Here is the Guardian newspaper’s report of the event, and here’s an opinion piece about it by the Guardian’s art critic Jonathan Jones.

The various people in the background add a surreal air to the whole scene.

The exhibition covers Canaletto’s whole career as a painter of views of Venice, giving visitors the chance to see some of his earliest panoramas of the city as well as his more characteristic later work.

As with many artists, the early work is in some ways significantly different to the later work that established his reputation. It’s more moody and much looser in style  than his more characteristic  mature paintings (I use the term mature to describe his later work, despite the fact that some people may argue that his later paintings were less of a development of style than a capitulation to the taste of the Grand Tourers. To my mind however the work in question is nothing short of excellent).

The exhibition gave me the chance to study Canaletto’s technique for depicting water, which has always fascinated me. I’m particularly impressed by the peculiar and simple graphic style that he employs in his mature work. It’s particularly impressive because it’s such a great contrast to the fussy and intricate manner in which he depicts the surfaces of buildings. Have a look at it in the detail below, from a painting that he produced in his mid thirties.

Canaletto; Molo from Bacino dei San Marco on Ascension Day. 1733-34. Detail showing his technique for rendering water

The water is rendered as a flatly toned body of greyish colour that is transformed into water by the addition of countless tiny flecks of translucent white that represent small waves or ripples. It’s such a basic technique that it seems like cheating. The thought occurs to me that it’s also a technique that could easily be mastered by an assistant, as the whole process of applying the endless flecks must surely have been mind numbingly tedious.

Canaletto’s water-depicting techniques in his early works is totally different, as can be seen in the two examples below.

Canaletto: San Cristoforo, San Michele and Murano from the Fondamenta Nuove. About 1722. Detail showing his technique for depicting water

The view of San Cristoforo, San Michele and Murano from the Fondamenta Nuove, above, is one of Canaletto’s earliest view paintings, executed in about 1722 when he was in his mid twenties. See how simply and moodily he depicted the water. Not a ripple in sight.

A year or so after completing this painting he created the work shown below, in which ripples have started to disturb the water’s surface, but of a much more painterly, less graphical, style than is the case with his later ripples. I suspect that he got fed up of painting ripples and thus devised his stylish shorthand method.

Canaletto: Rio dei Mendicanti, Looking South. 1723. Detail

The exhibition, Venice. Canaletto and his Rivals ia at the National Gallery, London, until 16th January 2011.

Molo from Bacino dei San Marco on Ascension Day is the Royal Collection of Her Magesty Queen Elizabeth II

San Cristoforo, San Michele and Murano from the Fondamenta Nuove is in the Dallas Museum of Art

Rio dei Mendicanti; Looking South.  is in  Ca’Rezzonico, Venice

In the early 1980s Gibbard was my favourite cartoonist. Judging by the quality of his work, with its clarity of line and style, I’d always assumed that Gibbard must be an urbane and sophisticated individual, smartly dressed and well turned out.

In 1985 I started working for the Guardian myself, as a freelance illustrator and graphic artist. From behind my desk I’d occasionally see a huge, bearded, unkempt tramp-like man walk past along the corridor, carrying his few possessions in a plastic bag. One day I noticed that this shambles of a man was carrying a Gibbard cartoon, and what’s more, that he was talking to another member of the Guardian’s staff as though he’d actually drawn it himself.

Les Gibbard obituary in the Guardian (written by Mike McNay, former Guardian art editor, who gave me my first job on the newspaper).

A visitor to Frieze 2010 looks at some cutting edge work by Reginaldo Pereira

Above: Reginaldo Pereira

A visitor to Frieze 2010 walks behind a work by Damian Ortega

Above: Damian Ortega. Ortega used to be a political cartoonist – a trade that I myself have pursued to some degree – before turning to sculpture and installation art.

Above: Francis Upritchard

Two identical visitors admire two identical spades in Joseph Kosuth's work 'One and three shovels'. 1965

In the Joseph Kosuth work above, one of the two identical spades is a photograph of a spade. That’s contemporary art for you – always questioning reality and perception.

I enjoyed Frieze 2010 more than several previous Frieze shows. I suspect that the work in it this year was safer than previously, which may not be a good thing. It’s losing its edge. The sort of work that I like is the visually interesting though intellectually undemanding type of thing exemplified by the Damian Ortega piece in the photo above. I left the show feeling happy but unchallenged.

Like Weiwei’s installation this is a very low-lying piece of work, made out of a very large number of similar elements. This time it’s not artificial sunflower seeds though, it’s flowers.

