Studio International - Visual Art, Design and Architecture

Studio International incorporating
The Studio
founded 1893

Pacific Standard Time: Crosscurrents in L.A. Painting and Sculpture 1950-1970

With its iconic architectural silhouette atop the hills of Los Angeles and its status as one of the most richly endowed and premier art institutions in Southern California, the J. Paul Getty Museum has become a dominant arbiter of art and culture for Los Angeles in the 20th century. It is indeed fitting that the Getty Foundation should spearhead the large-scale collaborative initiative, Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945-1980, in which over 60 cultural institutions from the greater Los Angeles area celebrate the city’s artistic heritage and contributions to the art world.

Building The Revolution: Soviet Art and Architecture 1915-1935

The arrival point at the Royal Academy Courtyard off Piccadilly, first glimpsed through the Classical archway, is unusually dramatised by the rising profile of Tatlin’s Tower (until 29 January), Vladimir Tatlin’s unrealised Monument to the Third International. This is an inspired move reconstructing a faithful model of a building, which had been proposed by its designer (1920) in the hubris of the Revolution, to be twice the height of the Empire State Building. Architect Jeremy Dixon of Dixon Jones Architects was enabled to create an authentic and accurately scaled constructed model, still here of substantial size, matching well that made originally by Tatlin. Lord Burlington, the original 18th-century Piccadilly mansion’s Palladian patron, could be spinning futuristically in his elaborate tomb.

Claude Lorrain: The Enchanted Landscape

It is an open question as to whether the late painter Cy Twombly, who was so inspired by the work of Nicholas Poussin, Claude’s near contemporary in Rome, would have felt the same way (one might surmise) if instead of encountering early in his career as he did, an example of Poussin’s painting within the Fogg Museum, Harvard Collection he had first chanced there prior upon Claude’s drawing of the Arrival of Aeneas In Latium, (not in this exhibition).

Edvard Munch, L'oeil moderne

The Pompidou's Munch retrospective entitled L'œil moderne stares defiantly at the Norwegian's life with (forgive the translated pun) fixedly modern ideas. The curators in their Introduction humbly claim to offer "a new slant on the artist". Apart from Munch’s 1,100 paintings, he also created 18,000 prints, 4,500 watercolours, woodcuts, drawings, and several sculptures. He also took many photographs, and was fascinated by cinema, newspapers and print media.

Giorgio Vasari: Dessins du Louvre

Musée du Louvre, Paris
until 6 February 2012

This winter, in celebration of the five hundredth centenary of Giorgio Vasari’s birth, the Louvre opened the doors of its own “cabinet des dessins” by displaying 42 drawings highlighting the diversity, elegance and skill of the Renaissance man the public have come to know as the famous, yet at times unreliable, author of The Lives of the Artists.

Pipilotti Rist - Eyeball Massage

Once upon a time there was a girl called Elisabeth Charlotte Rist who was born in the Alps of Switzerland. While growing up she realised that she saw the world through different lenses from the majority of people. Years later, when older, she renamed herself Pippiloti Rist - paying homage to the fictional powerful heroine of her childhood - and decided to become an artist to share her creative universe with everybody else.

Translating a Spiritual Legacy

So much has been written about Chanel since she emerged as an “insolent upstart”, as Jérôme Gautier describes her, opening her first Paris shop in 1910 and boutiques in the French resort towns of Deauville and Biarritz a few years later. One tends to take her story for granted. Gautier operates by questioning how much we really know about Chanel, the woman, and the force behind her commercial success.

Reality and Romance

Iconic images of war and martyrdom present very different sides of the same coin

There’s something very special about photography and war, and photography and death. The inscribing of instantaneous moments of people in extremis catches our attention and involves our emotions in with unrivalled intensity. The notion of a “shot” is common to both war and photography. Both forms of shot are decisive and irrevocable.

