Welcome to Alchemy, in which artists with famous names mix strange substances together with outcomes of variable interest.
Michael Glover
Michael Glover is a Sheffield-born, Cambridge-educated, London-based poet and art critic, and poetry editor of The Tablet. He has written regularly for the Independent, the Times, the Financial Times, the New Statesman and the Economist. He has also been a London correspondent for ARTNews, New York. His latest books are: Late Days (2018), Hypothetical May Morning (2018), Neo Rauch (2019), The Book of Extremities (2019), What You Do With Days (2019) and John Ruskin: a dictionary (2019).
Posted inArt
Just Don’t Tell Me the Artist Was “Influenced by Music”
Two London shows highlight the influences of music and architecture on sculptor Anthony Caro’s work. The latter is more successful than the former.
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A Crowd-Pleasing Party of Post-Impressionists
Here they are at the National Gallery, almost all at once, all those modern artists we came here to see, those we have come here to report having seen later.
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Diary of a British Town
The tales in the Thamesmead Codex are melded, mashed up, meshed together fragments of the many human stories told to artist Bob and Roberta Smith.
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In Celebration of Unloveliness
We go to Raphael for idealized beauty. But what if a painting were the opposite of beautiful, and utterly arresting for that very reason?
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Goya’s Coded Love Letter to the Duchess of Alba
Goya neatly clothes himself in his own world of fantasy: He will have her in the end. In life, where the climate is much chillier, it was, alas, to be otherwise.
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Things Go Wayward at the Hayward
The doomster title of Extinction Beckons at London’s Hayward Gallery had really got me going. Then, almost immediately, things started to go wrong.
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Making Mischief in Merry Old England
These rowdy, carnivalesque capers, and all this wild costuming, are about defiant displays of unreason, at odds with the dreary drone of the “voices of authority.”
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Cézanne Saw the Nobility of an Apple
The French painter felt he had to rise to the challenge of one question above all things else: What exactly is it to be a modern artist?
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How Great Was Lucian Freud, Really?
Would it be ridiculous to suggest that Freud lacks nobility or generosity, or even that his pessimism reduces him?
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Adrian Ghenie and the Soup of Fame
Ghenie’s paintings of Marilyn Monroe are a relentless representation of a howling, turbulent tragedy, a face broken into crude sideways slewings and gougings and gorgings of paint.
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Is It Possible to Enjoy Cornelia Parker’s Works Without Her Words?
Parker’s stories bring so many of her works alive, give them meaning, and make us warm to her and to them. Is that a problem?
