Walter Sickert : The Camden Town Nudes 26/11/2007
It is probably no exaggeration to say that Walter Sickert (1860-1942) is little known among the general public. Outside the art world, however, his name is familiar to British social historians for his series on the seedy tenements of Camden (...)
Art and the Sublime 13/11/2010
Along with major shows, often based on prestigious loans from internationally acclaimed establishments intended for sell-out crowds drawn by extensive advertising campaigns, the Tate Gallery presents “in-house” exhibitions with little media (...)
Breaking the Rules : The Printed Face of the European Avant Garde 1900-1937 23/02/2008
Not many exhibitions offer such a wide selection of truly international works as the one assembled currently at the British Library by its curator Stephen Bury, who has been gently chided for taking the risk of bewildering the British public in (...)
An American’s Passion for British Art : Paul Mellon’s Legacy 16/12/2007
On the occasion of the centenary of the birth of Paul Mellon (1907-1999), the Royal Academy presents more than 150 works from the vast collections built up by this wealthy member of the celebrated American banking family. In fact, one of the (...)
Modern Painters : The Camden Town Group 11/03/2008
Walter Sickert (1860-1942) has just had a retrospective devoted to his “Camden Town Murder ??? series, but other members of the “Camden Town Group ??? which he founded in 1911 have not benefited from the same attention in the recent past – in fact (...)
A Victorian Master : Drawings by Frederic, Lord Leighton 15/04/2008
Ernest Gombrich once wrote about “the whirligig of taste” [1]and nowhere can this better apply than in the case of Victorian academic painting – and even more so in the case of its leading figure, Frederic, 1st Baron Leighton (1830–1896), whose (...)
Paths of Fame : Turner watercolours from the Courtauld Gallery 05/01/2009
One could say that the price to pay for the indisputable domination of Turner museology by the Tate Britain is of course that other establishments might feel “overshadowed”, “complexed”, “frozen” to the point of abandoning any attempt at approaching (...)
Wyndham Lewis Portraits 02/08/2008
Percy Wyndham Lewis’s name will be familiar to readers of The Art Tribune, at least in the United Kingdom – but one may wonder how many people, even among the educated public, really know what he did apart from writing a book in praise of Hitler (...)
Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia 24/03/2008
“Oh, what a bunch of naughty boys !???, “They really had some cheek !???, might be some of the silent exclamations visitors to the exhibition of this bawdy trio at the Tate Modern will make when they are confronted with their works – and our gang (...)
Romantics 10/12/2010
The Tate collections are so extensive that it can effortlessly stage two simultaneous, and beautiful, exhibitions on related subjects – presenting paintings and drawings by some of the same artists in both. Clearly, the theme of the “sublime” (...)