International Art News

From the 8th of  September 2010  to the  16th of  January 2011 – Tate Britain
Rachel Whiteread is renowned for her evocative large-scale sculptures, but drawing has always remained one of her core activities. This exhibition offers a rare opportunity to explore her works on paper, most of which have never been shown before in a public gallery.

These collages and drawings provide a fascinating and intimate insight into the creative process behind Whiteread’s work. While her sculptures are often large-scale and involve a team of fabricators, these paper works provide a more personal, mobile counterpoint. Nevertheless, they also share many of the themes familiar from her public commissions: texture and surface; void and presence; and the subtle observation of human traces in everyday life.

Museum Hours

8 September 2010  to  16 January 2011 – Tate Britain
Muybridge was the man who famously proved a horse can fly. Adapting the very latest technology to his ends, he proved his theory by getting a galloping horse to trigger the shutters of a bank of cameras. This experiment proved indisputably for the first time what no eye had previously seen – that a horse lifts all four hooves off the ground at one point in the action of running. Seeking a means of sharing his ground-breaking work, he invented the zoopraxiscope, a method of projecting animated versions of his photographs as short moving sequences, which anticipated subsequent developments in the history of cinema.

British-born Eadweard Muybridge, who emigrated to the United States in the 1850s, is one of the most influential photographers of all time. He pushed the limits of the camera’s possibilities, creating world-famous images of animals and humans in motion. Just as impressive are his vast panoramas of American landscapes, such as the Yosemite valley, and his documentation of the rapidly growing nation, particularly in San Francisco. His dramatic life included extensive travels in North and Central America, a career as a successful lecturer, and the scandal of his trial for the murder of his wife’s lover.

This exhibition brings together the full range of his art for the first time, and explores the ways in which Muybridge created and honed his remarkable images, which continue to resonate with artists today. Highlights include a seventeen foot panorama of San Francisco and recreations of the zoopraxiscope in action. His influence has forever changed our understanding and interpretation of the world, and can be found in many diverse fields, from Marcel Duchamp’s painting Nude Descending a Staircase and countless works by Francis Bacon, to the blockbuster film The Matrix and Philip Glass’s opera The Photographer.

Museum Hours

28 June 2010  –  3 January 2011 – Duveens Commission 2010
Fiona Banner is best known for her ‘wordscapes’, written transcriptions of the frame-by-frame action in Hollywood war films. She has long been fascinated by the emblem of the fighter plane. Her compulsion to grasp the uncomfortable resonances of these war machines has produced a growing archive of material. From pencil drawings to newspaper cuttings and Airfix model collections of all the fighter planes currently in service, the modesty of her works often contrasts with the heroic connotations of her subject.

Here, Banner places recently decommissioned fighter planes in the incongruous setting of the Duveen Galleries. For Banner these objects represent the ‘opposite of language’, used when communication fails. In bringing body and machine into close proximity she explores the tension between the intellectual perception of the fighter plane and physical experience of the object. The suspended Sea Harrier transforms machine into captive bird, the markings tattooing its surface evoking its namesake the Harrier Hawk. A Jaguar lies belly up on the floor, its posture suggestive of a submissive animal. Stripped and polished, its surface functions as a shifting mirror, exposing the audience to its own reactions. Harrier and Jaguar remain ambiguous objects implying both captured beast and fallen trophy.

“I remember long sublime walks in the Welsh mountains with my father, when suddenly a fighter plane would rip through the sky, and shatter everything. It was so exciting, loud and overwhelming; it would literally take our breath away. The sound would arrive from nowhere, all you would see was a shadow and then the plane was gone.

At the time harrier jump jets were at the cutting edge of technology but to me they were like dinosaurs, prehistoric, from a time before words.”  – Fiona Banner

Museum Hours

9 June  to  5 September 2010 – Tate Britain
Gasp, cringe, or have a sly chuckle: Rude Britannia will certainly cause a reaction. See politicians brought down to size and the great and the good exposed; blush at the saucy postcards and laugh out loud at the slapstick fun – but watch out for that banana skin!

Put together with some the country’s best-known cartoonists and comedy writers, this exhibition explores British comic art from the 1600s to the present day. Bringing together a wide array of paintings, sculptures, film and photography, as well as graphic art and comic books, the exhibition celebrates a rich history of cartooning and visual jokes.

The room on the Absurd is curated by comedian Harry Hill, and includes such diverse materials as Alice in Wonderland illustrations, David Shrigley’s sculpture, and films by Edwina Ashton and Oliver Michaels . Within the Bawdy, Donald McGill’s smutty seaside postcards can be seen with works by artists as different as Aubrey Beardsley, Sarah Lucas, and Grayson Perry. The rooms exploring Politics, Social Satire and Cruikshank’s Victorian masterpiece The Worship of Bacchus, have been put together with Gerald Scarfe, Steve Bell, and the cartoonists from Viz. These show the power of comic art as a form of social and political commentary throughout history, from satires of Georgian society by Rowlandson and Gillray to Spitting Image’s damning Thatcher puppet.

