, London)
Can Kandinsky's turn to incorporate abstraction really be reduced to something so linear as a path? (Part of a brief series on abstraction and semi-abstraction in the arts.)

BRITISH MODERNISM


'WALTER SICKERT'
(Tate Britain, London)
The controversial Impressionism-influenced artist who brought Modernism, murk and menace to the genteel world of British art.


(Barbican Gallery, London)
Britain - yes, Britain! - in the Fifties - yes, the Fifties! - was a high-water-mark of Modernist art. What weird flowers grew from those bomb sites!

(Towner Gallery, Eastbourne)
Brother to the more famous Paul, Nash painted both the desolate No Man's Land and his home English landscape.

'JULIAN TREVELYAN; THE ARTIST AND HIS WORLD'
(Pallant House Gallery, Chichester)
Surrealist disciple, British Modernist and naive artist and print-maker.


'IVON HITCHENS: SPACE THROUGH COLOUR'
(Pallant House Gallery, Chichester)
The British Modernist who lived in Sussex much of his life and gained inspiration from its landscape.

'ALL TOO HUMAN' 1: SICKERT, SPENCER, FREUD + BACON
'ALL TOO HUMAN' 2: KOSSOFF, AUERBACH, KITAJ + SOUZA
(Tate Britain, London)
The post-war return to Expressionism, taking in the human figure in all it's flabby foibles plus monumental yet convulsive depictions of London.

The much-celebrated Scottish Pop Artist Eduardo Paolozzi with his impossibly accumulated collages, brutalist sculptures and widespread public art.
(Pallant House Gallery, Chichester)
Charting the breadth and... uh.. further breadth of the British art movement that first tried to engage with the mass media, and ended up succumbing to it.

(Pallant House Gallery, Chichester)
The hows and whys of how a generation of cutting-edge Modernists one day turned around to embrace those cold marbles of Classicism.
(Tate Britain, London)
Surrealism's coming home with a look at the English artist famous for his surreal views of English landscapes and First World War battlefields.
(Towner Gallery, Eastbourne)
The brush behind the Modernist classic 'The Mud Bath' later became a landscape painter. With results too often overlooked...

'BOMBERG'
(Pallant House Gallery, Chichester)
On the Sixtieth anniversary of his death, a look at the landscapes and portraits from the inter-war years of the great British Modernist David Bomberg.


(Somerset House, London)
The public art movement that filled post-war Britain with new architecture and sculpture shows how foreign a country the past can be...
(Pallant House Gallery, Chichester)
How did his stay on French shores influence the English artist Walter Sickert? And how well did he succeed in making Impressionism his own, and conveying the fin de siecle feeling of a society at unease with itself?
(Tate Britain, London)
The popular painter of Northern industrial scenes finally becomes Tate-worthy with a fitting retrospective. Just don't mention that risible 'Matchstick Men, Cats and Dogs' record… oh, wait I did.

(Pallant House Gallery, Chichester)
How the British response to the Spanish struggle against fascism marked both a political and an artistic frontier.
(Pallant House Gallery, Chichester)
The “English Surrealist”, featuring sailors getting down with prostitutes, sailors fighting with sailors, sailors getting down with sailors, sailors fighting with prostitutes... and more!!!
(Brighton Museum)
A very British take on post-impressionism

DO YOU SCREAM IN COLOUR? - FRANCIS BACON 
(Tate Britain, London)
The dark British painter famous for depicting screaming Popes and saying “well of course we are meat”

COMICS, CARTOONS, ILLUSTRATION + PRINTS


'HOKUSAI: BEYOND THE GREAT WAVE'
(British Museum, London)
Diving into the great Japanese print-maker, creator of the iconic Great Wave, asking how much he influenced and was influenced by Western art, and how much of his inspiration was an eastern world-view.

(British Museum, London)
A recently unearthed tranche of original drawings by the historic Japanese print-maker.


