Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from May, 2018

The Singular Stanley Spencer

A day at the seaside: stripey deckchairs, a pebbly shore, groynes, choppy sea, swimwear and towels drying on a line and the edge of a brightly coloured beach hut. It's a very English scene. And look, even the sun is out. Surely everybody's having fun?  Sadly, the painter -- a very English artist -- wasn't enjoying himself. Stanley Spencer had come back to Suffolk, a place where he'd previously known happiness, seeking solace after divorce from his first wife and the almost immediate breakdown of his second marriage. On the beach at Southwold, there was an air of "suburban seaside abandonment", he wrote in his notebook. But painting it, he was separated from the jollity by the high sea wall. "I felt a kindred feeling with the bathing suits in the line in front of me in the scene that they seemed to be taking no part, as I was not, with the activities on the beach."  The tale is told and the painting can be seen in Suffolk now, at Gainsborough's Ho...
Post a Comment
Read more

Subscribe to updates

Opening in June

The Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition  this year is a little bit special: It's the 250th, and Grayson Perry heads the committee that's picked the 1,200 or so art works on show from June 12 to August 19. Concurrently, the RA is putting on The Great Spectacle: 250 Years of the Summer Exhibition telling the story from Joshua Reynolds to the present day. There are two linked shows at the National Gallery as well, running from June 11 to October 7. Thomas Cole: Eden to Empire  is the first exhibition in the UK devoted to the British-born American landscape artist inspired by Turner and Constable (tickets can be had for less than £10 on weekdays, so the National is clearly not expecting Monet-size crowds.) At the same time, there's a free display with Ed Ruscha 's modern take on Thomas Cole's work in Room 1. Tate Britain marks the centenary of the end of World War I by examining the immediate impact on British, French and German art.  Aftermath , running from ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Monet -- Battle the Crowds to Get to Rouen Cathedral

There's no getting away from it: Monet & Architecture at London's National Gallery is a crowded exhibition. The first couple of rooms in particular are a bit of a slog as you try to manoeuvre your way along what is essentially a queue of people looking at the earliest (and to be honest, largely least interesting) of the 70-odd works. But stick with it: You'll eventually come to Rouen Cathedral and to Venice, and thankfully, and rather surprisingly, there's less of a crush to view the momentous art capturing gradations of light and weather on magnificent buildings that you've probably really come to see. It's often a bit of a problem with the National Gallery's subterranean Sainsbury Wing exhibition space: Some of the rooms are quite small, and here they're fairly densely hung, at least initially. This show, the gallery says, presents a new way of looking at Monet's art, demonstrating how he used architecture to create his compositions. It ma...
Post a Comment
Read more