Art Review
John Singer Sargent’s Essence in a Brushstroke
Though it offers little in the way of Sargent’s artistic engagement with the city he called home for a decade, “Dazzling Paris” is a reminder of his uncommonly skillful brushwork.
Olivia McEwan
Olivia McEwan is a trained art historian and freelance writer focusing on the London art world. She is also a practising artist, lending a keen eye and understanding of painterly technique which informs her criticisms of historical and emerging arts.
Art Review
Joseph Wright of Derby’s Candlelit World
Using an extreme form of chiaroscuro, Wright portrays the dramatic moment of intellectual or moral revelation in his paintings of scientific subjects.
Art Review
Jacques-Louis David Knew That Style Is Political
Where art history is a subjective observer, he was on an active quest for the representational form for the “truth.”
Art Review
The Anti-Caravaggio of the Baroque Era
Georges de La Tour incorporated chiaroscuro into austere genre compositions, lending them a uniquely intimate and spiritual quality.
Art Review
Who Was Marie Antoinette Beneath All That Silk and Spectacle?
History has never really known her as a person, and that isn’t about to change here.
Art Review
The Darkness of Greuze’s Doe-Eyed Children
Where an exhibition’s focus on childhood becomes outright problematic is the show’s bizarre conclusion, which considers spoiled innocence.
Art Review
Gilbert & George Forever Together
Looking at 25 years of art by the duo who have made themselves into their art, it feels as if they have made collectible editions of themselves.
Guide
10 Exhibitions to See in Paris This Fall
Surveys of French giants like Jacques-Louis David at the Louvre take center stage, but the city’s zeitgeist is perhaps best captured outside the big museum circuit.
Art Review
Tate Modern Loses the Plot With Theatre Picasso
The exhibition is all very meta — the audience are themselves the action and participants. Yet this device could be applied to any artist with the same result.
Art Review
A Neo-Impressionism Show for the One Percent
An exhibition shows off the movement’s socialist politics via works a wealthy benefactor unironically chomped up.
Art Review
The Visual Artist Who Made Radiohead
An exhibition of Stanley Donwood’s work in collaboration with frontman Thom Yorke charts how the distinctive look and feel of the band’s album covers took shape.
Art Review
What Does Anselm Kiefer Have to Do With Van Gogh?
As a show on the pair at the Royal Academy unwittingly demonstrates, not much.