Jeremy Deller’s art doesn’t fit easily into an art gallery. In 2004 he won the Turner Prize for his quite extraordinary project of re-enacting one of the bloodiest battles during the miners’ strike of the 80s, something he had seen as a teenager on telly. The Battle of Orgreave, or A Blow to One is…
Ben Nicholson may have connected Picasso’s Cubist period with their coded images of their lovers, but he was even more taken with the abstraction of Dutch artist Piet Mondrian, as a small show at the Courtauld (until 20 May) reveals. Mondrian║Nicholson: In Parallel looks at their friendship during the unsettled decade before the war. They…
Picasso and Modern British Art at Tate Britain until 15 July is an extensive and scholarly study of Picasso and his influence on modern British artists. It explores the rather chilly reception Picasso received in Britain, while looking at seven key British artists for whom he was an important stimulus, among them David Hockney, Henry…
Spring has come early in London. The Royal Academy is ablaze with all the colour and life of a new season; the air is heavy with blossom, leaves form a tunnel and a clearing in the woods takes on a green hue. David Hockney’s A Bigger Picture (until 9 April) is not billed as a…
A comedy about Stalin? It sounds outrageous, and in fact it is. Dark, bitter, savage, and very clever, Collaborators is a new play by John Hodge about the Russian playwright Mikhail Bulgakov, who was given a poisoned chalice by the regime when asked to write a play celebrating the life of Stalin. The time was…
London Letter 