All Too Human, Tate Britain until 27th August – so plenty of time..
A huge and brilliant exhibition, multiple rooms of stunning paintings, but with a few puzzles; the title suggests portraits and figures, the human body/bodies and there’s plenty of that. There are, however, also city- and landscapes (Auerbach, Kossoff, Bomberg, Creffield, Soutine). The booklet says “All Too Human explores how artists in Britain have stretched the possibilities of paint in order to capture life around them” – about as general as you can get. And how about Soutine? There’s a portrait and a wild expressionist rendition of Ceret, both brilliant, but did he ever even visit Britain? Booklet says yes, so fair enough.Anyway, below a sample of the best stuff. I think the best is Bacon’s 1956 “Figure in a Landscape”; never seen it before (unlike most of the other pictures here) – it’s the one with the near abstract swirls of paint and the vivid, smeary blue sky. I couldn’t find a picture of it, unfortunately.
Lucian Freud, portrait of Frank Auerbach
That bulging forehead and crooked nose, the angle..
Freud, portrait of Bella
Looming out at the viewer, those feet…
Euan Uglow, Georgia
Classic Uglow/Coldstream plotting, sculptural accuracy.
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye
Lovely portrait – but it’s not is it? She paints from imagination, I believe.
In addition to these, there are Bacon triptychs – Dyer, Rawsthorne – , a roomful of Freuds; a Sickert woman naked in a chilly grey dawn bed; Auerbach and Kossoff churches and streets and parks; Bomberg and followers (Creffield and Dorothy Mead, better than the boss for my money); three Kitajs, two of them (Cecil Court and the Wedding, the one with Sandra, obviously, and Hockney) huge splashes of vivid colour amidst the general brownishness; the weird little girls in Paula Rego’s huge, sinister tableaux.
In the last room, Yiadom – Boakye, Cecily Brown, Jenny Saville and Celia Paul. Brown’s paintings are always worth looking closely at, to decipher what’s going on. Celia Paul’s bear a resemblance both to Rego and Soutine, I think. Brilliant exhibition then – apart from the FN Souza room. I couldn’t find any pleasure in his flat, dark, spiky images of the Crucifixion et al; they did remind me a little of Wifredo Lam here and there.
Roy Oxlade, Alison Jacques Gallery until 7th April (Berners Street, W1)
Oxlade was another Bomberg pupil, but you wouldn’t know it from his work, unlike some of the more slavish acolytes. He died in 2014, at 85; these are works from the 80s and 90s.
I loved these dowdy, barbaric, cartoonish at times, mostly big old slap-around canvases; repeating images, paint pot and brush, coffee pot (shades of Kentridge), lemon squeezer (shades of Robert Johnson). I reckon you can see a lot of Rose Wylie in his work and vice versa; not surprising, maybe, because they were married.
Blue Stalks, 1998
That looks like a Basquiat face, next to the flower pot.
Profile and Brushes, 1984/85
I thought this was his version of Bruegel’s Icarus (legs disappearing into the sea) until I read the title. Hadn’t spotted the profile…
Kitchen Knife and Scissors, 1986
Dancing scissors in a stormy landscape of paintpots.
Green Curtain, 1996
Oxlade’s Rokeby Venus, maybe – no mirror though.
Yellow Lemon Squeezer and Coffee Pot, 1987
Yes, I get that – the lemon squeezer looks like an old fashioned candle holder; everything’s floating and is that a coffee pot which has grown legs? (Kentridge again).
Death of Stalin, dir. Armando Iannuci (2017)
Jason Isaacs as Zhukov
The historian Richard Overy write a very peevish critique of this brilliant film, pointing out errors – the main one I think was that Beria was no longer head of the NKVD when Stalin died. Were 1500 would -be mourners massacred by the NKVD when they (mourners) came to town? Nevertheless, the screenplay, based on a graphic novel, apparently, is convincing and so, decisively, is the acting: Palin as Molotov, Buscemi as Khrushchev, above all Simon Russell Beale as the demonic Beria. Chilling and very funny, but too horrifying to raise a laugh.
Rearview
Blackpaint
23/3/18
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