The American
CHOICE Saloua Raouda Choucair
Tate Modern, Bankside, London SE1 9TG www.tate.org.uk To October 2013 Lebanese artist Choucair is being celebrated at Tate Modern at present, and if you’re unfamiliar with her textiles, jewelry, sculpture, drawings and paintings, this cross-section is a fine introduction to an artist who deserves vastly greater international recognition, as adept with modular sculpture as figurative painting. July offers the opportunity to combine a viewing with the opening month of Tate Modern’s Ibrahim El-Salahi exhibition (more of which next issue), together illustrating the artistic genius hiding beneath the surface of endlessly negative Middle-Eastern news headlines.
SR Choucair, Self Portrait 1943
© SALOUA RAOUDA CHOUCAIR FOUNDATION
28 July 2013
BP Walk through British Art
Tate Britain, Millbank London SW1P 4RG www.tate.org.uk The American understandably reports American works and collections on tour in the UK, but the recent rehanging of Tate’s collection of British art offers a good moment to focus for a month on the treasures right here on our doorstep every day. Tate Britain’s decision to create a circuit of its great works in chronological order may seem a slightly vanilla approach, but in the quest to define what makes British art ‘British’ it is at least a point of agreement, leaving us to argue to what degree it may be parochial, epic, derivative or singularly inspired. The all-star line-up of Holbein, Bacon, Hirst, Constable, Waterhouse, Hockney, Riley, Freud, Hepworth, Hogarth, Rossetti, Epstein, Gainsborough, Millais, Turner and more should never seem dull, unsexy or staid, yet the new
Dame Barbara Hepworth, Pelagos 1946 © HEPWORTH ESTATE
circuit offers an opportunity for reappraisal, to be justifiably staggered by the contrast of sculpture and paint in stark proximity. Each Pre-Raphaelite masterpiece springs anew from the walls when mixed with contemporaneous artists who cared little for the Brotherhood, rather than walking into a forest of auburn-tressed lovelies and declaring this one better than that one. While the chronology denies the chance to juxtapose Fuseli’s nightmares with Dadd’s fairythemed madness, it’s a welcome remix of one of the world’s greatest collections, one we sometimes seem eager to overlook in favor of the latest shiny pop/fashion retrospective. JMW Turner, Caligula’s Palace and Bridge, exhibited 1831 © TATE