At Dulwich Picture Gallery

Peter Campbell: Adam Elsheimer, 2 November 2006

... to him all but three are to be seen at the Dulwich Picture Gallery until 3 December. (The self-portrait in the Uffizi is his only large painting on canvas.) Even this near complete showing of his surviving work puts no strain on the capacity of the long narrow space in which Dulwich hangs loan exhibitions. Not a lot is known about him. He had friends ...

Very Active Defence

Peter Lagerquist: Private Defence, 19 September 2002

... in the Territories,’ he says. ‘In this tough situation, you can’t distinguish between self-defence, active defence and very active defence.’ The role of private security has been raised in the Knesset, but few Israelis share Oron’s worries, and the press remains largely uncritical of Government policy on the Intifada, let alone of the role ...

At the British Library

Peter Campbell: Mapping London, 25 January 2007

... century having resown and retilled the field, have replaced the coherent, low-rise, spire-dotted, self-explanatory city of the early views with a confusing patchwork, there is enough left for this exhibition to raise ghosts as you walk in Southwark or along ...

At Tate Liverpool

Peter Campbell: Gustav Klimt, 3 July 2008

... embarrassing transgressions. In Klimt’s protégé Egon Schiele this ambivalence disappears. His self-portrait with Klimt of 1912 is the closest thing here to a great picture. The figures, both wearing smocks, stand close together – a blue smock belonging to Klimt can be seen in the exhibition. There is no island of safety isolating the fiercely drawn ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘District 9’, 8 October 2009

District 9 
directed by Neill Blomkamp.
September 2009
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... oozing arm ending in a vast crab claw, and become an outcast. Without ceasing to be the blinkered, self-admiring fellow he always was, he has decided he doesn’t want to be the mere material of his compatriots’ medical and military experiments. One of the finer touches in this (fortunately) none too serious plot is that the aliens have weapons of tremendous ...

Short Cuts

Lola Seaton: Deliveroo, 24 January 2019

... economy giants, relies on those who deliver the services being legally classified as self-employed ‘independent contractors’ rather than ‘employees’, and thus not sharing the fundamental rights and job security afforded to other workers. A six-page manual underscores this. It prescribes, and proscribes, certain words: rather than ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘Hale County This Morning, This Evening’, 20 December 2018

... can’t bear to let go. There are several wonderful moments in the film that would count as sheer self-indulgence in any ordinary account of documentary film-making, moments of pure photography, so to speak, where the camera itself is amazed at what it can do, or perhaps at what there is for cameras to see. I am thinking in particular of a scene where a man ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘BlacKkKlansman’, 27 September 2018

... and tangled bits of history and mythology hang in the air: spectacular but romantic defeat, self-congratulating hatred, the West, integration, much more. The film ends on a flag too: the flag of the United States, upside down, at first in colour, then frozen in black and shades of grey. Before that we have seen a discussion between the aforementioned ...

At the Towner Gallery

Brian Dillon: Carey Young, Palais de Justice, 4 April 2019

... of justice, and perhaps much else (assuming, that is, anything exists outside of this huge self-involved system). The men who appear in Young’s video seem at best peripheral figures, always subject to the speech and gaze of the judges, or stranded in passageways and vestibules. One fretful advocate looks as though he has been waiting there for ...

At Tate Modern and Modern Art Oxford

Peter Campbell: Joseph Beuys and Jannis Kounellis, 17 March 2005

... become artworks whose qualities as objects take on an autonomous life. An art of protest and self-examination is incorporated into the culture of excess it criticises.One way to respond to these displays is to give them the same status as the masks and effigies displayed in a museum of anthropology. Many of those were made to be discarded – even ...

At Tate Britain

Peter Campbell: Gainsborough, 28 November 2002

... pose (and which, in debased form, had a long history as photographers’ studio backdrops). The Self-Portrait done just before his move to Bath – a significant step up the social ladder – makes the subjects of earlier pictures (the Gravenor family of Ipswich, for example) look the provincials they were.† The change of mood, a new suavity and ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘One Fine Morning’, 15 June 2023

... the proposed change in the French retirement age. She’s funny too, but a bit too brusque and self-contained, as we realise when she announces to herself that she is not to be pitied. Of course not. When after 25 years of marriage her husband leaves her for another woman, she asks him why he didn’t just get on with his double life and keep quiet about ...

Lab Leaks

Alex de Waal, 2 December 2021

... are also risks. Living with Covid means every sore throat or runny nose is a quandary. Should I self-isolate and take a test right away or leave it for a day to see how the symptoms develop? Research virologists working with deadly pathogens run through the same mental calculations as the rest of us – they will often decide to shrug off a mild fever and ...

At the Imperial War Museum

Peter Campbell: Agitprop, 3 January 2002

... from one of Goya’s anti-clerical drawings asks to be compared with a photograph of Casals in self-imposed exile writing what might be a letter asking for funds (this was many years after the war) for ageing Spanish exiles.It was a war in which style could be matched to event. Picasso’s games with anatomy – at once dangerous and playful – had ...

At the Louisiana

Michael Hofmann: On Chaïm Soutine, 24 October 2024

... Bern until 1 December. Perhaps wherever one sees Soutine the experience is going to be violent, self-contradictory, disorientating. But the contrast between the immaculate physical setting – with its black or white gallery walls, some curved and some straight, small rooms, long passageways, snug little mezzanine at the end and introspective pebble beach ...