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

When I visited the huge Damien Hirst exhibition staged by the Gagosian Gallery in New York in 1996, one of the most striking pieces was a large glass tank full of live fish. Dumped among the fish were an obstetrical couch, in a rather decayed condition, and various obstetrical implements. For some time after I had seen the show, this image tugged at my mind. It reminded me of something - but of what? Finally, memory dragged up the reference I needed: Hirst's piece was a direct descendant of Salvador Dali's installation, "Rainy Taxi".

British, even more than most countries, like to have a "boss" artist - an artistic figure who is indubitably the head of the profession. In the old days, this need was easily accommodated within the establishment structures of the time. The big boss could be Sir Joshua Reynolds, knighted by the monarch of the day, or Lord Leighton, given a peerage. Both of these were also presidents of the Royal Academy.

The new exhibition at Tate Britain celebrates one of the best loved of all British artists, the landscape painter, John Constable. In his own lifetime, Constable was constantly struggling to catch up with his great rival, J. M. W. Turner, whose astonishing fluency he could never match. Turner has maintained his fame, but, among the British at least, Constable is now more intimately loved.

This may seem a funny moment to proclaim that nothing much is happening in art - certainly not in contemporary art. In many ways, the art world has never seemed more vibrant and active, and this activity is increasingly focused on what is defined as contemporary. There hasn’t, in fact, been a moment like this in the relatively recent history of art since the mid-19th century. If one looks at the years of political and economic chaos between 1789 and 1815, as the fortunes of war swayed back and forth, this is not surprising.

The current agitation about the restitution of artistic treasures of all kinds to their original locations is usually presented as overdue justice for faults committed by European colonialism. In fact, this is a serious oversimplification. Conquering armies have always regarded works of art as legitimate spoil. Modern attitudes to the legitimate or illegitimate possession of famous artworks can be traced to the European Enlightenment that blossomed in the late 18th century.

This exhibition, based on a single, very personal and - dare one say it? - extremely distinguished private collection, tackles a large subject within a relatively small compass. It aims to examine a now universally recognized crisis, which is what is happening to painting as an art form. Quite a large number of critics and curators have, in recent years, proclaimed that painting is dead: that attention must now be paid to other kinds of art.

The new exhibition at the National Gallery in London ought to be yet another triumph for an institution that is now running a very ambitious exhibition program. Yet this event makes a curiously uneasy effect. There are several, not just one, reasons for this. The first is that Rubens, of all great artists the one who enjoyed the greatest degree of worldly success, had distinctly uneasy beginnings. Of sound Flemish bourgeois stock, he was born in 1577 at Siegen in Westphalia.

Anyone who Googles the phrase curatorial theory will immediately come upon quite a long list of suggested websites. Sometimes it is a little difficult to be sure if the texts offered are intended to be taken entirely seriously. However, if I hack my way through the dense thickets of language, I find myself in agreement with what they seem to be trying to say, which is that curating an exhibition - or for that matter, a website - is not an end in itself.

The new Gauguin exhibition at Tate Modern in certainly the art event of the year in London. It’s a blockbuster exhibition of a kind that, thanks to the continuing worldwide financial crisis, may soon become extinct. It is also an exhibition that raises important questions about how we currently see and think about art.

Very seldom in London can a major show of modern and contemporary art at a highly respected national institution have received such universally negative reviews. As I write this, not all the verdicts on the Royal Academy’s exhibition of Modern British Sculpture have been delivered. However, it is already clear that the majority will be hostile. Paradoxically, it is this, more than any other factor, which makes it seem like an important event - a turning point if you like.

A good art collection is always much more than the sum of its parts. This applies with especial force to collections of contemporary work. A collection of this kind, whether the collector intends it to be so or not, is always a portrait - a reflection in the mirror of a particular epoch, and, willy-nilly, a self-portrait of the person who takes the trouble to bring it together.

Works of art have often been endowed by their audience with talismanic force. Their impact exceeds the visual impression they make. This seems natural enough when we consider the fact that the most ambitious works of art produced by ancient civilizations were religious. To those who originally encountered them, they seemed to speak directly from the gods. Their makers were very seldom recorded, though the names of those who ordered them to be made - pharaohs, emperors and kings - quite frequently survive.

Art in the Caribbean is culturally of great complexity. This complexity reflects the intricacies of the colonial history of the region, with the different islands and territories divided between many different European powers. Artists in each territory tended to mesh into a different education system and a different set of preconceptions about art.

Of the three great Italian High Renaissance masters, Raphael is now the most problematic. Leonardo and Michelangelo continue to fascinate, even though some of the modern audience - myself included - find some of Leonardo's output faintly creepy. Raphael is a different matter. In his own lifetime, he was perhaps the most admired of the three, successful with every type of patron and every type of audience. Where his rivals delayed, Raphael delivered, unflappable and omnicompetent.

Many people - among them, most art-world insiders - think that Joseph Beuys was the most important artist of the second half of the 20th century. Beuys was many things - a shaman, a trickster, a charismatic social and political activist. He spearheaded the return to prominence of the German avant-garde post-World War II, and his impact on both the European and American art worlds continues to be felt today, nearly 20 years after his death in January 1986.

In 1975, the American critic, Laura Mulvey, published an article entitled "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema". This has over the years been one of the most influential of all feminist texts. In it, Mulvey made use of a version of Freudian theory, as reinterpreted by the French philosopher and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Freud referred to scopophilia - the pleasure of look at other people’s bodies as erotic objects. Mulvey applied this to the cinema.

Rothko is now one of those mythical artists, an icon of 20th century creativity, the central figure in a tragic legend. Which means to say that one is pretty much compelled to agree that everything he did was wonderful, a manifestation of genius. I have to say that I find myself increasingly resistant to this approach. Some works by Rothko I do in fact respond to, with their glowing blocks of color.

Alex Katz is one of the great survivors of a heroic period in American art. He is also one of the great unclassifiables. At various times he has been described both as a Pop artist and as a classic American Realist, though critics admit that he does not fit comfortably into either of these categories. What most people admit, however, is that he reflects and presents aspects of American culture and American landscape in a uniquely skillful and economical way.

As a working critic, I find the most difficult exhibitions to write about are those that combine an evidently important subject with a faintly dispiriting result. The new Edvard Munch show at Tate Modern is a case in point. Munch is undoubtedly a major Modernist artist, a Norwegian cultural icon who was the precursor and to some extent the inventor of what came to be known as Expressionism. One version of his composition, The Scream, very recently made a record price.

Renoir’s reputation has long been in decline with intellectuals. He is seen as sugary and self-indulgent, to the point where his work gives the whole of the Impressionist Movement a bad name. The thing that has contributed to this fall from grace is, of course, the late work, with its bloated nudes and curiously hot colors. Yet even the work of Renoirís best period tends to seem uneven, despite the continuing popularity of undoubted masterpiece such as La Loge [1874].