The Engine

    DAVID HOCKNEY, THE ARRIVAL OF SPRING, NORMANDY 2020   At the   ROYAL ACADEMY   Hockney has sought to exploit a new material for his painting, his ipad.   Attempting to be popular, he has chosen the most conservative subject matter, landscapes of trees, hills, and farms.   Isolated trees stand against a horizon consisting of distant hills depicted in deep blue or purple.   The most jarring thing is Hockney’s colour palette provided by the ipad.   Colours are brighter and less nuanced than normal in fact they are lurid and luminous thus suggesting abstraction.   Traditional perspective is evoked, horizon lines always dwell in the middle of the painting and are never pulled up to the very top of the canvas to make abstraction.   Some of the works are reminiscent of Van Gogh or Claude Monet, particularly the lily pads depicted in 100 and 105.   The insistence of en plein air painting once again references the wor...

  SOPHIE TAEUBER-ARP AT THE TATE MODERN on August 8 th, 2021     Several years ago, the Tate Modern attempted to shed light on Picasso’s muse Dora Maar.   This time it is the turn of Sophie Taeuber, formerly the wife of artist Hans Arp.   That is how she has been known, if at all.   Taeuber was born in Davos, Switzerland in 1889 and brought up by her mother, a widow.   Her artistic education was more eclectic than some, crossing over to applied art disciplines such as woodwork and textiles, insisting on the inter-relationship between fine art and applied art.   The Tate Modern’s exhibition hardly attempts to join up the dots for us.   It presents Sophie Taeuber as if she is a newly discovered artist who is ‘very interesting’.   In fact, she was married to Jean (Hans) Arp, a much more famous and recognised artist.   Jean Arp’s work is not mentioned, simply the fact of her marriage to him and life in Zurich during the First W...

  PAULA REGO at the TATE BRITAIN, MILLBANK, PIMLICO on the 5th of July 2021   Paula Rego was born in Portugal in 1935 and grew up in the era of Prime Minister (or dictator) Antonio de Oliviera Salazar and his Estudo Novo (New State) in 1933.  Salazar had been swept to power by a military coup in 1924, he established a fascist and imperialist regime that resisted the rise of nascent liberation movements in Portugal’s colonies such as Angola.  Rego’s father was middle-class and opposed the fascists whose main appeal was to recalcitrant members of the working classes and their imperialist and colonialist aspirations.  He also happened to be an Anglophile since Portugal’s educated classes had often looked to Britain for aid, for instance in the Napoleonic period and, thus Britain was looked upon as a liberal and sympathetic state.  For this reason. Paula Rego was sent to England to be educated and, eventually, to study art.  Salazar was to be the las...

  NERO THE MAN BEHIND THE MYTH   At the British Museum on the 29th, June 2021   The Roman Emperor Nero seemed destined to blur the limits of reality when his own life became a theatrical performance straight out of his mentor Seneca’s play Oedipus , itself a recasting of a Greek original by Athenian dramatist Sophocles.   The British museum’s new exhibition reveals a face behind a legend, a new quiff that travelled the length and breadth of the empire and an attempt to re-boot a failing political dynasty, the Julio-Claudians.   Nero was Roman emperor, but more people will know him as the character played by Peter Ustinov in the film Quo Vadis .   The new exhibition at the British museum failed to make much of more modern re-interpretations of Nero’s life but there were still a great many revelations. Nero’s real name was Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus, he was born near Anzio, Italy in 37 AD.   The date is significant because Nero’s reign came to...