Category: Reviews

Fighting it Out on the Home Front***

The home is an enduring site of ease and dis-ease. It is where we traditionally experience comfort, contentment, resentment and confinement. How did British artists respond to the idea of home between about 1950 and 1980? Answering that question is the purpose of a new group show at the Graves Gallery in Sheffield which opens … Continue reading Fighting it Out on the Home Front*** →

Stuck in the cul-de-sac with no way back****

A suite of three new galleries have been created from former office space over at the Burlington Gardens' side of the Royal Academy, one letting into the other, a very pleasing show-through. Works by Phyllida Barlow - collectively entitled cul-de-sac - are on display in them. Was this where Stormin' Norman Rosenthal once worked? They … Continue reading Stuck in the cul-de-sac with no way back**** →

Van Gogh comes to London ****

This is a huge and almost unwieldy, if not ungainly, show. So research-heavy is it that it courts the possibility of failure by sheer documentary overload, but because, by sleight of hand, it finally encompasses so much (and that much includes many excellent paintings by Van Gogh which have nothing to do with Britain whatsoever), … Continue reading Van Gogh comes to London **** →

Sorolla: stumbling master of the light fantastic **

It was in 1908 that the Spanish painter Joaquin Sorrolla (1863-1923) had his first exhibition in London, at the Grafton Galleries. The world's greatest living painter, someone said of him. Others begged to differ. Now the National Gallery, more than a century on, has filled its subterranean galleries in the Sainsbury Wing (most of the … Continue reading Sorolla: stumbling master of the light fantastic ** →