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July 2022
For the past twenty years Christiane Kubrick, the widow of the film director Stanley Kubrick, has hosted an arts fair in the grounds of Childwickbury Manor, their magnificent estate near St Albans http://childwickburyarts.com. The three day festival, an inspiration for artists and would-be artists alike, is held over the first weekend of July and showcases artisans from around the UK:painters, printmakers, metal workers, jewellers, clothes designers, potters, woodcarvers, leatherworkers and stonemasons come to meet the public face to face and sell direct to them.
Christiane Kubrick is an established artist of many years standing. Her richly decorated paintings adorn several scenes in Stanley Kubrick’s 1999 movie Eyes Wide Shut, starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, and partly filmed at the nearly by Luton Hoo Estate. Christiane was previously an actress and met her husband on the set of his film Paths of Glory (1957) Sadly, he died shortly after completing Eyes Wide Shut, and is buried at Childwickbury. A peaceful feeling permeates the fern forest beside the green fields where the artists are invited to camp overnight.
Not content to watch the crowds wandering in her gardens, Christiane sets up her easel and favourite painting chair and paints surrounded by winnowing plants. Her flow is only interrupted by people asking for a signed copy of her book Paintings, or curious onlookers taking photographs. Plants, trees and flowers appear in many of her still lives and landscapes with prints and originals on show or for sale in her tent. https://christianekubrick.com . Amongst several other paintings which feature her husband, Remembering Stanley is a touching image of him relaxing by a lily pond.
The fair resvolves around Childwickbury’s impressive stables yard, once used as a stud farm, where luxurious lotions hand-made in nearby Harpenden are a tempting purchase. The aromas from the tasty street food and coffee stalls waft about the impeccably manicured gardens: sweet and savoury crepes, a bistro in a bun, or the South African delicacy "bunny chow," washed down with artisanal Ice creams and ales. There is an interactive art space especially for kids, who are entertained by the riotous antics of performer Johnny Slap.
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Vincent Van Gogh in Britain
If you have not visited the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam then Van Gogh in Britain at the Tate Britain is a chance to see the selected works of one of the world’s most gifted artists. The exhibition covers the time frame that Van Gogh spent living and working in England, firstly taking the wholesale orders of art prints, packing and despatching them for the Dutch art dealers Goupil.
During 1873-76 Van Gogh learns about art at the warehouse and visits the Royal Academy Summer exhibitions where he admires the work of John Everett Millais and John Constable. Exposed to life in Victorian London, he buys a top hat and becomes a fan of the hand engraved woodblocks made by the “Black and White Illustrators” in The Graphic and the Illustrated London News. He later buys 21 volumes of The Graphic, almost the complete run from 1869-80 and allows the lines and marks of the engraver Gustave Dore to influence his own work.
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Barbican Art Gallery, London UK Sam Burcher and Jane Wallace review.
October 2017
This is the first large-scale exhibition in the UK of the work of American artist Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988). Clearly, something is amiss that not a single work by such a prolific 20th Century artist is held in a public collection here. Interest in Basquiat has piqued since his Air Power (1984) sold as part of the late David Bowie’s art collection for £7.1 million at Sothebys in London, November 201
There are over a hundred startling paintings on three floors plus film of the artist speaking to camera. A strikingly prodigious young talent, it is fitting that his work has been gathered from a variety of sources for an international audience. His vibrant, raw imagery, abounding with fragments of bold capitalised text offer insights into his encyclopaedic interests ranging from anatomy to symbolism, skilfully integrated into paintings and collages. Leonardo da Vinci's Greatest Hits (1982) is a good example.
Coming of age in the late 1970’s in the post-punk underground art scene in downtown New York led to a meeting with Andy Warhol and collaborating on murals and installations for the Mudd Club, Area and Palladium nightclubs, which typifies his role as metteur en scene of this particular era in modern art. Famous (1982) conveys the Warhol connection, whilst Untitled (1980) conveys the mood.
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30 Sept 2017
The V&A distinguishes itself with yet another fantastic exhibition, Jane Wallace reviews.
Today marks the preview of Opera:Passion Power and Politics, the Victoria and Albert Museum’s autumn exhibition in collaboration with the Royal Opera House. Probably the coolest museum in the world, the V&A is placing itself at the cutting edge of art, fashion, history and more recently music. Under the direction of Nicholas Coleridge, the Chair of Trustees, Conde Nast Chairman and ancestor of the poet, the V&A is a veritable goldmine.
It was in 2013 that the now famous David Bowie Is exhibition blossomed, decorating the hallowed walls with everything David Bowie. From stage costumes to blotchy penned lyrics,to “Life on Mars” Major Tom to much more, all charting the seamless shift of personas from Ziggy Stardust to the Thin White Duke et al. To be there was to know this chameleon-like pop star so much more intimately. Mothers from the provinces brought their teenage sons to peer into the memorabilia.
Savage Beauty, Europe’s first major retrospective of Alexander Macqueen’s exquisite couture, followed hot on Bowie’s heels in March 2015 breaking all previous records for ticket sales. In all, 493,043 people saw the show and over the last two weekends of its run the V&A remained open all night.
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29th September 2017
I
Iconoclasts explores the experimental and often transformational practices of thirteen groundbreaking artists inviting us to engage with what modern day iconoclasm might be. Whether these talented artists are iconoclasts of 21st Century remains to be seen. Meanwhile, all are driven by an urge to produce art in an intriguingly diverse way. The sumptuous space inside Sloane Square’s Saatchi Gallery provides an excellent setting to discover the variety of work on offer.
