The Engine

NATALIA GONCHAROVA AT THE TATE MODERN 10 th of June 2019 Natalia Goncharova (1881 – 1962) was born in Tula province, Russia, 200 miles from Moscow in 1881.  Her career encompassed the Russian avante garde, she was involved in painting, lithography, design and later in her career worked as a set and costume designer for Diaghalev’s Ballet Russe .  Her family were impoverished aristocrats who made their living from textiles.  Goncharova was familiar with the creation of textiles in all stages of their production.  She was initially motivated by her interest in traditional Russian forms of art and design, rejecting western models.  She collected traditional Russian icons, paintings and designs avidly and later in her life campaigned for their preservation, just as Stalin’s project of collectivisation sought to wipe them out.  Her work Peasant Woman from Tula Province (1910, State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow) illustrates these interests in tradi...

EDVARD MUNCH AT THE BRITISH MUSEUM 11 th of June 2019 This exhibition at the British museum concentrates on Munch's work beyond painting as he sought to use lithographs, woodcuts and other media.   Intricate technical details of these processes are provided to indicate the diversity of Munch’s artistic methods.   While he experimented, he also tended to go back to oil painting as his first point of reference.   He used these other forms in order to make his work more accessible to the general public. Edvard Munch (1863-1944) began his artistic career in Kristiania, the former name for Oslo, capital of Norway.   Munch was a member of the Kristiania Bohemia, a group of artists, writers and intellectuals who met in clubs in the city to discuss ideas, new movements in ideas and the arts and presumably to drink absinthe, the preferred drug of the avante garde of that time.   An early lithograph represents Hans Jaeger (1854-1910), a member of the Kristiania B...

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...