ROWLANDSON, GILLRAY AND THE GOLDEN AGE OF BRITISH CARICATURE: THE ARRIVAL OF CARTOONING
ROWLANDSON, GILLRAY AND THE GOLDEN AGE OF BRITISH CARICATURE: THE NAPOLEONIC WARS IN THE PRINTS
(British Museum and Queens Gallery, London)
A two-part, two-exhibition look at the birth of British political cartooning as we know it, taking in the Regency crisis, the changing ways the French Revolution and Napoleon were depicted ... and taking a prat-fall part-way through.

(British Library, London)
The changing face and reputation of comics upon this sceptered isle.

(University of Brighton Gallery)
Just what it says on the lid from Eric Gill’s brother

RONALD SEARLE, GRAPHIC MASTER 
(Cartoon Museum, London)
The celebrated cartoonist chiefly known for ’St. Trinians’.

RUDE BRITANNIA: BRITISH COMIC ART (1)
RUDE BRITANNIA: BRITISH COMIC ART (2) 
(Tate Britain, London)
Exploring the comic, the satirical, the bawdy and the absurd in British art… so no, not a short exhibition!

REVOLUTION ON PAPER: MEXICAN PRINTS 1910-1960 
(British Museum, London)
Popular images from the Mexican revolution and beyond

PRESS AND RELEASE AND THE ARISTS SPEAK 
(Phoenix Gallery, Brighton)
A celebration of artists’ books and independent publishing

CONTEMPORARY ART


'SOULS GROWN DEEP LIKE THE RIVERS'
(Royal Academy, London)
Contemporary Black Southern artists create with whatever they have to hand, including (if infrequently) art materials.

'PETER DOIG'
(Courtauld Gallery, London)
The contemporary British artist who's effectively the poet of estrangement.

'MIKE NESLON: EXTINCTION BECKONS'
(Hayward Gallery, London)
A series of super-sized immersive installations to get lost in, stuck up with old-school saws, hammers and nails.

(Hayward Gallery, London)
Fabric and textile-based installations as the artist looks back on her life from her Eighties and Nineties…

(Tate Britain, London)
...whose art encompassed expressionism, surrealism, collage, magic realism and the folk tales of her native Portugal.

'BASQUIAT: BOOM FOR REAL'
(Barbican, London)
The well-known, if sadly short-lived, New York artist with graffiti roots.

(Tate Modern, London)
Themes of exile pervade in this solo show of the Palestinian expat artist, whose work stretches from performance pieces to installations and back again.

'ANSELM KIEFER'
(Royal Academy, London)
The acclaimed German artist, given to gargantuan canvases with trans-historic, cosmological and yet often controversial subjects. All was too much (in a good way) as old works and new overpowered your attention!

SHOOT THE WRX: ARTIST + FILM-MAKER JEFF KEEN
(Brighton Library and Museum)
A career-spanning retrospective gives us a chance to reassess the irrepressibly multidisciplined Brighton artist and his mythic universe


A comparison between the two artists' attitude to, and borrowings from, popular culture

CONTEMPORARY ART - IS IT ALL JUST A GREAT BIG STEAMING PILE OF CRAP?
A detour round Tate Britain, taking in Jess Flood-Paddock and Jake Chapman, the better to ask the questions which everybody else does

LIS RHODES' LIGHT MUSIC
(The Thanks, Tate Modern, London)
Lis Rhodes' instillation piece, where electronic music generator doubles as light show, works like a discotheque for Modernists.

THE FORTY PARK MOTET/ MESOPOTAMIAN DRAMATURGIES/ EVOLUTION OF FEARLESSNESS (THREE BRIGHTON FESTIVAL EXHIBITIONS) 
(various venues, July 2011)
Installations by Janet Cardiff, Kutling Ataman and Lynette Wallworth

BRIAN ENO: RESTORING THE BALANCE 
A report on Eno’s festival appearances which includes his installations ‘Seventy Seven Million Paintings’ and ‘Speaker Flower Sound Installation’


PANIC ATTACK: ART IN THE PUNK YEARS 
(Barbican, London)
Punk inspired and spirited art from Britain and America, 1974 to 1984. This review originally appeared in ‘Last Hours’.

