Head down to Piccadilly and the Royal Academy for the first big blockbuster exhibition of the New Year and I’m pleased to be able to report that the show is a good one. Picasso and Paper fills the dozen or so galleries of the main exhibition space with a cascade of works – drawings, cut-outs, … Continued
After the last couple of New Year blogs that have almost exclusively featured the work of women artists, normal service is now being resumed with a quick dash around half a dozen private galleries all of which are exclusively now showing sculptures, paintings and prints by men. Clearly, it’s a situation that reflects the wider … Continued
In the Review section of last week’s Observer Sunday paper – along with all the usual bland reports from the in-house critics, plus the mini-interviews with semi-celebrities that I’ve never heard of and the sudoku puzzles that I can never quite be bothered to finish off – there was a whole great cut-out-and-keep supplement devoted … Continued
Getting on the tube heading off to Tottenham Court Road, I pick up one of those free Metro papers that are scattered around the capital every morning in order to try to tempt commuters to forgo their daily digital routines of swiping through video clips, updating profiles and deciphering emojistic pictograms, and switch instead to … Continued
Having ended last year’s final blog by exiting the Royal Academy under the steely gaze of Lucian Freud‘s penetrating vision, I thought I’d risk turning round and, just like Orpheus or Edith, take a metaphorical look back and try to hack together a sort of review of the last year’s fifty or so trips into … Continued
Head down to Piccadilly and up to the Royal Academy for the last blog of the year which, by happy coincidence is, arguably, going to be about one of the best shows of the year. The exhibition in question being an interesting, entertaining and rather cleverly curated display of self-portraits that have been drawn, doodled, … Continued
Today, in a rare twist of the current wintry meteorological trends, the heavens have shed the grim gray shroud that has recently been providing that depressing sense of seasonally affective disordering and replaced it instead with a shimmering cyanean skyscape through which now shines a fiercely penetrating orb of sheer golden brightliness. And as for … Continued
Head down to South Kensington tube station and then walk up the steady slope that takes me past the tourists going to the Museums, the students going to Imperial College and the explorers going to the Royal Geographical Society. Finally I get to Kensington Gardens which is looking particularly radiant today, suffused as it is … Continued
Looking back through the diary, I seem to have spent the last few weeks covering all the big would-be blockbuster shows at London’s main public galleries – Blake at Tate Britain; Gormley at the Royal Academy; Bridget Riley at the Hayward; Nam June Paik at Tate Modern and Gauguin at the National Gallery. And while … Continued
As most people will probably know – well, maybe not most people but at least the majority of that select sophisticated societal segment who regularly read this blog will probably know – this year marks the quincentenary of the death of that most polymathical maestro of his, and perhaps any other era, the greatest of … Continued