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

An essay by Edward Lucie-Smith on David Hockney's portraits exhibited at the Royal Academy's "82 Portraits and One Still-Life", and also "David Hockney and the Yorkshire Landscape" at RA in 2012.

An essay by Edward Lucie-Smith explores aspects of the mysterious and private character of the renowned American society artist John Singer Sargent.

Explores the structure and development of the Pre-Raphaelite movement in the mid-19th century and works that figure among the most enduring and generally popular in British art. Renowned writer and art critic Edward Lucie-Smith contributes a study of the brotherhood of seven artists and their interconnection and intricate links with the social establishment of the time. James Cahill has a special interest in the movement, having studied Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Holman Hunt. He reviews a major exhibition of 150 works at Tate Britain launched in September 2012.

It is a paradox of a sort that the only fully authentic Holbein painting of King Henry VIII of England should now reside in Madrid, in the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza. It left Britain as late as 1933, sold by Earl Spencer, grandfather of Diana, Princess of Wales. Holbein is, after all, the author of what is perhaps the most iconic and formidable of all British royal images. Fittingly, the Thyssen-Bornemizsa portrait adorned the cover of the catalogue that accompanied the "Holbein in England" exhibition at Tate Britain in London.

A study of a later period album of drawings on the theme of old women and nightmares by Francisco Goya exhibited at the Courtauld Gallery London, with reference to his supernatural "Black Paintings".

The Titian Show at the National Gallery here in London has just opened to the public again. It was available for just three days before the big lockdown. Now, it is with us once more, though on rather different terms from what was the case previously. You have to book a time. You have to be wearing a mask. You have to maintain distance between yourself and other visitors booked in for the same slot. Is it worth the hassle? Yes, of course it is. Titian is one of the greatest figures in the history of Western art.

The word avant-garde, so much used in connection with the various manifestations of contemporary art, is starting to have a strange, ironic ring to it. One might even claim that it is starting to signify what is behind the times, rather than in front of them. Like all such terms, it is in fact a metaphor, rather than a direct description. Borrowed from old-fashioned military terminology, it seeks to describe a situation where social norms are being perpetually challenged by artists. In the military sphere, where it originated, it is long out of use.

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.

Yayoi Kusama is now one of Japan’s best-known contemporary artists. She was the recipient of her country’s Praemium Imperiale for painting in 2006 - the most prestigious award Japan can offer to any painter, native or foreign. Her rise to fame has been unconventional, even by the standards of the art world of the 21st century, where eccentricities of all kinds pass without question.

In this study, Art, Poetry, and WW1 by Edward Lucie-Smith of writing, poetry, and painting in the centenary year of the outbreak of the First World War, the author considers the historical impact on the general psyche of the calamitous events, reflected in the expression of poets and visual artists. He establishes a continuity to the theme with reference to works by Velázquez, Watteau, Goya, and others, in their treatment of the spectacle of battle and the horrors of war and human conflict.

Ben Luke, resident art critic of the London Evening Standard, calls Ai Weiwei "probably the most famous artist in the world. He has transcended the world of museums and galleries, and exerts a newsworthiness that no other artist competes with." This statement, if one bothers to look through the kind of publicity that Ai now attracts - thanks to the digital revolution most of this is easily available with a few clicks on one’s computer - is self-evidently true.

The first body art performer, as well as the first professional bodybuilder, was the showman Eugene Sandow (1867-1925). Though Sandow’s heyday occurred before the birth of the Modern Movement, there are compelling reasons for giving the primacy to him. Sandow, born Friedrich Wilhelm Müller in Prussia in 1867, left his native country in 1885 in order to avoid military service and first appeared on the London stage in 1885. His real celebrity began when the American impresario Florenz Ziegfield hired him to appear at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago.

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.

Of all the British poets of my generation, Ted Hughes, now nearly 20 years dead, left behind him both the grandest and most sulfurous reputation. The controversies he aroused rumble on, and the hurts, in certain quarters, are still keenly felt. Any life story that comprises not just two but actually three suicides, plus a murder, does wrap a cloak of darkness about itself.

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.

Georgia O’Keeffe is a slightly odd case in the story of American art. She became famous very early, thanks to the efforts of her patron, lover, and eventual husband Alfred Stieglitz. Having been a leading figure in the New York art world, she eventually withdrew from that to become the central presence in a new kind of regionalism, focused not on the Midwest but New Mexico and, in particular, on the art scene in and around Santa Fe.

A study of Aubrey Beardsley's work exhibited at Tate Britain until May 25, 2020. The author considers the darkly vigorous imagery of the short lived genius, his graphic work for the notorious Yellow Book, and sublimely erotic illustrations for Lysistrata by Aristophane and Salome by Oscar Wilde, which frank imagery even shocked the author.

An anthology of essays and reviews by the eminent art historian and writer, Edward Lucie-Smith. The articles cover a broad span, from the Italian Renaissance of Giotto and Antonello da Messina, Leonardo, and Michelangelo, progressing to Rubens, Velázquez, and Ingres, with essays on William Hogarth, John Constable, and John Everett Millais for British art. With the experience of his landmark publications on modern art, which remain in print, the author sweeps the listener on a fabulous journey of perception.

This audiobook considers the magnetic poles of post-war modernism and the towering figures of Pablo Picasso and Jackson Pollock. The essay considers the history of French avant-garde art led by Picasso to the post-war years and the increasing dominance of American artists foregrounded by the advent of Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s.

Andrea Palladio is the most influential architect who ever lived - much more so than those heroes of the Modern Movement - Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe. It is significant that buildings we call "Palladian" are still being built today - for example, by the British architect Quinlan Terry. Palladio’s ideas were disseminated not only by his buildings, but also, even more effectively, by his writings, most notably by his didactic masterpiece, I Quattro Libri dell’Architettura (The Four Books of Architecture), published in 1570.