DADA + SURREALISM

'OBJECTS OF DESIRE: SURREALISM + DESIGN 1924 - TODAY'
(Design Museum, London)
Can an art style dedicated to disruption meet with a medium that's all about utility? Let's find out...

(Tate Modern, London)
On Surrealism's de-centred, border-busting global reach.

(Dulwich Picture Gallery, London)
How the surreal erupted in our rainy, deferential land.

'DORA MAAR'
(Tate Modern, London)
Who blended Surrealism, glamour and documentary photography to find nothing was so surreal as reality itself.

'DOROTHEA TANNING'
(Tate Modern, London)
The Surrealist who depicted wild desires in the great indoors.

'DALI/DUCHAMP'
(Royal Academy, London)
The arch-Surrealist and deviser of the lobster telephone set against the pioneering Dadaist who dragged a urinal into a gallery.

(White Cube Gallery, London)
Responses from women artists to Surrealism, which while offering liberation often only gave them misogyny.

'GIACOMETTI'
(Tate Modern, London)
The Swiss sculptor whose worked swerved between Surreal and abraded, elongated, expressionist figures, and in-so-doing summed up his time.

'WIFREDO LAM'
(Tate Modern, London)
The important Modernist artist, often referred to as "the Cuban Surrealist", shouldn't be stuffed in a box marked 'ethnic'.

'JOSEPH CORNELL WANDERLUST'
(Royal Academy, London)
A rare retrospective for this friend of the Surrealists, who devised strange and fantastical shadow boxes composed of found objects plundered from New York thrift stores.

DUCHAMP, MAN RAY, PICABIA 
(Tate Modern, London)
Three of Dadaism’s most infamous and provocative characters in one place at one time. Expect befuddlement.


EXPRESSIONISM + SYMBOLISM


'MUNCH: MASTERPIECES FROM BERGEN'
(Courtauld Gallery, London)
How Munch became Munch, and moved art from daylight to twilight in the process.

(British Museum, London)
The Norwegian Expressionist's prints. Including... you know... that one.

(Royal Academy, London)
Four female Fauvist/Expressionist artists rescued from art history footnotes.

FANTASTICAL ART


'WILLIAM BLAKE'
(Tate Britain, London)
Be Blake a Romantic, a Symbolist, a comics artist before his time, or beyond all the above?

'TOVE JANSSON (1914-2001)
(Dulwich Picture Gallery)
The creator of the Moomins was also a prolific painter, illustrator, political cartoonist, and comic strip and poster artist


'INTO THE UNKNOWN: A JOURNEY THROUGH SCIENCE FICTION'
(The Barbican, London)
From Russian Modernism to toy plastic robots. Including the genre’s family recipe, historical origins, family links to Modernism, plus future cities and all that fly in them. While asking just how SF got so darned mainstream anyway.

(Royal Academy, London)
The fantastical Belgian artist who indulged his obsession for Carnival - including masks, skulls, crowds and Jesus. (Yes, Jesus, but not as we know him.)

(Dulwich Picture Gallery, London)
In the compelling impossibility of Escher, expect perspective distortions, multiple levels of reality and morphing and tessellating forms. No cash refunds should you get giddy.

FOLK + OUTSIDER ART


(Tate Britain, London)
Strange be the goings on as the villagers take over the great country house in the first major gallery exhibition of Folk art.

(Barbican, London)
This time a career-spanning retrospective of the Art Brut founder, also dipping into his personal Outsider Art collection.

(Pallant House Gallery, Chichester)
Companion pieces to 'Dubuffet:Transitions' - 'Outside In', a group show of contemporary outsider art, and 'Pat Douthwaite: The Uncompromising Image.' 
(Pallant House Gallery, Chichester)
The pioneer of Art Brut (aka Outsider Art) and arch-enemy of Classicism receives a rare retrospective, mostly focusing on his Sixties work.

