Showing results by author "Edward Lucie-Smith"

Art dealing today in the United States is a huge, well-organized, well-publicized industry. Probably, there has never previously been a market in art that has played such an important role in a national economy. The United States retains the preeminent position in the world market for art that it achieved immediately after World War II and seems unlikely to lose it any time soon. In addition to serving collectors and institutions based in America, the American dealing community supplies works of art to individuals and museums all over the world.

London is now a major centre for the international art world. The only other European city that houses as many studios is not Paris but Berlin. And Berlin does not have nearly as many galleries, public or commercial, which feature the latest developments in contemporary art. 

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

In the early years of the 20th century, Paris became the center for an international community of artists. Some of them were French, but the city also offered its hospitality to artists from an increasingly wide range of other nationalities. Some, like Marc Chagall, came from communities that had never produced artists of international note before. The result was a mixture between a stewpot and a laboratory.

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.  

As a number of recent exhibitions have shown, there is a growing fashion for what is called appropriation in art. To you and me, what this means is slavish copying - no ifs and buts, apologies replaced by the paradoxical assertion that this is a thoroughly original, impeccably avant-garde thing to do. Examples were a recent show at the Saatchi Gallery, entitled "Post Pop: East Meets West"; and "Sturtevant: Double Trouble", on view till late February at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

A study of Giacometti portraits at the National Portrait Gallery London and Frank Auerbach at Tate Britain.

Going to the Frida Kahlo exhibition current at Tate Modern in London is like entering the shrine of a secular saint. The rooms are thronged. People peer closely at the paintings, many of them very small. They seem afraid to talk much above a whisper. There are a number of reasons for this reaction. One is Hayden Herrera’s highly readable biography of the artist, first published in 1983, and now established as a classic feminist text. Another is the feminist movement’s general need for heroines, which has had a similar effect on the posthumous reputation of Georgia O’Keeffe. A third, probably the most powerful, reason is Kahlo’s own personality, which combined self-assertion, defiance and masochism in almost equal proportions. In this respect Kahlo can be compared with a slightly later generation of English-language poets, male and female. Prominent among them are Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton.

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.

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.

The new exhibition at the National Gallery in London is entitled "Delacroix - And the Rise of Modern Art". In other words, Delacroix, one of the most important artists of the first half of the 19th century, is presented as being important, not so much for what he actually did as an individual creator, but because he in so many ways foreshadowed the kind of art that was made immediately after his demise - in particular by artists linked to Impressionism, Post-Impressionism and even Fauvism.

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.

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.

The monograph publishes a study of Rembrandt van Rijn and JMW Turner at the National Gallery and Tate Britain in exhibitions of their later works.

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.

From the earliest times, human beings have found it difficult to represent their own bodies in a straightforward way. The rare painted images of humans in Paleolithic art are much less naturalistic than the images of animals created at the same epoch. At the dawn of art, representations of the nude body were simply vehicles for statement about the need for fertility if the human race was to survive successfully.

How do we expect public art to function in a contemporary society? By public art, we mean art that to some extent at least ambushes us. We encounter it as we go about our everyday lives, not in some special art-dedicated space. In other words, certainly not in a museum. However, Aida Mahmudova notes, in her introduction to this public art project for Baku organized by Yarat! Contemporary Art Space, conditions for public art are now very different from the way in which art of this kind operated previously.

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".

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.

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.