It’s called Crocus Carpet and it consists (as you can hopefully see in the photo below), of the whole floor of the gallery being turfed over and planted with crocuses (apart from the pleasant pathways between the flowers). Art is often concerned with questioning one’s perceptions, and that’s exactly what this work does.The sensation of strolling through what feels for all the world like an area of parkland while actually being inside a huge cathedral-like industrial building is unsettling and disorientating. At the time of my visit several people were sitting on specially installed benches admiring the flowers – and eating sandwiches. I didn’t realise that you were allowed to do that sort of thing in art galleries.

Tate Modern Turbine Hall installation: Crocus Carpet

Crocus Carpet doesn’t only make you question your perceptions because of the fact that it’s an outdoor space that’s been transported indoors though. It also does so because the crocuses aren’t crocuses at all. Here’s a close-up photo of them.

Some of the crocuses in Tate Modern's Crocus Carpet

That’s right. They’re not crocuses. They’re darts.

Here’s one copied from the catalogue.

A crocus from the Turbine Hall's Crocus Carpet

As the artist says “The installation explores concepts of reality, illusion, perception and deception by utilising the dissonance arising from the similarity in appearance and the contrast in nature between crocus flowers and darts.”It sounds a bit pretentious to be honest, but then that’s artists for you. I think it’s meant to be something about the difference between the soft, warm nature of the flowers and the hard, aggressive nature of darts.The artist goes on to say that the work “is anchored to deeper currents of unreality than are evident simply by observing and interacting with the piece.” I’m not sure what that’s supposed to mean. It smacks of obscurantism to me. I’ll try to find out and mention it later.
Apart from the usual caveat about contemporary art’s need to over-intellectualise itself, it’s an excellent piece of thought provoking and engaging conceptual work.

The work also explores areas of reality and unreality because the work actually never existed at all. It was, and still is, a fabrication within the mind of the artist himself. Or so I’m told.

Word has it that more than a few of the assembled media folk slipped some of the exhibit into their pockets. I think that Tate Modern may have missed a merchandising opportunity there.

These photos show Ai Weiwei being interviewed by the press.

Ai Weiwei being interviewed in the Turbine Hall in Tate Modern at the launch of his work, Sunflower Seeds, upon which everyone is standing

Ai Weiwei in the Turbine Hall, Tate Modern. Ai Weiwei is bending down at the top left of the photo (see next photo for a close-up)

Ai Weiwei bends down to show the assembled members of the press his sculpture, Sunflower Seeds

 

With this installation in mind, have a look at another Tate Modern Turbine Hall installation in my next post

Ai Weiwei in the Tate Modern Turbine Hall

To mark this fact there are two exhibitions in London.

Read about them here on the Professional Cartoonists Organisation blog.

As my own contribution to the celebrations I thought I’d exhibit a rarely seen early Searle on these pages. It was drawn when he was 18 years old.

The picture dates back to Searle’s early years in Cambridge.  He wasn’t a student there – he just happened to live in the town (His father was a porter at Cambridge railway station at the time of his birth). He managed to get a job as a cartoonist on the local Cambridge paper and also indulged his interest in art by drawing portraits (not quite caricatures at this early stage) for the Cambridge University magazine The Granta.

This portrait from the magazine’s edition of 2nd November 1938 is of Helen Gillett, who just happens to be my partner’s mother (which is why we’ve got an old copy of the publication in a drawer). She had her portrait done because she’d just become the captain of the women’s hockey team.

An early Ronald Searle illustration from Cambridge University's Granta magazine

Here’s a rare treat:
Ronald Searle’s first TV interview in 35 years,
 conducted for his 90th birthday for Channel 4 News

The  Ronald Searle exhibition at The Cartoon Museum: March 3rd – July 4th 2010

Richard Prince, the ‘appropriation artist’ has had his work in the Tate Modern exhibition Pop Life removed due to its questionable taste. The questionable work in question – Spiritual America – was a ‘rephotograph’ of a photograph of the actress Brooke Shields when she was 10, standing naked in a bath and looking decidedly provocative. The picture was withdrawn following a visit to the gallery by the police following complaints that the image may have breached the Obscene Publications Act.

The catalogue of the show had to be withdrawn and modified. The catalogue wasn’t pulped, but had a rectangle of paper pasted over the offending photograph (below). This makes the catalogue almost a work of art in its own right (by today’s criteria of what constitutes art).

Richard Prince, Spiritual America: censored in Tate Modern catalogue

The photograph of a prepubescent Brooke Shield was replaced by a photograph of a decidedly post-pubescent Ms Shields, shown below. This photograph, Spiritual America IV, 2005, was a collaboration between Mr Prince and the photographer Sante D’Orazio, and was thus not produced by his usual techniques of appropriation, rephotography, or as some may put it, theft.

     

 

 

Richard Prince: Spiritual America IV, 2005. Tate Modern, 2009

 

 

Here’s part of the discussion.

Barbican Art Gallery

The School of Saatchi