This isn’t any sort of anniversary year for JMW Turner, but one would be forgiven for thinking it was. The year opened with a superbly exciting show of his work in Greenwich, and comes to a close with the first museum exhibition to focus solely on his later work, as well as a new British…
Henri Matisse’s cut-outs are some of the most instantly recognisable of his works. They reduced his art to simple coloured shapes that lend themselves to easy reproduction. I knew what I was going to see at the Tate Modern’s exhibition, Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs, better than most. I have spent hours in art class tracing…
Charles Saatchi isn’t simply grabbing the headlines with Nigella, he continues to hunt down the next big thing in the art world. This time his cavernous Saatchi Gallery in South London turns its focus on Africa and South America with Pangaea: New Art from Africa and Latin America (until 31 August). The title Pangaea refers…
Richard Hamilton is touted as Britain’s most important post war artist, but I have to admit that a year ago when the National Gallery showed his late works, I simply didn’t get them. Meeting the same paintings again in the last rooms of this huge Tate Modern retrospective (until 26 May), they made sense. There…
After years of writing tragedies, Verdi in his old age turned to the majestic girth of Shakespeare’s debauched knight, Sir John Falstaff, for inspiration in what would be his final opera. Conductor James Levine, who returns to the Met Opera after two years of illness, believes it is the greatest comic opera of all –…
Turner and the Sea. The two go together so well, it is almost impossible to imagine that this collection of magnificent works at the Greenwich National Maritime Museum (until 21 April) is the first time there has been a survey of the subject. In fact, somewhere between half and two thirds of Turner’s enormous output…
The Chapman brothers crucify Ronald MacDonald in their latest show, Come and See. Literally. And dozens of times over. Taking their title from a movie about the horrors of World War 2, these irreverent artists bring war right into our daily existence. They merge a fast-food culture with the grimmest scenes of human suffering since…
The Tate Britain has been hiding behind hoardings for some three years now, and it was with something akin to relief that they could now reopen with a fully functioning museum. Building works are always tedious, and never more so in a public space when suddenly the café has moved, the toilets don’t work or…
The Nose. It must be the most unromantic title for an opera, or a story for that matter, because Shostakovich’s opera started out as a short story by Gogol. It’s an unromantic opera. But it’s clever and crazy and utterly zany. This Russian classic is essentially the magic of making comedy out of absolutely nothing.…
Paul Klee famously took ‘a line for a walk’ with his drawing, and opened up the world of art to every primary school pupil. His work is hugely popular, probably because it appeals to so many different tastes. There are the deceptively simple pure watercolour washes, with an incredible harmony of colour, and the bold…
London Letter 