Highlights include:
– Marco Livingstone and Allen Jones on Lichtenstein, as well as Nathan Dunne on the making of Whaam!
– Paul Farley on Kurt Schwitters
– Jon Savage on David Bowie and T Rex in Glam! At Tate Liverpool
– John-Paul Stonard on European Pop Art
– Penelope Curtis, Fiona Crisp and Willie Doherty on how artists have looked at landscape
– Patrick Baty on the Camden Town Group
– John Burnside on Peter Fraser at Tate St Ives
– Francesco Manacorda on Sylvia Sleigh at Tate Liverpool
– Henry Holland in the Tate Archive
Roy Lichtenstein was widely regarded as one of the key figures of American Pop Art. He became best known for his works based on comic strips and advertising images, but Tate Modern’s forthcoming exhibition will also include his early black-and-white Pop paintings, as well as seascapes and abstracts, sculptures in ceramic and brass and previously unseen drawings and collages. Marco Livingstone introduces his work, his friend Allen Jones pays his respects, and Nathan Dunne explores his modern masterpiece Whaam!
Could it be the same Kurt Schwitters, founder of Merz, collaborator with Dadaists, Cubists and Constructivists, who won first, second and third prizes in the 1946 Ambleside flower show art competition? A new exhibition picks up where many accounts trail off, examining the final years of a major European modernist on the run, who made work from the detritus of wartime London and the Romantic landscapes of the Lake District. Paul Farley says, Modernists Don’t Die in Ambleside.
In the early 1970s, when T Rex, David Bowie and Roxy Music appeared on stage in wild costumes and with androgynous looks, Britain was witnessing the emergence of a new aesthetic that blended high and low culture. Glam had arrived, but what was it, and what did it mean? Jon Savage investigates.
In 1971 the Israeli artist Avital Geva took a lorry filled with second-hand books and dumped them in baskets on a strip of land that divided a kibbutz and a Palestinian village. Why? Edward Platt looks at The Books in Landscape Experiment.
William Scott is known for his still lifes, landscapes and nudes produced over a 60-year period. A friend of Rothko and De Kooning, he deftly blended mid-twentieth-century American and more historic European influences in his paintings, which oscillate between figuration and abstraction. David Anfam reveals the complexities in work that aimed for “beauty in plainness.”
Sylvia Sleigh was a Welsh-born realist painter who spent much of her life in New York with her husband, the art critic Lawrence Alloway. She was best known for her feminist-inspired nude portraits of men, often people she knew. They were depicted in poses taken from art history, with the aim of reversing the stereotypical portrayal of women in art. Francesco Manacorda explores her work.
“One evening we ate in Roy’s studio where there were too many people to be seated, so he placed one of his large sunset enamels on to trestles so that we could all be accommodated. This gave another meaning to eating as an aesthetic experience.” Allen Jones on Roy Lichtenstein, p45
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