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Showing posts from April, 2018

A Queer Tale of Deception

Truth is often stranger than fiction, isn't it? Head to the newly opened venue of Charleston in Lewes for  Dorothy Hepworth and Patricia Preece: An Untold Story , an exhibition that relates a piece of art history that, you have to say, would make a good film.  And here are the two principal characters: Dorothy, on the left, a talented graduate of the Slade School of Fine Art , and her fellow student, friend, lover, partner and collaborator Patricia, perhaps not quite so talented, but both passionate about art.  The photograph seems to tell you a lot. Dorothy looks a little bit awkward and ill at ease, slightly frumpy, androgynous even. Patricia appears confident, glamorous, exuberant, perhaps a little.... possessive? But maybe we're getting ahead of ourselves. We need to establish the plot....   The rather retiring Hepworth and the outgoing, gregarious Preece became inseparable as students, and they planned to set up a studio together after graduation. In 1922, Preece took exam
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Opening in May

Shape of Light is the title of the new show that Tate Modern says aims to tell the intertwined stories of photography and abstract art for the first time. Man Ray and Alfred Stieglitz are among the pioneering photographers featured from May 2 to October 14. At the Royal Academy, the third of Tacita Dean's three spring shows at major London museums opens on May 19. This one focuses on Landscape  and runs to August 12. The two others --  Portrait  at the National Portrait Gallery and Still Life at the National Gallery -- can be seen until May 28. Edward Bawden , perhaps best known as an illustrator and graphic artist, is the subject of a wide-ranging retrospective at Dulwich Picture Gallery that's also intended to champion his work as a fine artist, including innovative watercolours in the 1930s. It's on from May 23 to September 9, following on from Dulwich's excellent David Milne show. The Guildhall Art Gallery in the City of London focuses on William De Morgan
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Cedric Morris -- More than Just Irises

Spring came late to Britain this year, but there are plenty of flowers to be seen in Cedric Morris's garden. This rather forgotten artist, who died in 1982, has two main claims to fame: firstly, as a botanist who developed nearly 100 irises, and secondly, as a teacher of Lucian Freud. Now he's being brought back to the public eye with two concurrent exhibitions in London: Artist Plantsman  at the Garden Museum in Lambeth and Beyond the Garden Wall at Philip Mould in Pall Mall. Morris was born in Swansea in 1889, the son of an industrialist, and his story really begins after World War I, when he met and fell in love with fellow artist Arthur Lett-Haines, known as Lett. They went off to Paris and got to know a circle that included Gris, Léger, Duchamp, Man Ray and Hemingway, as well as travelling extensively. As you enter the Garden Museum exhibition, one of the first pictures you see is a 1919 portrait of Lett, looking louche in slouch hat and bow tie. We see Morris next
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The Solitude of the City -- America's Cool Modernism

It must have been a disorienting era, the early 20th century in America, one of rapid change amid the onward march of the skyscraper and the automobile. That sense comes over clearly and strongly in America's Cool Modernism at the Ashmolean in Oxford. Here is art that is largely devoid of people, highlighting the strange new shapes of the technological revolution and the dislocation of the individual in a confusing new world. You'll discover names new to a European audience in a fascinating line-up of paintings, prints and photographs from the Met in New York and other American collections. Many of the works have never crossed the Atlantic. The familiar sunflower of the Impressionists takes on a new more abstracted form as we enter the show with Le Tournesol (The Sunflower) by Edward Steichen, from about 1920. It's a rare painting by an artist who destroyed most of his others and leaves you wondering what striking images he committed to canvas are lost. Plants and
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