Showing results by author "Edward Lucie-Smith" in All Categories

There is room for a book on this subject, among the vast mass of publications about the visual arts that flow from British and American publishing houses every year. Gay art, from being a quasi-forbidden topic, is now fashionable, not least among would-be up-to-the-minute academics.

The artist Ingres was a supreme bourgeois who also succeeded in being one of the supreme rebels of 19th-century art. Like Caravaggio, his opposite in most respects, he is historically recalcitrant.

'AIDS art' is essentially an American invention. It has now manifested itself in a large number of different locations, but is almost invariably based on a model of artistic activity that evolved in the United States - one that was a response to the impact made by the epidemic on sections of American society.

In Chinese culture, calligraphy is so closely allied to traditional modes of ink-and-brush painting as to be almost indistinguishable from them. There is no definite border between the two art forms, as this exhibition amply demonstrates.

Lucio Fontana is rightly regarded as one of the most important Italian artists active in the 20 years after World War II, important not only in Italy, but in a pan-European sense. It is, however, also important to remember additionally that he was born in Argentina and spent quite important parts of his early career there, working first as an assistant to his father, Luigi, a sculptor, and then independently.

The Antonello da Messina exhibition now at the Scuderie del Quirinale in Rome is one of those rare occasions that takes place only once in a lifetime. In fact, an exhibition devoted to Antonello will almost certainly never happen again. Like Vermeer, whom in some respects he resembles through his quietism, he is known through very few paintings - less than 50 in all. About two-thirds of these have been gathered together for the exhibition.

It is a historical peculiarity of landscape painting that it begins with the artificial, and only after that proceeds towards the natural. For example, landscape paintings, and especially fanciful Nilotic panoramas, were one of the genres produced by artists in Pompeii. When, with the Renaissance, landscape painting once again started to establish itself after a long interval, the representations of the surrounding world that artists began to produce as a separate and independent genre, rather than simply as a background for human figures, were usually more fanciful than real.

The magnificent Veronese show that opened at the National Gallery in London in 2014 met with a curiously subdued response from local reviewers. They recognized that it was a magnificent event of its kind, and one that was especially appropriate because the gallery has an important group of works by this 16th-century Venetian painter in its own collection, among them the famous Family of Darius Before Alexander.

The Gale Dictionary of Psychoanalysis defines ‘self-representation’ as “the image the subject has of him or herself based on his or her own interpretation.” The hugely influential 20th century psychoanalytic researcher and philosopher Jacques Lacan enlarges on this by speaking of “the finally donned armor of an alienating identity that will mark [the subject’s] mental development with its rigid structure.” Not surprisingly, psychoanalysts see this construct as a manifestation of the ego, and also as something intimately linked to narcissism.

Eminent art historian and writer Edward Lucie-Smith discusses an ambitious digital art book series called 100 London Artists, designed to celebrate London as an art city.

Every now and then, an exhibition comes along that hits you in the solar plexus. The compact Daumier show at the Royal Academy in London is one of those. It is housed in the moderately sized Sackler Galleries on the top floor of the building, not in the main exhibition rooms below, where it would be swallowed up. Most of the works on view are quite small. Very few are more than medium sized. For the most part, the color is subdued. Indeed, some of the paintings seem monochromatic until you examine them more closely, The range of subjects is, if not exactly restricted, not hugely wide.

When Beryl Cook died, she was the subject of a large number of obituaries. Some of them were predictably condescending, which I suspect she would not have minded a bit. The really telling thing, however, is what has happened since then on the web. If you go to the site maintained by The Times, still regarded as the British paper of record, and look for the paper’s obituary archive, you will find a section within it devoted to "Artistic Genius". The subtitle is "Artists and makers who changed the way we see".

This year sees the 300th anniversary of the foundation of St. Petersburg, an event that is being widely celebrated here in London as well as in Russia. And today The Times of London carried a story about the "widespread sleaze" that is hampering the restoration of Russia's former capital city. Though Oleg Kulik is not a Petersburg artist, these two facts help to provide a context for his career. Western interest in and curiosity about Russia is acute. The tendency is, however, to look at the Russian past, not at the present.

The tendency for art to detach itself from any duty to reflect observed reality manifested itself in avant-garde art production almost from the beginnings of the Modern Movement in art. It is already present in pure form in Malevich’s drastically reductive Black Square, which consists of exactly that, a black square on a white ground. It is interesting to note the way in which this work was exhibited when it was first put before the public.

Hammershoi is, in a certain sense, the Danish Vermeer, an artist whom he occasionally paraphrased. That is to say, a quietist painter obsessed by subtle effects of light, forgotten very soon after his death, but rediscovered and turned into a demi-god by a later generation.

The story of David Burliuk, now generally regarded as the father of Russian Futurism, is in some ways one of the strangest in the history of the Modern Movement in art. He was immensely influential in the years immediately before the Russian Revolution, at a time when the whole of the Russian cultural world was in ferment. And fairly soon after that, he was almost forgotten in his own country. This exhibition is, among other things, an attempt to correct an injustice.

Art in Puerto Rico occupies a kind of bridge position, between the North American art world one the one hand and the various Latin American and Caribbean art worlds on the other. Puerto Rican artists have easy physical aspects to the United States, and large Puerto Rican colonies in major American cities, notably New York and Chicago, have led to the birth of mixed vernacular cultures. The one in New York is sometimes referred to as Nuyorican, and has a populist downtown vibe that swings the spotlight toward it every time graffiti art returns to fashion.

There are three things that we have to take into account when attempting to assess the impact of the contemporary sensibility in art on the culture of the various countries bordering the Mediterranean. First, the way in which each of these territories responds to the idea of the contemporary is bound up with its own cultural history. Every Mediterranean coastline possesses a hinterland, and this hinterland exercises an enormous influence on what is seen on the coast itself.

Philip Pearlstein is a paradox. He is one of the great survivors from a time when American art was at its most creative and influential. And at the same time, he seems to oppose everything that the two major revolutions in American art - Abstract Expressionism and Pop - seem to stand for.

More than 30 years ago - in 1977, to be exact - I co-authored a book called Work and Struggle: The Painter as Witness. Its subject was one aspect of the academic painting of the late 19th and very early 20th century - art which dealt not with the comfortable lives of the rich but with all the social problems of the time. There were over 200 illustrations, most of them drawn from publications issued in conjunction with the official Salons of the period, but when we searched for these, they were largely missing.