FUTURISM + VORTICISM


(Estorick Collection, London)
How Italian Modernism in a few short years segued from the wild, brash dynamism of Futurism to the strangely unsettling world of Metaphysical painting.

(Tate Britain, London)
The sometime/ sometime not Vorticist, who rejected the art establishment for an idiosyncratic take on Modernist style and British proletarian culture

Britain’s combative answer to Italian Futurism

SHOWS OF FUTURE PAST 
(Aug. 2009)
A comparison between two Tate Modern exhibitions: the Italian-set ‘Futurism’, and the Russian-based ‘Rodchenko and Popova: Defining Constructivism.’

IMPRESSIONISM, POST-IMPRESSIONISM + FAUVISM


'CEZANNE'
(Tate Modern, London)
The dissident Impressionist was not about dazzling you with sights, but whispering doubts in your ear.

'INVENTING IMPRESSIONISM'
(National Gallery, London)
Beneath the mythologising, how much were they a bold new movement who set painting free?

(National Gallery, London)
How did the most celebrated Impressionist style the relationship between nature and culture?

(Royal Academy, London)
Degas' obsessions with indoor scenes, with capturing movement and with women at work.

'VAN GOGH AND BRITAIN'
(Tate Britain, London)
The great Dutch post-Impressionist's (somewhat brief) time in London and the post-hoc cult of his life

'PIERRE BONNARD; THE COLOUR OF MEMORY'
(Tate Modern, London)
Widely thought a post-Impressionist, he was perhaps more of an anti-Impressionist, using Impressionist devices against themselves.

GAUGUIN: MAKER OF MYTH 
(Tate Modern, London)
The pioneering post-impressionist has adventures away from home

'GAUGUIN PORTRAITS'
(National Gallery, London)
Is there anything more to them than a monstrous ego? Remarkably, yes.


MODERNISM IN GENERAL


'PHILIP GUSTON'
(Tate Modern)
The dissident of the New York School, who abandoned abstraction to make dumbed-down art for a dumbed-down world.

(Tate Britain + Tate Modern)
Looking at art's attempts to capture the carnage of the war. And how it led simultaneously to a rise in spiritualism and to Surrealism.


(Tate Britain + British Museum)
Asking the question “who’d want to be a Futurist after the Future arrived?”, by looking (mostly) at the under-rated British Modernist CW Nevinson

'ART OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR 3: DISQUIET ON THE EASTERN FRONT'
(Tate Britain + Tate Modern)
Looking at German art, including the distorted subjectivities of Expressionism, the savage prints and collages of Dada and Otto Dix’s New Objectivity.

(Royal Academy, London)
This overview of art from the American depression chiefly starred Grant Wood’s well-known ‘American Gothic’, but went from the small-town heart of America in art, the big gleaming city.

'GEORGE BELLOWS: MODERN AMERICAN LIFE'
(Royal Academy, London)
The arresting New York scenes of the American "Ashcan' realist. (Part of a short series on Modernism and the City.)


Two classic Mexican artists who mixed modernist with folk styles

NEO-DADA, FLUXUS, CONCEPTUAL + AUTO-DESTRUCTIVE ART


(Tate Modern, London)
“The work is volatile and inchoate. It seems to simply shrug off analysis... Art is often about trying to bring order to the world, through the manipulation of symbols. Rauschenberg reminds us we can’t even bring order to art.”

(Tate Britain, London)
The anti-art movement that arose to pull the rug from under Modernism just when it finally seemed to triumph.

(Hayward Gallery, London)
The best exhibition you'll never see, stuffed with invisible or otherwise unseeable works.

Conceptual, performance and installation art hitting the streets of Downtown Manhattan.

