The Engine

RED STAR OVER RUSSIA: A REVOLUTION IN VISUAL CULTURE 1905-1955 at the TATE MODERN The Tate Modern is examining the influence of the Russian revolution which occurred 100 years ago.  The exhibition grew out of the collection of Russian art, films, posters, memorabilia in the possession of David King (1943-2016) who acquired the vast material presented here over 50 years.  His book Red Star Over Russia published in 2009 is the basis for this exhibition. Russia had been ruled by the Romanov dynasty for over 400 years but Tsar Nicholas II (1868-1918) led Russia into the First World War which turned out to be disastrous.  Russia was insufficiently economically or politically advanced to fight a war on such a scale.  There had been earlier discontent such as the 1905 revolution which had been a consequence of Tsarist incompetence, the defeat of Russia in the Russo-Japanese war.  Various radical groups such as the Social Democrats and Social Revolutionaries (SDs and SRs) proliferated

Paul Cezanne: Painting People at the National Portrait Gallery and Amadeo Modigliani at the Tate Modern on the 26 th & 27 th of November 2017 Paul Cezanne (1839-1906) was born in Aix-en-Provence in the south of France but soon moved to Paris to be with his childhood friend, the writer Emile Zola.  Throughout his life he divided his time between Paris and Aix.  Cezanne’s father, Louis-Auguste Cezanne (1798-1886) had accrued a fortune firstly by selling hats and then as a banker.   He wanted his son to be a lawyer. However, Cezanne’s ambition was to be an artist.   His wish to be purposefully engaged in a creative life and to marry the woman he loved were all opposed by his father who also happens to be the subject of the first major painting in this exhibition.  Cezanne’s painting of his father, ‘The Artist’s Father reading L’Evenement’ (oil on canvas, 1866) demonstrates the dominant influence of Cezanne’s early life.  Louis-Auguste is sitting in a chair reading a newspaper,

FIRE BELOW (A War of Words) by Owen McCafferty directed by Jimmy Fay at the Lyric Theatre, Belfast on the 14 th October 2017 Beckett Women: Ceremonies of Departure & BECKETT WOMEN: CEREMONIES OF DEPARTURE Presented by The Poets’ Theatre Not I Footfalls Rockaby Come and Go At The Mac, Belfast on the second of November, 2017 The Mac, Belfast has presented a conflation of four Beckett shorts under the pompous imprimatur, Beckett Women: Ceremonies of Departure , not that a deep-seated engagement with women, feminism or femininity underscores Beckett’s writing.   Often Beckett’s work is deeply male oriented but in a blank, neutral sense.   The male is usually an Irish tramp such as Molloy or Malone, and focuses on his aloneness and jagged ruminations in the chaos, the flux of experience or non-experience. By contrast Fire Below is a short plotless interlude in the lives of two middle-aged, middle-class Catholics and

Pandemonium by Thomas McCarthy (Carcanet, 2016) The Occupant by Jane Draycott (Carcanet, 2016) Pandemonium is the mythical capital of Hell, created by the poet John Milton in his epic Paradise Lost .  Pandemonium is where the maker of chaos resides, an unhinged anarchist, an artist smearing Heaven with his dirty protest.  More than this Pandemonium is a Hell made in Ireland by venture capitalists, bankers, hedge fund managers.  John Martin’s Pandemonium (1825) is a visual recreation of the stump outlined in Milton’s vision but it is not a place of human habitation.  It is an obviously infernal region complete with fiery cracks that delve deeply into the swirling lava and fire below and Satan (presumably) stands before his headquarters, arms, shield and spear aloft, hailing the misery of his destructiveness and the minor demons that abound within the halls of his palace.  John Martin (1784-1854) was an artist of the north-west of Britain, an outsider figure rejected by the E

Queer British Art 1861-1967 at the Tate Britain Queer British Art 1861-1967 at the Tate Britain The title of this exhibition sets out a definite temporal limit which does not stretch to the present day but stops at 1967.  The publication of the Wolfenden Report in 1957 paved the way for legalisation.  It concluded that homosexuality was not a disease or an illness and the committee commissioned to produce it almost unanimously recommended legalisation.  The report was a response to various sensational legal cases of the era which included the conviction of the scientist Alan Turing and Lord Montagu of Beaulieu.  Thus, an era of semi-legality for homo-erotic acts is defined which also corresponds to the zenith and then fading strength of the British Empire.  This is no coincidence since the two are intimately connected.  In 1861 the death penalty for sodomy was abolished.  Britain therefore left the ancient and medieval worlds behind.  The year 1861 also coincided with new mov

THE ENCOUNTER: DRAWINGS FROM LEONARDO TO REMBRANDT at the NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY, LONDON, SUNDAY JULY 23 RD , 2017 Art production suddenly changed in Renaissance Europe as paper became more readily available.  This was due to the dissolution of antiquated monopolies established during the medieval period.  In Italy the reproduction of stale, formulaic religious works had given way to the study of nature and the human form.  Before the Renaissance artists were expected to reproduce Biblical scenes, repressing their own creative natures at the behest of their church patrons.  Specific formulas had been established with rigid rules designed to inhibit the artist whose individuality was rigorously stamped out.  Artists did not even sign their works, the idea of an artist creating a recognisable body of work was unknown.  Furthermore, religious art only celebrated types belonging to different feudal classes who were unindividuated.  Even Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo were prone

Alberto Giacometti at the Tate Modern, Sunday July 16 th 2017 Born in Italian Switzerland in 1901, Alberto Giacometti was the son of a significant post-impressionist artist and much of his early work was imitative of his father’s style.  He was later galvanised to move to Paris in 1922 where he encountered the works of the cubists and the surrealists.  His early busts are conventional, typical works, completely classical in impulse.  He liked to work with soft, malleable materials like clay or plaster rather than in bronze.  However, he eventually found the financial help he needed to transform his works into bronzes.  His later style emerged gradually. In his early period Giacometti was equally a painter and a sculptor, his busts were usually intimate portraits of close friends and family members.  Giacometti’s engagement with the surrealists is clearly reflected in his work of the 20s and 30s in Paris when he also became fascinated with the creation of mechanical sculptures