The Art Newspaper

The key is inside

Donald Lee on De l'Allemagne, 1800-1939: de Friedrich à Beckmann, Musée du Louvre, until 24 June

This is an extraordinary exhibition. In the first place, the numbers attending have taken the Louvre by surprise. By the time of writing, it had been seen by more than 50,000 people since opening on 28 March (on average, 4,400 visitors a day), 81% more than anticipated. It is hard to say why this has become a blockbuster, except, perhaps, the novelty of it: here are 200 works of art, almost all of which will be unfamiliar to the general public, French and international.

Wed, 08 May 2013 13:38:00 GMT

David Bowie, patron saint of gender bending

Duncan Fallowell on “David Bowie is”, the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, until 11 August (pre-booking strongly advised)

British Rock burst upon the world with a spectacular ferocity comparable to that of the Ballets Russes 50 years earlier. The Russian ballet created complex intellectual works of collaborative genius—rock was always more individualistic and star-driven—but both were powerful performance arts that revolutionised taste, and rock music had much the greater impact on social and political change. (There is a big exhibition that ought to be mounted somewhere: British Rock 1963-93—from the Beatles to Dance.

Wed, 08 May 2013 10:32:00 GMT

A master of colour, line and Christian devotion

William E. Wallace on “Federico Barocci: Renaissance Master of Color and Line”, St Louis Art Museum, and “Federico Barocci: Brilliance and Grace”, the National Gallery, London, until 19 May

Federico Barocci (1526-1612) has not been a well known artist. Even specialists might have been hard pressed to name one of his masterpieces or more than a half dozen pictures. Barocci was born and lived in Urbino, a charming city in the Italian Marche far removed from the artistic centres of Florence, Rome and Venice. One might, therefore, legitimately ask why Federico Barocci deserves a major international loan exhibition – the first monographic showing of his paintings and drawings outside Italy.

Wed, 08 May 2013 08:21:00 GMT

Why and how art was suddenly born 40,000 years ago in Europe

Colin Renfrew on “Ice Age Art: Arrival of the Modern Mind”, the British Museum, London, until 26 May

Art was born suddenly, about 40,000 years ago, in the Ice Age of Europe. That art could be so old was not indeed realised until 1879, when the cave paintings of bison at Altamira in North Spain were first recognised and authenticated. The cave paintings of France and Spain can only be visited there, at the famous sites like Lascaux (in the Dordogne) and Altamira. But the remarkable small carvings on bone or ivory which are found in such caves, often of animals or the celebrated “Venus” figurines of nude women, are more portable, and they have been found more widely .

Wed, 08 May 2013 08:18:00 GMT

Boxing à la français

Carey Gibbons on “George Bellows (1882-1925): Modern American Life”, Royal Academy of Arts, London, until 9 June

This is the first monographic exhibition of the American artist, George Bellows, 1882-1925, in 30 years and the first ever in Britain. Although Bellows’ artistic career was ended in 1925 by his early death, aged 42, he produced an oeuvre that is remarkable for its variety of style and subject matter. His work was exhibited frequently and rewarded with positive reviews and prizes during his lifetime, but Bellows has received little recognition after his death, largely due to the focus on the Abstract Expressionists at the expense of earlier American modernists.

Wed, 08 May 2013 08:13:00 GMT

The big names from Glasgow cannot tell the story alone

Peter Crack on “Bellini, Botticelli, Titian: 500 years of Italian Art”, Compton Verney, Warkwickshire, until 23 June

This didactic display of 40 works on loan from the Glasgow Museums sticks to a well worn path. The organisers have chosen to trumpet the presence of three artists—Bellini, Botticelli and Titian—all born within 60 years of each other. Otherwise, the exhibition tells the story of Italian art from the 15th to the 19th century, in traditional, chronological order. An isolated St Lawrence, of around 1370–75, by the Sienese artist, Niccolò di Buonaccorso, the start of the exhibition, represents the new dawn in Italian painting.

Wed, 08 May 2013 07:51:00 GMT

Painter of a vanishing and vanished world

John Chu on “George Catlin: American Indian Portraits”, National Portrait Gallery, London, until 23 June

In the summer of 1830, the American painter George Catlin (1796-1872) embarked upon the first of five journeys deep into the Indian territories that stretched west of the Mississippi River. Having abandoned a burgeoning law career and failed to establish himself as a society portraitist, this Pennsylvanian was busily reinventing himself as an artist-ethnographer possessed of an urgent mission to document the “looks and modes” of the Native American peoples before they were overtaken by the geographic encroachments of the United States.

Wed, 08 May 2013 06:47:00 GMT

Preening and posing

Clare Backhouse on “Painted Pomp: Art and Fashion in the Age of Shakespeare”, the Holburne Museum, Bath, until 6 May

This one-room exhibition concentrates on nine full-length portraits that represent the pomp of elite English clothing in the early 17th century. Alongside these articles of Jacobean dress, information panels invite us to imagine the expense and labour involved in constructing such appearances in real life. Commissioned from the artist William Larkin (around 1580- 1619), the portraits are thought to celebrate a dynastic marriage between the Howard and Cecil families in 1614.

