Fine Arts
Remarkably, this is the first solo show in the UK of the work of Albert Burri (1915–95) for more than 50 years. Compare the popularity of other Italian postwar artists — Lucio Fontana, for instance, who only had one idea, the slashed or pierced canvas, to recommend him. Burri remains very much an unknown quantity, with a single work in this country’s public collections. A dozen Burris were shown at the Tate in 2005 in a mixed show of modern Italian art, but otherwise nothing. All praise then to the Estorick for mounting this enjoyable and succinct survey of Burri’s...
ShareThis
Niru Ratnam on the manipulation of the contemporary art market
Having studiously avoided the media for years, Charles Saatchi was stirred enough to write an article for the Guardian last December that opened: ‘Being an art buyer these days is comprehensively and indisputably vulgar. It is sport of the Eurotrashy, hedge-fundy, Hamptonites; of trendy oligarchs and oiligarchs.’
He has a point. A new type of collector is taking a close interest in contemporary art and elbowing old hands such as Saatchi out of the way. These new collectors are not interested in watching artists build a career through museum shows over a period of years. They’re not out to spot...
ShareThis
Several people I spoke to when this exhibition was first mentioned thought it would be a Hockney retrospective, considering that he was commandeering all the first-floor galleries at the RA. But actually the retrospective element is very slight, consisting of half a dozen early landscapes and a couple of photo-collages, before we encounter the first of the mainly large-scale landscapes he has been painting since the late 1990s. In fact, the greater part of the exhibition (sponsored by BNP Paribas) consists of work done in Yorkshire since 2004, and Hockney has packed the galleries with hundreds of images (a single...
ShareThis
For as long as I’ve been interested in Modern British art, I’ve been fascinated and intrigued by the work of Graham Sutherland (1903–80). One of the first Cork Street exhibitions I went to as a schoolboy was of paintings, gouaches, watercolours and graphics by Sutherland from the collection of Douglas Cooper, held at the Redfern Gallery in the autumn of 1976. I was enormously impressed, particularly by the golden-eyed toad rampant, the thorny sentinel figures, a 1944 Welsh landscape and a gouache of bomb-damaged buildings from 1942. (My recall is not always quite so accurate: in fact, I have the...
ShareThis
When R.B. Kitaj put together The Human Clay, his ground-breaking 1976 exhibition of figurative art at the Hayward Gallery, he wrote: ‘If you have a great subject, say, a person or people or a face or some complex theme, you have no right to be negligent about form or colour. Great themes demand the highest artistic qualities and ambitions.’
The current loan exhibition at the newly reopened Haunch of Venison gallery (with a handy new shopfront on Bond Street) is a splendid example of great themes articulated by the highest artistic qualities and ambitions. Selected by Catherine Lampert, former...
ShareThis
The last major show of paintings by Edward Burra (1905–76) was at the Hayward Gallery in 1985 and I remember visiting it with a painter friend who was rather critical of what she called Burra’s woodenness and lack of movement. At the time, I was impressed by her criticisms, but now they rather seem to miss the point. Burra made highly stylised images of people (often actually in movement) which are mostly about the darker side of humanity and the ways in which we distract and amuse ourselves in the face of despair. What might have been dreary little genre...
ShareThis
