The Engine

  WALTER SICKERT at the TATE BRITAIN on TUESDAY 26 th April 2022   Brighton Pierrots by Walter Sickert, 1915 Walter Sickert was born in Munich in 1860 and eight years later travelled with his family to London.   His father was also an artist, indeed Sickert began his career by imitating his father’s work.   Sickert initially trained as an actor, indeed fascination with the theatre is in evidence throughout his career.   Sickert trained at the Slade School of Fine Art before working as an assistant to established artist James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) in 1882. Walter Sickert, Self-Portrait 1896 Sickert adopted Whistler’s signature style of muted tones and dull, realist colours.   However, by 1885 Sickert had met French artist Edgar Degas (1834-1917).   He began to follow Degas’s meticulous preparation which included a planning grid and bolder use of colour.   This can be observed in works like Shop Front, The Laundry (1885, pencil,...

  Kyosai at the Royal Academy on the 21 st, April 2022   Kawanabe Kyosai (1831-1889 is regarded as the successor in Japanese art to Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) who helped to shape the Ukiyo-e (floating world) painting style.  Whereas Japan had been relatively isolated from the outside world for 260 years, Kyosai witnessed the arrival of the first western fleet and increasing Westernisation.  This was initiated by the Meiji dynasty in 1868 when the Tokugawa shogunate was toppled and imperial power restored after centuries of decline.  The emperor had come to represent spiritual power whereas, the Shogun (meaning roughly ‘army commander’) the secular, military power of the Japanese state.  Although the Shogun was technically the emperor’s servant, the emperor had been marginalised and deprived of significance for centuries.  The Meiji restoration signified the decline of the shogunate.  The emperor moved his seat of power from Kyoto to Ed...

  The World of Stonehenge at the British Museum on the 19 th, April 2022   The famous standing stone circle on Salisbury Plain known to us as Stonehenge was not unique.   The new exhibition at the British Museum offers us an understanding of the construction of Stonehenge, details of other henges and standing stone circles in Britain and the near continent.   Such sites were important in pre-history for communal religious worship until changes in society and the advent of metalwork came to mean that precious objects became more important than sites.   These changes occurred when new arrivals like the Beaker people (known as this because of the characteristic bronze beaker they used) who came to Britain about 4,400 years ago, reinvigorating the local economy and technological means too.   It is thought that the Beaker people all but wiped out the Neolithic farmers that occupied Britain until their arrival.   Stonehenge was built between 5000 and ...

  Inspiring Walt Disney at the Wallace Collection on the Thursday, 14 th April 2022   This new exhibition at the Wallace Collection is an unexpected delight, detailing the influence of French art of the rococo period on Walt Disney cartoons like Cinderella (1950) and Beauty and the Beast (1991).   Born in 1901 in Chicago, USA, Disney attempted to join the army from High School in 1918 but his application was rejected as he was too young.   Instead, Disney forged a birth certificate and joined up as a Red Cross ambulance driver, arriving in France in November after the armistice.   This was Disney’s first encounter with Paris where he glimpsed the rococo visions that he was later to incorporate into his films.   Later, in the 1930s, Disney returned to Paris to see the sights once again and while he was there, he acquired a library of 330 books, consisting of European fairy tales and books of art and architecture which he used as a basis for some of hi...

  Surrealism Beyond Borders at the Tate Modern, Sunday 10 th April 2022   The international reach of Surrealism is what is at stake in this exhibition, from its origins in the French art movements in the 1920s to its global extensions in the USA, Japan, literally everywhere. Eugene Granells Los Blasones Magicos del vuelo tropical 1947 Co-Founded in 1924 by Andre Breton whose Manifeste du Surrealisme (Manifesto of Surrealism) defined surrealism as “a pure psychic automatism”.   The word Surrealism was first coined by the French poet Guillaume Apollonaire when he used it in reference to the ballet Parade which contained music by Eric Satie.   The movement was formed out of Breton’s preoccupation with authors like Rimbaud, Jarry and the current ideas of both Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud.   Breton even went so far as to join the Communist Party in 1927, but he was expelled six years later, a typical trajectory for a Surrealist in the 1920s and 30s.   By 19...

Lubaina Himid at the Tate Modern on Saturday, 9th April 2022   Lubaina Himid is a painter, mainly, but she also creates sound installations and conceptual art. Himid likes to dazzle the viewer with bright colours surrounded by muted pastel shades. Her object is architecture, constructs and buildings abandoned, placed edgily near the shore, between earth and water. The sea is omnipresent in her works, receding into the distance or glimpsed out of a window, a grey void or sharply, logically blue. Her work is often flat and two-dimensional, as in her work Ball on Shipboard (2018, acrylic on canvas). Figures emerge from the bowels of a ship, engage in dialogues and dance, surrounded by a brightly patterned awning while a lone canoeist paddles by. The warm, bright colours are appealing but it seems to be pleasant decoration. The painting wants to be political but somehow the message has been blunted. Another work, The Button Maker (2001, acrylic paint on charcoal on canvas...