GUSTAV METZGER: DECADES 1959–2009 
(Serpentine Gallery, London)
Is the work of this renowned auto-destructive artist a glass half-smashed or half-standing?

PHOTOGRAPHY


'THE RADICAL EYE'
(Tate Modern, London)
Modernist photography from the Sir Elton John collection. How the inter-war generation of Modernists became such happy snappers.

'CONSTRUCTING WORLDS: PHOTOGRAPHY AND ARCHITECTURE IN THE MODERN AGE'
(Barbican Gallery, London)
The symbiotic relationship between photography and the city, from the gleaming Modernism of Thirties New York to the excessive banality of neoliberalism in present day China, Afghanistan and the train ride home. (No, really! The train ride home…)

EXPOSED: VOYEURISM, SURVEILLANCE + THE CAMERA 
(Tate Modern, London)
Photographic exhibition exploring notions of voyeurism

RUSSIAN MODERNISM


'NATALIA GONCHAROVA'
(Tate Modern London)
Neo-Primitivist plus Futurist, in her day the belle of the avant-garde ball, since too often overlooked.

'IMAGINE MOSCOW: ARCHITECTURE, PROPAGANDA,REVOLUTION)
(Design Museum, London)
The story of six unrealised architectural projects in post-Revolutionary Moscow, bringing in paintings and propaganda posters along the way.

'REVOLUTION: RUSSIAN ART 1917-1932' 1: THE NEW ICONOGRAPHY
'REVOLUTION: RUSSIAN ART 1917-1932' 2: THE RADICAL FRINGE
(Royal Academy London)

A two-part piece looking respectively at Futurism, Constructivism and all that was self-avowedly revolutionary in Russian art of this all-too-brief era. Closely followed by art of the peasantry, plus the stuff simply too maverick for categorisation. Personal favourite line: "It’s the Godzilla versus Mecha-Godzilla of revolutionary iconography."


'MALEVICH: REVOLUTIONARY OF RUSSIAN ART'
(Tate Modern, London)
Was Malevich's expunging of the representational in his art a revolutionary turn or a step into a formalist blind alley? (Part of a brief series on abstraction and semi-abstraction in the arts.)

BUILDING THE REVOLUTION: SOVIET ART + ARCHITECTURE 1915-35 (1)
BUILDING THE REVOLUTION: SOVIET ART + ARCHITECTURE 1915-35 (2)
(Royal Academy, London)
How post-revolutionary Soviet art ventured into the third dimension, and tried to make use of itself in transforming the world.

SHOWS OF FUTURE PAST 
(Aug. 2009)
A comparison between two Tate Modern exhibitions: the Italian-set ‘Futurism’, and the Russian-based ‘Rodchenko and Popova: Defining Constructivism.’

FROM RUSSIA: FRENCH AND RUSSIAN MASTER PAINTINGS FROM MOSCOW AND ST. PETERSBERG  1870-1925 
(Royal Academy, London)
Just what it says on the lid!


ROMANTICISM


(Tate Britain, London)
It's official! Turner's later years really were the most golden, as the time he most successfully found the sublime in the world. And he still packs something of a wallop, even today.

(Tate Britain, London)
Were these Romantic Brit painters kitsch in technicolour or steam-punk pioneers of Modernism? The short answer is "yes".

SCULPTURE


(Tate Modern, London)
The Tate's retrospective on the pioneering American artist and deviser of the mobile, who made sculpture float and dance...

(Tate Britain, London)
An overdue career-spanning retrospective on who was almost certainly Britain's finest post-war sculptor, with her evocative marine forms.
MODERN BRITISH SCULPTURE (2) 
(Royal Academy, London)
Wide-ranging works spanning the years of British sculptural history

HENRY MOORE 
(Tate Modern, London)
Is Britain’s best-known sculptor now safe from harm?

...plus check out my photos of graffiti and street art. These started out on Flickr, until Yahoo decided in their benevolence to cut off my access while still charging me for it. At which point they moved to 500px.