Showing results by author "Edward Lucie-Smith" in All Categories

The first body art performer, as well as the first professional bodybuilder, was the showman Eugene Sandow (1867-1925). Though Sandow’s heyday occurred before the birth of the Modern Movement, there are compelling reasons for giving the primacy to him. Sandow, born Friedrich Wilhelm Müller in Prussia in 1867, left his native country in 1885 in order to avoid military service and first appeared on the London stage in 1885. His real celebrity began when the American impresario Florenz Ziegfield hired him to appear at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago.

The new exhibition at Tate Britain celebrates one of the best loved of all British artists, the landscape painter, John Constable. In his own lifetime, Constable was constantly struggling to catch up with his great rival, J. M. W. Turner, whose astonishing fluency he could never match. Turner has maintained his fame, but, among the British at least, Constable is now more intimately loved.

A good art collection is always much more than the sum of its parts. This applies with especial force to collections of contemporary work. A collection of this kind, whether the collector intends it to be so or not, is always a portrait - a reflection in the mirror of a particular epoch, and, willy-nilly, a self-portrait of the person who takes the trouble to bring it together.

As a working critic, I find the most difficult exhibitions to write about are those that combine an evidently important subject with a faintly dispiriting result. The new Edvard Munch show at Tate Modern is a case in point. Munch is undoubtedly a major Modernist artist, a Norwegian cultural icon who was the precursor and to some extent the inventor of what came to be known as Expressionism. One version of his composition, The Scream, very recently made a record price.

A study of Aubrey Beardsley's work exhibited at Tate Britain until May 25, 2020. The author considers the darkly vigorous imagery of the short lived genius, his graphic work for the notorious Yellow Book, and sublimely erotic illustrations for Lysistrata by Aristophane and Salome by Oscar Wilde, which frank imagery even shocked the author.

From the earliest times, human beings have found it difficult to represent their own bodies in a straightforward way. The rare painted images of humans in Paleolithic art are much less naturalistic than the images of animals created at the same epoch. At the dawn of art, representations of the nude body were simply vehicles for statement about the need for fertility if the human race was to survive successfully.

A review of the exhibition Late Constable at the Royal Academy London. Includes the family background of the artist, his career development, and working methods and technique. Noted works include "The Leaping Horse", "Cottage in East Bergholt", "Rainstorm at Sea", "Chain Pier Brighton", "Stonehenge", and "The Cornfield". Includes essays by Edward Lucie-Smith ("John Constable", 2006) and Janet Barber ("John Constable: Earth and Sky", 2012).

The Titian Show at the National Gallery here in London has just opened to the public again. It was available for just three days before the big lockdown. Now, it is with us once more, though on rather different terms from what was the case previously. You have to book a time. You have to be wearing a mask. You have to maintain distance between yourself and other visitors booked in for the same slot. Is it worth the hassle? Yes, of course it is. Titian is one of the greatest figures in the history of Western art.

An essay by Edward Lucie-Smith considers the Andy Warhol exhibition re-opening at Tate Modern on July 27. He puts forward a provocative view of the relevance of the art in an time of turbulent disruption. When the Warhol show returns to Tate Modern on July 27, almost the first thing you’ll meet if you go to see it will be a large painting, on two paired canvases, entitled Marilyn Diptych. It features repeated images the film star Marilyn Monroe.

Here can be no doubt that the Chinese exhibition at the Royal Academy in London is more than a merely artistic event. It represents a new stage in the burgeoning relationship between contemporary China and the West. The opening, originally scheduled for January, was brought forward to coincide with a State Visit to Britain by the Chinese president, Hu Jintao. The "Three Emperors" of the title were the second, third, and fourth rulers of the Qing Dynasty, and their period in power spanned nearly a century-and-a-half, from the mid-17th century until the end of the 18th.

Forgotten Empire, the new exhibition in London devoted to the great realm that Alexander the Great destroyed, is an openly political occasion, designed to stress links in the present as well as to revive interest in a part of the past that has more or less sunk into oblivion. It stresses the fact that, despite the tensions that now exist between the Islamic Republic of Iran and Western Europe, a degree of cultural cooperation is still possible.

His sculptures have never been afraid of being seen. What I mean by this apparently paradoxical statement is that Pomodoro has never needed the shelter of the museum - defined by me here as "a space set apart for art" - in order to make his point as an artist. His sculptures have never been afraid of being seen. What I mean by this apparently paradoxical statement is that Pomodoro has never needed the shelter of the museum - defined by me here as "a space set apart for art" - in order to make his point as an artist.

The Tate Britain’s "display", Seeing Africa - it was hardly big enough to be called a proper exhibition - raised more questions than it answered. Consisting of paintings and sculptures drawn from a single private collection, it aimed to explore the subject of Africanisme through images of African people and African landscape made by European painters who traveled to the Dark Continent at the height of the colonial epoch. That is to say between the 1870s and the 1950s.

It is a historical peculiarity of landscape painting that it begins with the artificial, and only after that proceeds towards the natural. For example, landscape paintings, and especially fanciful Nilotic panoramas, were one of the genres produced by artists in Pompeii. When, with the Renaissance, landscape painting once again started to establish itself after a long interval, the representations of the surrounding world that artists began to produce as a separate and independent genre, rather than simply as a background for human figures, were usually more fanciful than real.

Eco-art exhibitions are part of the trend of our times. Radical Nature, the show at the Barbican Art Gallery in London, demonstrated some of the possibilities and paradoxes of enterprises of this sort. Basically what the organizers had to do is to move the outside indoors. This set them both practical and, in their own terms at least, moral problems.

Pablo Gargallo is often described as "Cubist" sculptor, partly thanks to his signature technique of hollowing out or reversing volumes, and partly due to his links with Picasso, one of the two undoubted inventors of cubism. In the strict sense, the idea of cubist sculpture is an oxymoron. Despite its undoubted early links to the African tribal sculptures that partly inspired Picasso’s transition to a new and radical style, cubism was essentially an attempt to find a better and more complete way of representing forms on a flat surface.

One of the commonest and most loosely used terms in any discussion of contemporary art is the word avant-garde. Indeed it often seems to be taken for granted that valid contemporary art and avant-garde art are synonymous.

There is room for a book on this subject, among the vast mass of publications about the visual arts that flow from British and American publishing houses every year. Gay art, from being a quasi-forbidden topic, is now fashionable, not least among would-be up-to-the-minute academics.

The artist Ingres was a supreme bourgeois who also succeeded in being one of the supreme rebels of 19th-century art. Like Caravaggio, his opposite in most respects, he is historically recalcitrant.

'AIDS art' is essentially an American invention. It has now manifested itself in a large number of different locations, but is almost invariably based on a model of artistic activity that evolved in the United States - one that was a response to the impact made by the epidemic on sections of American society.