The Engine

SICILY: CULTURE AND CONQUEST at the BRITISH MUSEUM   "So scatter brilliance over the island which Zeus Lord of Olympus gave to Persephone and, his hair falling forward with his nod, promised that he would raise up fertile Sicily with its high and prosperous cities to be pre-eminent on the plentiful earth! Pindar (c522-443BC) First Nemean Ode Between 800 and 700BC the early Greeks and Phoenicians began to colonise the island of Sicily and by 734 BC the Greeks had established their first settlement at Naxos.   Earlier peoples had lived on the island but little certain is known of them and the entire early period mostly consists of legend.   It is known that the early peoples valued the volcanic rock obsidian, obtained from the volcano that dominates the eastern half of the island, Mount Etna, but later peoples imported metal for making weapons.   Greeks began leaving the mainland to seek colonies under the pressure of population expansion.   Sic...

RUSSIA AND THE ARTS at the NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY, LONDON The Age of Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky The work presented at the National Portrait Gallery has been gathered from the collection of Pavel Tretyakov donated to the city of Moscow in 1892. In 1892 it was valued at 1.5 million roubles and comprised 2000 works of art. Today it forms the basis of the State Tretyakov Gallery, Russia's national gallery in Moscow. Tretyakov was a textile industrialist and collector who sought to create a portrait collection of Russia's leading intellectuals, authors, actors, composers and patrons of the arts, commissioning Russia's leading painters to portray them. Tretyakov created a survey of a Golden Age of Russian portraiture. The painters he employed initially followed a traditional, realist approach to painting then, following the art tendencies of the day, embarking on the new Impressionist style. Other commissions followed even after Tretyakov's death in 1898. The per...

The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2016 At the 248 th Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, the trite, traditional artwork stands side by side with the modern and post-modern. Kitschy satires like Marie Antoinette, The Queens Hamlet by Pierre et Gilles, an image half-way between a photograph and an oil painting, evokes a Russian mail order bride rather than a chapter from the French Revolution. Retrospectives of a degraded future are encapsulated in works like 2 Hose Petrified Petrol Pump by Puerto Rican pairing Allora & Calzadilla, an ossified stone petrol pump the seeming remnant of a finished civilisation. The curators of the RA have themed the exhibition in terms of twins, pairs of artist collaborators but beyond that the artist’s relationship with gallery owners, critics and ultimately the public gaze. A new Gilbert and George work Beard Aware evokes a sense of anti-art, pop hysteria while also underlining our sense of surface appearances being deceptive as the duo flau...