A standout three-dimensional piece is Echoes of the Kill by Alexi Williams Wynn. She uses a special blend of wax, steel and wood to describe the deepest hollows of cow and horse lungs. She represents them as translucent coral, a golden forest or synaptic bronchioles of higher forms of intelligence. In fact, Williams has been lucky with lungs, recently given the chance to open the dead body of a Narwal washed up in Belgium and given one of its lungs to create art with. An upcoming solo show of her works in Ghent will feature an installation including the whale lung.
If you like textiles, you’ll love gay textiles! Josh Fought creates calendars, memorials and waterfalls from glittery pink weaves and from indigo hemp. His large tapestries are adorned with self-help books, affirmations, time-faces, nail polish, gloves, pretzels and badges in the most delightful way. He combines Duchampian-punky everyday found objects with the language of a community.
Renne So’s innovative and playful knitted portraits explore the transformation of visual identity from illustration to ancient civilisations. She uses a 1980’s knitting machine to create motifs as diverse as a Victorian top hat to the curls of an Assyrian beard. Black outlines filled with flat blocks of colour portray mysterious genre scenes, the central character repeated throughout her portraits inhabits a infinite world of negative space.
Of the painters, Danny Fox is probably the name to watch. His large-scale oils present the human figure as hero, following the history tradition of painting. A large portrait of a man on a horse, The Salt that Killed the Ramen, evokes the bright colours of Mexico as does Ice Cream Seller. The latter particularly has a provincial feel, except the lone man is pushing an ice-cream cart instead of a plough, so has been modernised in that way. Fox has travelled far and wide from his birthplace of St Ives creating allegorical and representational work.
Another painter playing with history is Makiko Kudo, who recalls traditional Japanese prints and inhabits them with dreamy, Manga-like characters. He says, “Constructing a painting is similar to dreaming. Shuffling different landscapes, creating stories and connecting them with emotion and imagination, like a collage or a jigsaw puzzle. His watery landscapes evoke skilful impressions of Monet.
Thomas Mailaender’s Illustrated People (2014) are edgy, photographic prints of bodies that bring a new and surprising meaning of the phrase “double-take.” He burns the original negatives of past social conflicts onto the skins of unknown subjects with a UV lamp and photographs the temporary results. The strips of film stand out from the patches of red-raw skin on white flesh, an example of Mailaender’s fascination with the wrong things in the wrong place. His compulsive breakdown of human beauty is inventive, amusing and thought provoking.
Other exhibitors are Maurizio Anzeri, Matthew Chambers, Daniel Crews-Chubb, Aaron Fowler, Dale Lewis. Kate Mccquire and Douglas White.
The show runs until 7th January 2018 at the Saatchi Gallery, London, free entry.
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1st July 2017
The celebrated Japanese artist known as Hokusai (1760-1849) believed that when humans reached the age of 61, their life cycle began again. It follows that his best known work, Great Wave (1831), was produced when he was in his 70’s. Changing his name many times during his long lifetime, he settled on the name he called himself after the North Star, also meaning North Studio.
Hokusai lived in Edo, the former name for Tokyo, with his daughter Oi. They were constantly moving due to poverty. A fervent Buddhist, he produced hanging scrolls of Monk Nicheran sitting on a rock (1811). Everywhere he went, he recited a mantra.
His most notable works utilised Prussian Blue, a newly acquired import into the Japanese market in the early 1900’s. He blended this pigment with indigo to produce the finest and widest shades of blue. It was the series of 36 views of Mount Fuji that finally gave him a living and made his name. Fuji features in the background of Great Wave and prominently in Red Fuji where the mountain is coloured a fiery orange-red.
At the end of his life he had more than 200 students and would throw his drawings out of the window as good luck charms, fortunately these were retrieved, along with many of his letters. When he was 90, he wrote that just 5 or 10 more years of life would make him the perfect artist. But, he already was a great artist, his unceasing quest to understand form enabled him to recreate the unlimited perfection of nature with a brushstroke.
Hokusai believed that all phenomena have spirit and is interconnected. You just have to look at his nature paintings such as Peonies with Canary, Azalea and Lesser Cuckoo (1834) and his series of Waterfalls to see that. He attributed life-giving powers to Mount Fuji, his talisman and symbol of immortality. He died at 90, his last painting a poignant scene of the spirit of a black dragon ascending his beloved mountain.
An exhibition of his work is on display at the British Museum until 18th August 2017
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September 2016
2016 is the 40th anniversary of Punk Rock and the British Library has a modern collection of punk and new-wave memorabilia on show.
By his own admission curators are always trying to draw attention to their collections. So, an exhibition celebrating punk’s 40th anniversary is Andy Linehan's opportunity to show that the British Library collects modern material as well as Shakespeare, Alice in Wonderland and the Magna Carta, all recent exhibitions.
The British Library Sound Archive is amongst the most wide ranging in the world and mirrors what the written word archive does. Its ambition to get hold of a copy of everything published in the UK relies on donations from record companies. Andy explained in the sunlit piazza overlooked by Paolozzi’s four metre high bronze statue of Isaac Newton measuring time inspired by a William Blake engraving how the exhibition came about.
“We utilised our own collection of records, fanzines, music press, flyers and personal documents, he said. "But some of the material, for example the letter from EMI Records sacking Glen Matlock, the original bass player with the Sex Pistols, we borrowed from England’s Dreaming author Jon Savage’s punk archives stored in Liverpool John Moore’s University.”
How easy was it to organise and who has seen it?
“It’s a complete mix of material and that’s one of the nice things about it. People of an age reminiscing about their youth and younger people discovering something completely new. Yesterday someone walked through with a couple of kids aged around 6 years old and one put on the headphones to listen to the Pistols and started reacting to the music, so the idea that kids can get something out of it is brilliant. We got lots of press interest in Japan, France, and America, so tourists put us on their ‘to see’ list."