Hogarth and his contemporaries agreed that human life was a stinking and dirty business once you had skimmed the froth off the top.
Michael Glover
Michael Glover is a Sheffield-born, Cambridge-educated, London-based poet and art critic, and poetry editor of The Tablet. He has written regularly for the Independent, the Times, the Financial Times, the New Statesman and the Economist. He has also been a London correspondent for ARTNews, New York. His latest books are: Late Days (2018), Hypothetical May Morning (2018), Neo Rauch (2019), The Book of Extremities (2019), What You Do With Days (2019) and John Ruskin: a dictionary (2019).
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What Constable Sacrificed for His Artistic Success
Sentimentality would creep into the artist’s late evocations of remembered childhood scenes, as would idealization.
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The Wild Side of Poussin
Quite a bit of wildness hides beneath the artist’s cloak of scholarship and respectability.
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Leon Kossoff’s Art of Darkness and Light
I soon discovered that this gentle, wary, vulnerable man of 75 possessed a will of steel.
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Searching for Frans Hals’s “Laughing Cavalier”
So many of us have seen this painting too often in reproduction, without perhaps ever having really seen it at all.
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Paula Rego’s Raging Women
Rego’s women are always independent spirits, and they are often raging.
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Two Forms of Sculptural Ingenuity
For Eduardo Chillida, a work was a finished thing. Gustav Metzger, on the other hand, would make works that sometimes existed in a state of perpetual evolution.
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JR, Down the Barrel of the Camera
This is a public, political art that invites us to see the world differently, and even encourage the spirit of community.
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Barbara Hepworth’s Monumental Elegance
The exhibition Barbara Hepworth: Art & Life is both an examination of some of the best of her artworks and a spasmodic account of her life.
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What to Make of Nero?
An exhibition takes on the notorious Roman emperor, from gleaming marble to roaring flames.
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A Flawed Retrospective for a Surrealist Rebel
There is so much information handed to us in the exhibition, Eileen Agar: Angel of Anarchy that we risk forgetting what we might think if we came fresh to a painting.
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A Painter of the Bloomsbury Group Comes Into View
You could say that Nina Hamnett fell victim to her own reckless self-mythologizing.