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.
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
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.
Art Review
The Shocking Allure of Erotic Abstraction
A show on Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, and Alice Adams gives a sense of how different, even alarming, these pieces would have been to viewers in the 1960s.
Art Review
Is Jenny Saville the UK’s Greatest Living Painter?
Enormous in scale, Saville's uncomfortably close-cropped depictions of women’s faces and nude bodies abound in the joy of painterly modeling.
Art Review
Leigh Bowery Was His Own Artwork
In a contemporary society made creatively bland by the homogenizing factor of social media, one yearns again for such an original artist.
Art Review
José María Velasco Lovingly Captured a Changing Mexico
He celebrated the physical entity of Mexico in its exactness, rather than appealing to ingrained nationalistic European sensibilities of history painting.
Art Review
Edvard Munch Was a Magician of Light
A show at London’s National Portrait Gallery reveals the artist’s astonishing technical skills, but the wall texts are laugh-out-loud amusing at best and art historically dangerous at worst.
Art Review
The Courtauld’s Impressionism Show Is a Victim of Corporate Curating
It seems that the philanthropic funds that enable shows like this are at the expense of art historical depth and integrity, perhaps even curators’ jobs.
Book Review
Adventures in the Louvre Is the Guidebook Nobody Asked For
Rife with descriptions of “seductive” works, the former “New York Times” Paris bureau chief’s book reads more like a travel guide than the impartial reporting of a journalist.