Painting Canada: Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven

This winter, The Dulwich Picture Gallery takes us on a tour of the seductive world of Canada’s vast and wild landscape. The galleries are devoted to a group of early 20th-century pioneer artists, Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven, who set out to change the existing style of Canadian art. These artists painted a landscape previously believed too harsh to be rendered sublime – the 19th-century ideal and the preferred aesthetic for rendering landscape.

Youth and Beauty: Art of the American Twenties

It is almost impossible to separate the decade of the 1920s in America from the Jazz Age spectacle found in the stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, a social scene celebrating opulence, wealth and sexuality, populated by young flappers with cropped hair and dapper gents in seersucker suits sipping on mint juleps, dancing the Charleston in shiny new shoes. Culturally these boom years are also tied to both a celebration of industry and steel, as seen in the Precisionist cityscapes of Charles Sheeler, and the flowering of African American cultural in the Harlem Renaissance.

The Steins Collect. Matisse, Picasso and the Parisian Avant-Garde

When Leo Stein settled in Paris in late 1902 it was with the same romantic intention, as so many before him, to become an artist. Dutifully he spent hours at the Louvre and Musée du Luxembourg, enrolled in art classes and found himself a studio adjacent to his flat on 27 rue de Fleurus. But what was more momentous was Leo’s decision to start buying contemporary art, purchasing his first Cézanne, The Spring House (c1879), from Ambroise Vollard’s gallery in 1903. In the fall of 1903, Leo was joined by his sister Gertrude, who moved in with her brother on rue de Fleurus.

Can Architects Draw?

Architects’ Sketchbooks: This extensive compendium reaches for a definition of this fundamental process and mental tool available to all architects. Literally “sketch” is both a noun and a verb. And so it is in the hands of all 85 architects whose work is included: in some cases only a noun defines it, in others, proactively and dynamically, it is a verb.

Studio Visit:
Antony Gormley

Sculpture studios are particularly fascinating places: factory-like yet traditional in terms of materials and processes, having more in common with the historic atelier such as that of Rodin or Brancusi, from which marvellous photographs exist, with assistants and large spaces, than an average modern-day studio. An artist of Antony Gormley’s remarkable productivity working on a large scale and operating out of central London, must it would follow, have a spectacular work space.

The Pot of Gold at the Other Side of the Atlantic.
Cecil Beaton: The New York Years

Cecil Beaton’s love affair with New York City began when he sailed from his native England into New York Harbor. The year was 1928 and he was a starry-eyed 24-year-old looking for what he later called “the pot of gold at the other side of the Atlantic”. His expectations for the new venture were high; fueled by author Beverley Nichols’s descriptions of a Brave New World waiting to be conquered. Soon, Beaton’s infatuation grew into a full-fledged romance with New York’s high society.

Gerhard Richter: Panorama

The enigma of Gerhard Richter is not here resolved by Tate Modern’s new exhibition. Yet the exhibition is, as is now usual at Tate Modern, very well curated. As would seem very appropriate to Richter’s multifarious range of art, different groups of work, according to genre, are sub-divided more or less typologically with definable boundaries to categories by room, and follow accordingly a chronology to fit. Perhaps it is the method of this sub-division by rooms that jars.

From Timbuktu to Shangri-La

Now that the Alexander McQueen “Savage Beauty” exhibit at the Met has ended, it does not seem possible that another show could spark as much enthusiasm for a designer’s work or for fashion in general. It would have to be something of the same magnitude and caliber, you might reasonably say. In fact, there are two small exhibits that opened in mid-September keeping up the momentum while raising questions about fashion’s impact on culture, the arts and practical life.

Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan

According to the famously unreliable Giorgio Vasari, when Leonardo’s drawing of The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and Saint John the Baptist was displayed in a Florentine friary, crowds of men and women gathered to see the image. The awe it inspired in these contemporary spectators transformed a viewing of Leonardo’s work into something of a religious festival. The current display of a considerable number of Leonardo’s few existing paintings at the National Gallery (until 5 February 2012) confirms that Leonardo and his attendant myth still have the power to draw febrile masses.

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