Looking at Art
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La Danse on Piccadilly 09/02/08
It may seem that the Weasel is laying himself open to charges of being a slowcoach, lie-a-bed and Johnny-come-lately in only now offering an appreciation of Matisse’s exultant masterpiece La Danse, the centrepiece of the Royal Academy’s From Russia exhibition, sometime after the rest of the press pack has come, prognosticated and moved on to pastures new. But it ain’t so. Far f... Full text
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Beardsley at Dulwich 05/01/08
The panto season is the perfect time for Dulwich Picture Gallery to mount The Age of Enchantment, an exhibition about illustration around 1900. Like pantomime, the works from this aesthetic cusp are concerned with transporting the viewer to somewhere exotic and magical. But anyone who visits Dulwich anticipating a prolonged wallow in the charming innocence of late Victorian and... Full text
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Time travel with Hogarth 17/02/07
This is a magical month for those of us who harbour a secret desire to be whizzed back in time to the 18th century (as long as that era was provisioned with modern dentistry, anaesthetics, antibiotics, refrigeration, the 60-watt bulb, the cocktail shaker etc.). As I remarked a couple of weeks ago, the Canaletto in England exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery is a glittering to... Full text
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Drinking in Degas 26/11/05
There are upwards of 100 works in Tate Britain’s autumn blockbuster Degas, Sickert and Toulouse-Lautrec: London & Paris 1870-1910, but the show is dominated by a single image. L’Absinthe, painted in 1876 by Edgar Degas, appears on the exhibition poster, recurs in the catalogue and has a room to itself in the centre of the exhibition. Obviously, the Tate knows that absinthe ... Full text