Wed, 08 May 2013 06:43:00 GMT

Rodin, first and foremost

Clare Heath on “Moore Rodin”, the Henry Moore Foundation, Perry Green, Hertfordshire, until 27 October

Set within the sculpture park of Henry Moore’s 50 acre-estate in rural Hertfordshire, this exhibition brings together Moore’s sculptures with works by Auguste Rodin. To my mind, the Frenchman comes out on top. Seeing Rodin’s majestic Burghers of Calais, 1889, cast 1908, transported from its site outside the Houses of Parliament to Moore’s self-landscaped grounds gives an opportunity to reconsider this work.

Wed, 08 May 2013 05:37:00 GMT

Two ways, one movement

Catherine Spencer on “Pistoletto Politico”, Luxembourg & Dayan, London, 12 February-12 April; Giuseppe Penone, the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, until 11 August

The overlap of the Michelangelo Pistoletto exhibition “Pistoletto Politico” at Luxembourg & Dayan and Giuseppe Penone’s Bloomsbury-commissioned Spazio di Luce, 2012, at the Whitechapel Art Gallery allowed formal and conceptual comparison to be made between them. The burnished steel surfaces of Pistoletto’s Mirror Paintings from the 1960s, four of which featured in “Pistoletto Politico”, explore the mirror’s incorporation and exclusion of the viewer, correlating its ability to unify, multiply, and split the subject with the contradictions of political consciousness.

Wed, 08 May 2013 05:30:00 GMT

Washing away the past, transforming the present

Julie Solovyena on “Gaiety is the Most Outstanding Feature of the Soviet Union: Art from Russia”, the Saatchi Gallery, London, until 9 June

“Gaiety is the Most Outstanding Feature of the Soviet Union: Art from Russia” brings together works by artists who are Russian, or of Soviet origin, more often than not now working outside of the country, notably Yelena Popova, Daniel Bragin and Dasha Fursey. There are also those, such as Jānis Avotiņš, who belong to the so-called “networked” Russia from former Soviet satellites. Contemporary Russian art is paradoxical, as it is made by artists whose national identity is often shaped and reflected by their physical distance from the homeland that often seems all too eager to reject them.

Wed, 08 May 2013 04:20:00 GMT

Ancient Romans? Folks just like us

Jane Masséglia on “Life and Death: Pompeii and Herculaneum”, the British Museum, London, until 29 September

British Museum curator Paul Roberts and his team have constructed a lively and accessible exhibition which leads the visitor through a model Roman house, before its sudden destruction by Vesuvius’s eruption of AD79. The “Life” of the exhibition title is primarily domestic. Aside from for a series of objects illuminating the role of women in the public life, the opening space, given over to commercial life, feels brief and lacks atmosphere.

Wed, 08 May 2013 03:24:00 GMT

Art in exile: haunted by a house

Niccola Shearman on “Schwitters in Britain”, Tate Britain, London, until 12 May

This exhibition is part of the Tate's occasional series on the British context of international artists, and it tracks an artist whose sheer creative resilience turned the deprivation of exile into a scavenger hunt. Leaving Germany in the wake of the Degenerate Art exhibition of 1937, Kurt Schwitters first settled in Norway before arriving in Britain in 1941, only to be interned on the Isle of Man as an enemy alien.

Wed, 08 May 2013 02:12:00 GMT

Communications in cloth

Elizabeth Kutesko on “Yinka Shonibare, MBE, Fabric-ation”, the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield, until 1st September

“Fabric-ation” is about Yinka Shonibare’s ideas of cloth as a systems of cultural signs and ethnic stereotypes. With more than 30 exhibits, all made between 2002 and 2013, it is the largest exhibition of his work to date. It includes sculpture, photography, film, painting, music and performance, as well as textiles. Shonibare’s recent public sculpture, especially his Nelson's Ship in a Bottle, 2010, displayed in Trafalgar Square, London from 2010 to 2012, was a suitable, large scle preamble to this Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP) show, where his two open-air pieces, the six-foot Wind Sculptures make their debut.

Wed, 08 May 2013 01:03:00 GMT

The Palais de Tokyo presents an esoteric underbelly

Julie Solovyena on “Cold Sun”, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, until 20 May

Soleil Froid The Palais de Tokyo presents an esoteric underbelly “Cold Sun”, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, until 20 May When the Palais de Tokyo re-opened last April after a massive renovation and extension, its ambitions flew high. It would set off on a mission to present challenging, experimental and forward-thinking art. The Palais, the former 1937 World Fair building, has also been a cinema, an archive and a squat.

Wed, 08 May 2013 00:55:00 GMT

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