British artist Edward Burra (1905-76) features surprisingly prominently in the publicity for the Royal Academy’s current exhibition Mexico: A Revolution in Art, 1910-1940. A number of the reviews of the show feature Burra’s watercolour El Paseo (c.1938), a wonderfully stylised and slightly sinister snapshot of night-time street-life in the Mexican city. I haven’t yet seen the exhibition, but I’m […]
Monthly Archives: July 2013
Had enough of the great British heat wave already? Cool off at one of this summer’s great British art shows… Like Wimbledon and the Proms, the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition, now in its 245th year, has long since gained the status of a British institution. Which is not to say that all of the 1000 plus […]
Shortly after I joined Lund Humphries in late 1991, somebody put forward the idea for a series of short, low-priced, illustrated monographs on the key figures in modern British art. It would be a Penguin Modern Painters series for the end of the millennium. Lists of artists were drawn up and authors approached. One of […]
When painter L.S. Lowry died in 1976, his young protégée Sheila Fell confessed to Lowry’s biographer Shelley Rohde: ‘I miss his wit; I miss his humour; I miss him. He was a great humanist and no-one ever seems to mention that. To be a humanist one has to be slightly detached from human beings after […]
Modern British Artists 