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...

PERFORMANCE AND THE CAMERA AT THE TATE MODERN From the time when photography was in its infancy the tendency towards it evolution into the seventh art was palpable.  This is the topic of the Tate Modern’s latest exhibition Performance and the Camera .  Artists sought to connect individual shots into a performance, an enactment or re-enactment, that somehow also delved into the macabre or esoteric origins of the art form in its vital capture of a single moment in time.  The ephemeral became unique and indivisible, science presents photography, an art form capable of presenting a glimpse into eternity. The exhibition demonstrates that photography is a mediated, conventional form rather than a depiction of reality.  Yves Klein’s (1928-1962) work Saut dans la Vide (Leap into the Void, 1960) which was completed along with his collaborators Harry Shunk (1924-2006) and Janos Kender (1938-2009) shows the artist leaping from a building into fresh air....

EUGENE DELACROIX AT THE NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON Eugene Delacroix (1798-1863) was a product of the post-revolutionary era in France, glimpsing the bitter end results of Napoleon's campaigns, the restoration of the Bourbons, annotating the upheaval of 1830 which was to lead to 1848 and the era of the second French Republic and then the second French Empire under Napoleon the Third. Delacroix was born on the eve of a new century and his parents were older than is the norm when his mother conceived. His father apparently had a two stone tumor removed from his left testicle at the same time as he was supposedly procreating.  Charles-Francois Delacroix was Minister of Foreign Affairs, his successor in the post was Talleyrand.  Therefore, many believe that Eugene's real father was Talleyrand (1754-1838), a ubiquitous Enlightenment figure simultaneously berating nuns and the like while continuing elicit affairs with scions of the rich.  However, it must be sa...