I didn’t like this exhibition. There, I’ve said it. And I had been looking forward to it, too, after reading five star reviews in various publications. There are some showstopping paintings, if you’re into old masters, a few recognisable works, and a lot of loans from big hitting collections like the Louvre and the Prado, […]
Those with around £20 and a few hours in London to spare this weekend should get themselves to the National Portrait Gallery, where the exhibition Cézanne Portraits is due to close on Sunday. The exhibition is organised by the Musée d’Orsay and the National Gallery of Art in Washington as well as the National Portrait Gallery, and […]
Despite having been in London for close to eight years and having a personal and professional interest in museums, this was my first trip to Sir John Soane’s Museum. I can’t believe it took me that long! It is a slightly crazy place in the tradition of English eccentrics, a fascinating window into Enlightenment collecting […]
Let me preface this by saying I’m a massive (and proud) history geek, but it’s hard to underestimate how impressive it is seeing all of the bits usually missing from archaeological exhibitions and museum displays. The wood, the fabrics, the leather, the hair: the things that are normally inferred from the lack of them (an […]
Ah, the bank holiday weekend. A time to get out of London and piece together an agenda of interesting activities, hopefully interspersed with at least one pub lunch. At the start of May I spend a weekend in the West Riding of Yorkshire, including a day in Leeds, and enjoyed activities including a very windy […]
I recently had the good fortune to be in Milan with an evening to spare, and decided on going to the late evening opening at the Pinacoteca di Brera. I had been once before, last year, but hadn’t seen everything I wanted to see, and was expecting a nice evening of art appreciation. What I […]
I intend to go back to this exhibition again before it closes. Not because I loved it so much I just have to (this remains to be seen) but because the main drawbacks I found with this exhibition were organisational and design constraints: too many people, wall texts too hard to read and not enough […]
This is an exhibition with a very good starting point: a successful and creative businessman, buffeted by the vagaries of 20th Century history, whose story illustrates a much wider narrative. Plus that of a granddaughter (Anne Sinclair), public figure, painted by major artists as a child, and now author of a successful history of her […]
Artists whose creativity spills out of them – onto canvases, onto objects around them – fascinate me, it’s a reason I have such a soft spot for Jean-Michel Basquiat. It is also a principle behind Robert Rauschenberg’s artistic output, made all the more interesting by the fact that he did not set out on an […]
This is an interesting exhibition, which reflects on how we, as humans, see our fellow animals, and what effect our interactions with and understandings of animals have on them. It opens by looking Linnean classification of species (ie. the Enlightenment era division of living things into kingdoms, species, etc) including a fascinating and fragile dried […]
