The exhibition Fashioning Masculinities lets men have their cake and eat it too.
Olivia McEwan
London based Olivia McEwan is a trained art historian with BA and MA degrees from the Courtauld Institute, now a freelance writer focusing on the London art world; this academic background contributing to a writing style that — positive or negative — is argued with crucial fairness and balance. Combined with curatorial awareness, she is also a practising painter of predominantly figurative work, lending a keen eye and understanding of painterly technique which powerfully informs her criticisms of historical and emerging arts.
Posted inArt
How Disney Animation Provides a Gateway to Understanding Rococo
So closely do Disney’s animators assimilate the sensibility of French design that on occasion their source material appears almost more Disney than Disney itself.
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A Missed Opportunity to Bring an Eccentric Museum to Life With VR
In Space Popular’s presentation at the Sir John Soane’s Museum the VR content does not complement the physical, but widens the gulf between art history and contemporary art making.
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A Show Traces Philip Guston’s Impact on Contemporary Artists
A Thing for the Mind takes Philip Guston’s 1978 painting “Story” as a starting point to examine the myriad ways in which this piece has filtered into the work of other painters.
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Searching for Healing in Postwar Art
An exhibition at the Barbican in London asks: How do you make sense of war’s senseless destruction and loss of human life?
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A Thrilling Discovery of the Only Known Work by Female Renaissance Artist Caterina Angela Pierozzi
Depicting the busts of Gabriel and the Virgin, “The Annunciation” (1677) may be the ultimate lost artwork, or “sleeper.”
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When a Contemporary Art Gallery Exhibits a Renaissance Artist
Ikon Gallery’s retrospective asserts that Carlo Crivelli’s self-reflexiveness and questioning the nature of the image made him anticipate the “contemporary.”
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Delicately Balancing Psychoanalysis and Art History in a Van Gogh Exhibition
Popular perceptions of van Gogh are often preoccupied with heart-wrenching accounts of mental illness, but Van Gogh: Self Portraits avoids speculative psychoanalytic readings of one tortured face after another.
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Why Is a Virtual Veronese Artwork at a Physical Museum?
To play devil’s advocate, you could argue that eventually technology will be so good that everyone will have VR, and there is no need to travel to the National Gallery at all to see art.
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A Hogarth Survey Has Good Intentions but Misses the Mark
Why assemble the most significant grouping of Hogarths from far and wide without indicating why calling out the faults in historical artworks is important to our understanding of our world today?
Posted inBooks
“I Will Show Your Lordship What a Woman Can Do”: Artemisia Gentileschi’s Compelling Feminist Life
Sheila Barker’s account reveals an undeniably strong character and confidence distinct from, or perhaps in conjunction with, her practical survival needs.
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Dürer’s Journeys Offers a Detailed Examination of the Worldly Artist
By recording unusual sights encountered throughout his travels and disseminating these via workshop practices, it’s understandable why Dürer is so prominent in art history.