René Magritte was fond of jokes. There are several in René Magritte (Or: The Rule of Metaphor), a small but choice exhibition at Luxembourg & Dayan, 2 Savile Row W1 (until 12 May), that includes numerous variations, accomplished and disturbing, on similar ideas to his famous ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe’ painting. ‘L’usage de la
In the mid-1940s, Frank Auerbach remarked, the arbiters of taste had decided what was going to happen in British art: Graham Sutherland was going to be the leading painter. ‘Then downstage left, picking his nose, Francis Bacon sauntered on. And the whole scene was changed.’ But how did it alter? What happened to figurative painting
Leonard Rosoman is not a well-known artist these days. Many of us will, however, be subliminally familiar with his mural ‘Upstairs and Downstairs’ in the Grand Café at the Royal Academy, painted in 1986 when the artist was in his early seventies. Two worlds are portrayed with a degree of satire — dressy guests arriving
To bleak, boarded-up Margate — and a salt-and-vinegar wind that leaves my face looking like Andy Warhol’s botched 1958 nose-peel — to see Journeys with ‘The Waste Land’ at Turner Contemporary. The exhibition has been organised by a group of local residents, who selected the exhibits, designed the layout, and wrote the exhibition texts. In
One of the best things about Beehives, Bobs and Blow-dries — yep, an exhibition about hairdressing — is the reaction of visitors. Some are getting on a bit and their pangs of recognition as they pass 1970s straightening tongs or Carmen heated rollers are evident. One woman exclaimed, as she passed a Ronson hairdryer with
Listen closely, among the shelves of the last remaining music shops, in student dorm rooms and amid the flat whites and reclaimed wood of certain coffee shops, and you’ll hear a sound that many thought long banished. Check out the steadily rising sales figures of the past few years and there’s little doubt: the vinyl
When I first visited Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, I was shown around by Jim Ede, its founder and creator. This wasn’t an unusual event in the 1970s. I was an undergraduate, and in those days Ede — elderly, elegant and almost translucently ascetic — showed round anyone who rang his doorbell. It was rather as if
Walking around the Andreas Gursky exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, I struggled to recall what these huge photographs reminded me of. Gursky has built a career on colossal, panoramic pictures of subjects that are extremely ordinary — the view from a departure lounge of the empty runway at Schiphol airport, for example. Or, yet more
Seventeenth-century Roman art at its fullblown, operatic peak often proves too rich for puritanical northern tastes. And no artist was ever more Baroque than Gian Lorenzo Bernini, the supreme maestro of the idiom. But I love his work, which is why, on a spare afternoon in Rome before Christmas, I strolled over to the Borghese
The thing about Winnie-the-Pooh, 91 years old this year, is that he’s the creature of E.H. Shepard, who drew him, quite as much as he is of A.A. Milne, who created him. The words and the pictures came together for anyone who encountered Pooh Bear in the books rather than the film. Any exhibition about
‘It’s odd,’ Picasso once mused, ‘but you never see Modigliani drunk anywhere but at the corners of the boulevard Montmartre and the boulevard Raspail.’ He obviously suspected his friend of being a stage bohemian. There is, indeed, a touch of Puccini about Modigliani’s life — the poverty, his film-star good looks, the drink and drugs
Under the central dome of UCL — an indoor crossroads where hordes of students come and go on their way to lectures and lunch — there’s an intriguing exhibition on at the moment about death. ‘Human remains are displayed in this exhibition’, it says in white lettering on the floor atall four entrances, to warn
Erté was destined for the imperial navy. Failing that, the army. His father and uncle had been navy men. There were painters and sculptors on his mother’s side, but they were thought very frivolous. Romain de Tirtoff (‘Erté’ came from the French pronunciation of his initials) was born in 1892 at the St Petersburg Naval
Tove Jansson, according to her niece’s husband, was a squirt in size and could rarely be persuaded to eat, preferring instead to smoke fags and drink whisky. And when she did eat, it was usually salted cucumbers — to go with the drink. You know, this late in life, I may have encountered my role
The critic and painter Adrian Stokes once remarked on how fortunate Cézanne had been to be bald, ‘considering the wonderful volume that he always achieved for the dome of his skull’. It’s a good joke, and all the better for being perfectly true — as is demonstrated by the superb sequence of self-portraits included in
Leonardo da Vinci thought sculpting a messy business. The sculptor, he pointed out, has to bang away with a hammer, getting covered in the process with a nasty mixture of dust and sweat. In contrast the painter can sit at his easel, dressed like a gentleman, and portray the whole wide world and everything in
In the 1880s the young Max Klinger made a series of etchings detailing the surreal adventures of a woman’s glove picked up by a stranger at an ice rink. At a certain point the glove washes up, nightmarishly large, beside a sleeping man’s bed on to which a shipwrecked sailor is desperately hauling himself. Storm-tossed
During a panel discussion in 1949, Frank Lloyd Wright made an undiplomatic comment about Marcel Duchamp’s celebrated picture of 1912, ‘Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2’, in the presence of the artist. ‘I am sure he doesn’t himself regard it as a great picture now.’ At this Duchamp bridled, exclaiming in his excellent English, ‘I
‘Art by its very essence is of the new… There is only one healthy diet for artistic creation: permanent revolution.’ Jean Dubuffet wrote those words in 1963, and when Jean-Michel Basquiat burst on to the New York art scene 20 years later — barely out of his teens, untrained and black — he seemed to
Where was Degas standing as he sketched his ‘Laundresses’ (c.1882–4)? Did he watch the two women from behind sheets hanging to dry? Or was he hidden by steam from the basins? The laundry women are unselfconscious, unguarded. One reads aloud from a list, calling out shirts, collars, cuffs to be washed and ironed. Another leans
