Kossoff’s subject is London – roads, buildings, tube stations, individuals. His early cityscapes are “bare and joyless but [they] have authority”. That was true of postwar London. His more recent work is lighter; a school building is “a mighty structure that seems to stand for something more lasting”. Says one critic “an oeuvre that is among the most original in postwar painting”.
The Sackler families are prolific donors to arts organisations. They are now accused of misrepresenting the addictiveness of their pain control drug. US artist Nan Goldin opposes institutions accepting their “blood money” donations. London’s National Portrait Gallery has just announced that it will decline a donation. Tate and Guggenheim are set to follow.
Here is a vehemently different view of the arts patronage issue. How do we know that the Sacklers are morally “worse” than other donors? Institutions have been accepting their money for years. To reject it now is simply “over-politicisation”. The arts “are fast becoming just one more vehicle through which to strike moral poses, regardless of whether they have much real effect.”
A fun piece. When expensive art is moved, especially for museum shows, the logistics are “delicate, expensive and complex. In 2010, a courier lost a portrait by Corot worth some £850,000 while drunk in a New York hotel bar.” And then there’s the paperwork – “they’d lost the forms at the airport and were going to bump my shipment. I nearly lost out to some fresh fish.”
What thinking lies behind an abstract painting? Jack Whitten, who died late last year, recorded his thoughts in a diary. It reveals a roller coaster of ambition about his own art. He wanted a “synthesis of abstraction and subject matter”, but also to “get rid of the spiritual”. Sometimes he wanted “revenge”. Later, “please do not show me anything that doesn’t go beyond the self!”
This “magnificent” show has a painful resonance with the Brexit identity crisis. Nelson has salvaged a mass of obsolete machinery from post-war industrial Britain. A show “not of nostalgia but deep sadness” says one critic “It’s about the end of an era: industries moving on and out of the country … everything must go, entire eras of the past.” More images are here.
Philip Johnson was called the “Godfather of American architecture”. He helped bring architecture into the public discourse and, as a practicing architect, produced some acclaimed designs. This success papers over less lofty realities – a Nazi sympathizer; a great deal of second-rate work. “Many of his buildings, even churches and museums, look like malls.”
A landmark show. Facing stiff competition from Titian and Veronese, Tinteretto took from Michelangelo. Putting energised human figures in his paintings may provide them narrative force. It did indeed. Not all Tintoretto’s works are masterpieces but they always persuade. “Deeply original, often sublimely weird [he was] one of the most imaginative painters of the Renaissance.”
“Rapturous” acclaim for Tate’s show of Anni Albers’ weavings is but part of a bigger story. Despite Bauhaus credentials and groundbreaking modernism, her reputation faded. Weaving also fell from favour. Now this is reversing, the art/craft distinction discredited. The warp and weft of textiles creates a grid, modernism’s favourite “armature for the expressive aesthetic gesture”.
Lagerfeld insisted that he learned more from Hamburg’s Kunsthalle than from school. It showed. His fashion shows were masterpieces of the fabulous, even more perhaps than his designs. His personal life was a piece of highly curated performance art. He said variously “I want to be an apparition.” and “I’m very much down to earth, just not this earth.”
Do media images tell the truth? In one set of works Charlesworth blanked out newspaper pages, except for the photos, to reveal their latent meaning. Other works showed people in mid-air. Are these stunts or people attempting suicide? Her later manipulated glossy pictures pose the same question: do I accept “photography’s historical claim to credibility”?
By age 21, Kirstein had founded a literary journal and a contemporary art society. After graduating he chose the young MoMA as “the perfect repository for his many enthusiasms.” At 25, he co-founded the New York City Ballet! His contributions to modern art via institution building and support of individual artists “was one of the greatest of the twentieth century.” A video is here.
This bio piece makes Sacks sound intimidating – literature specialist, poet, Harvard academic and now, at age 69, successful painter. His paintings take years, sometimes having 10 or more layers. Not abstract art, he says, more non-representational. “They are like very slow action paintings … one step at a time. In a certain sense, it’s up to the materials to show me the way.”
Different people see things differently. In London, this show was praised for its “beauty”. On home soil it is the show’s “searing moments” that catch attention. Some 1960’s artists were trying to create distinctively ‘black’ art. While that didn’t quite happen, art did find its voice on race issues. Now, art focused on these issues has “a secure place within the art market”.