Looking at comedy that is both timeless and of-its-time, Rude Britannia contrasts contemporary artists such as Angus Fairhurst with key historical pieces, and covers everything from Hogarth to the YBAs.

Museum Hours

Actually until – 24 May 2010 – Then the exhibit move to The Prado in Madrid

The exhibition was organised by Tate Britain, London, in partnership with the Rmn, Paris and the Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.

Shown at the Tate Britain from 23 September 2009 to 31 January 2010. To be shown at the Prado, Madrid from 22 June to 19 September 2010.

The British landscapist J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851) was highly unusual in that he responded to the works of the old Masters and his contemporaries throughout his lengthy career. This often anxious, pernickety, deliberately competitive but always fertile exchange was an integral part of his work as a painter. Turner emerged in the mid-1790s as a particularly gifted and ambitious watercolourist, rivalling his greatest contemporaries (including his friend Thomas Girton (1775-1802)) but also eager to improve his painting technique by studying the Welsh landscapist Richard Wilson (1713-1782) and visiting private collections.
In the absence of museums, the early British collections gave him access to the old masters he sought to equal. As a young man he was moved to tears by one of Claude Lorrain’s paintings (1600-1682), despairing that he would ever do as well. But his work did not go unnoticed and he exhibited at the Royal Academy at an early age, readily emulating contemporary painters and watercolourists. Driven by a powerful ambition, he broadened his fields of investigation: topographic watercolours, seascapes, classical landscapes, fantastic landscapes, genre scenes and history paintings. This variety reflects the wide range of references he had accumulated.

At first he faithfully applied the methods of the budding English watercolour tradition. When he turned to oil painting, he took inspiration from the Dutch landscape painters in the Rembrandt tradition, using a narrow, sombre colour range. The stimulating and already classical example of his great predecessor Richard Wilson led him, towards the turn of the century, to tackle classical landscapes of broader scope and brighter colours. At the same time he studied the art of the great landscape painters working in Italy in the 17th century: Salvatore Rosa (1615-1673) and Nicolas Poussin (1596-1665). Far from producing pastiches of these great models, Turner let powerful, turbulent energy upset the perfection of their harmonious compositions and came close to launching the masterly British tradition of fantastic landscapes with The Deluge (1805, Tate) directly inspired by the painting of the same name by Nicolas Poussin (1664, Louvre).

The two canvases will be shown side-by-side in the exhibition. Turner’s few sallies into history painting (The Holy Family, 1803, Queen’s collection, or Venus and Adonis: Adonis departing for the chase circa 1805, private collection) used richer, deeper colours influenced by Titian (circa 1490-1576) (Virgin with a Rabbit circa 1530, Louvre) and Claude Lorrain. His small figure paintings rival with lesser known masters from the period such as Watteau (1684-1721) (What you will!, 1822, Williamstown, Clark Institute) or his most famous rivals such David Wilkie (1785-1841). The fruitful dialogue with the landscape artists of the following generation, Bonington (1802-1828) (French Coast with Fishermen 1826, Tate) and Constable (1776-1837) (The opening of Waterloo Bridge, 1829, Tate) amplified the freedom of Turner’s brushwork and tone (Calais Sands, Low Water, Poissards Collecting Bait, 1830, Bury Art Gallery or Beached Boat circa 1828, Tate).
After 1820, his discovery of Venice (Venice from the Porch of the Madonna della Salute, 1835, New York, Metropolitan Museum) and a more intensive study of Claude Lorrain led to more sophisticated colour and a mastery of multiplane, vaporous compositions (Palestrina Composition, 1828, Tate). As Turner himself wished, the exhibition will compare one of his most complex masterpieces, The Decline of the Carthaginian Empire (1817, Tate) with two of Claude Lorrain’s magnificent visions which inspired it: Sunset at sea (Louvre, 1639) and Le Débarquement de Cléopâtre à Tarse (Louvre)
By deliberately engaging with other painters, Turner developed his dazzling freedom to paint which reached its apogee in the last decade of his career (Snow Storm, Steam-Boat Off a Harbour’s Mouth, 1842, London, Tate).

“Turner and the Masters” is an illustrated demonstration of the way Turner constructed his remarkable vision throughout his long career. It brings together a hundred paintings and graphic works (studies, engravings) from major British and American collections, the Louvre, the Prado and the Tate Britain.