The Engine

Shape of Light: 100 Years of Photography and Abstract Art Tate Modern “Unless photography has its own possibilities of expression, separate from those of the other arts, it is merely a process, not an art.” – Alfred Stieglitz This exhibition offers no background information to the long 20 th century but goes straight to the early pioneers of abstract art and photography.   In the beginning photographers followed where artists had led but the inter-relationship of the two arts was later to change.   The point of innovators and practitioners was to make photography into an art form rather than a scientific process.   In America photographer Alfred Stieglitz launched Camera Work (1903), a journal promoting photography as a fine art and his gallery 291 in New York City with the same aim.   At first Stieglitz’s photographs embraced painterly techniques but later he began to take photos with qualities essential to the medium.   His relationship with Ge...

THE FUTURE STARTS HERE At the VICTORIA & ALBERT MUSEUM On the 14.08.18 To anticipate the singularity, the Victoria and Albert’s new exhibition demonstrates how this present was anticipated and the inventions of today that will eventually predict the future.   The singularity, due apparently in 2070, is an event rather like the take-off into self-sustained growth envisioned by economist Gunnar Myrdal.    This is when industrialisation established its own internal dynamic at the time of the industrial revolution allowing development to happen but this time our computers will replicate autonomously, without our consent, and be able to re-configure themselves at will.   Gordon Moore of INTEL has predicted that our computers will double their processing powers every 18 months, but the singularity goes beyond even this prediction.   Artificial Intelligence or AI is, however, still in its infancy as demonstrated by IBM’s attempt to replica...

AFTERMATH Art in the Wake of World War One At the Tate Britain On the 29 th July 2018 A solitary abandoned helmet often symbolised a dead soldier, this iconic image was used by French, British and German war artists.   The Tate’s exhibition to mark the centenary of the end of hostilities in what became known as The Great War or even “the war to end all wars”, focuses on official and unofficial war art, meaning depictions of the fighting on canvas or in sculpture.   There are also the unofficial efforts of the men, matchbox covers, letter openers, ash trays, money boxes made from used and abandoned shell cases, spent cartridges and other wasted metal that surrounded them on the battlefield.   Some of these pieces are very finely made indeed and they underline the wasted creativity, the lives thrown into the mouth of battle, devoured and destroyed. Following the end of the war, for the focus of this exhibition is the aftermath, a term derived from a...

RA SUMMER EXHIBITION 2018 AT BURLINGTON HOUSE, LONDON ON THE 16 TH OF June 2018 The RA has once again managed to find an array of strongly contrastive work, each gallery is separately curated and this time the selection process was harder since there were more entrants than ever before. Gallery 3, curated by Grayson Perry, has a painting of Coleridge looking high as a kite (161 Coleridge oil by Sonia Lawson RA) beside a photo shopped print of Donald Trump performing a visual investigation of Miss Mexico’s splayed legs as she gazes back at his gob smacked amazement (163 Trump and Miss Mexico , c-type print by Alison Jackson).   It’s as if Trump had never seen a woman before but the manipulation of the image lends it an aura of “fake news”, the soundbite coined by the addictive Twitter using President.   Satire is also present in this room, in works such as Laughing while Leaving (160 oil on linen by Roxana Halls), a cheery female couple make a bid for freedom...

RODIN AND THE ART OF ANCIENT GREECE AT THE BRITISH MUSEUM ON THE 15 TH OF JUNE 2018 Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) visited London in 1881 to view the Parthenon sculptures, commonly known as the Elgin marbles, to encounter ancient Greek culture, thought at the time to be superior to all others.   Rodin said, “the sculptures of ancient Greece…remain my masters.”   He never visited Greece and London became his substitute for Athens. Key works by Rodin such as The Gates of Hell and The Burghers of Calais are compared with important Greek sculptures from the Parthenon which served as a basis for Rodin’s work.   The armless, headless fragment is also considered and highlighted as an independent art  form and included in works like The Gates of Hell , inspired by Dante’s Inferno and Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleur du Mal .   Rodin himself said, “they are no less masterpieces for being incomplete.”   Indeed, when Lord Elgin brought the Parthenon sculp...

MONET AND ARCHITECTURE AT THE NATIONAL GALLERY LONDON ON THE 14 TH OF JUNE 2018 Claude Monet, born in Paris, but brought up in provincial Normandy, rejected the conventional art school progression for painting en plein air (in the open air).  His subsequent journey across Europe, limited by modes and means, encompassed various cities, centres of culture, that had already been criss-crossed, absorbed or rejected by countless other artists, writers and travellers.  Monet, however, was to be at the centre of an art movement, Impressionism, that changed the world.  Its centre was to be found in France at a time of great ferment following the cataclysmic defeat of 1870 in the Franco-Prussian war. Monet derived his engagement with landscape from English art which had turned to this genre because of Romanticism, its dichotomization of culture and nature, its nature worship, and because of a patriotic upsurge following the end of the period of upheaval initiate...