Reviews

Joan Miró, Tate Modern, London

From farm to firmament the Catalan artist saw stars his entire, 70-year career

Inside Reviews

City Blues: Cartoons by Marf, Guildhall Art Gallery, London (Rated 3/ 5 )

Friday, 15 April 2011

If the 2008 banking crisis had an architectural motif, it was the Gherkin. In City Blues, a series of cartoons about the financial crisis by the female cartoonist Marf at Guildhall Art Gallery, it appears at least a dozen times, an instantly recognisable shorthand symbol for the Square Mile's decade of excess, self-celebration and collapse. In one cartoon, the Gherkin has even found its way into a lap-dancing club, having morphed into a decorative penis. Its familiar form presumably offers a reassuring sight for the attendant bankers who, the caption tells us, are strictly forbidden from enjoying any sort of "quantitative easing".

Pino Pascali, Camden Arts Centre, London

Sunday, 10 April 2011

An experimental Italian sculptor who died at only 32 left a joyous legacy that celebrates the world of work itself

The Cult of Beauty: the Aesthetic Movement 1860-1900, V&A Museum, London (Rated 3/ 5 )

Friday, 8 April 2011

What should make the curve of a brow, or the cherry flush of a lip, beautiful? Why are peacocks' feathers, rich in delicate texture and iridescent colour so unlikely, so pointlessly extravagant?

Dirt: The Filthy Reality of Everyday Life, Wellcome Collection, London

Sunday, 3 April 2011

Jenny Gilbert: Dishing the dirt... or how we learnt to grapple with life's grubby truths.

Wool Work: A Sailor’s Art, Compton Verney, Warwickshire

Sunday, 3 April 2011

Charles Darwent: Needlework done on board ship is far more expressive and inventive than its folk-art image suggests.

Alfred Wallis and Ben Nicholson, Compton Verney, Warwickshire (Rated 3/ 5 )

Thursday, 31 March 2011

It proved to be a strangely fruitful meeting of minds and artistic sensibilities. Ben Nicholson met the old Cornish fisherman Alfred Wallis in St Ives one day in 1928, quite by chance, when he was visiting with his friend and fellow painter Christopher Wood. He saw a bunch of paintings nailed – yes, nailed – to a wall beside an old fisherman's cottage. They were of boats, sea walls, sea turbulence – the compelling stuff of folk art. Wallis had come to painting late. He had started at the age of 68, after the death of his wife.

A Practice for Everyday Life: Young Artists from Russia, Calvert 22, London

Wednesday, 30 March 2011

Russian art, hung by a loose thread

Picasso, Mir�, Dal�: The Birth of Modernity, Palazzo Strozzi, Florence
Picasso in Paris, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

Sunday, 27 March 2011

Picasso was a magnet to younger artists, but some stories of meeting the master in Paris may be as inventive as the paintings of his accolytes.

Laurie Anderson, Trisha Brown, Gordon Matta-Clark, Barbican Art Gallery, London (Rated 3/ 5 )

Friday, 25 March 2011

The full title of this show – Laurie Anderson, Trisha Brown, Gordon Matta-Clark: Pioneers of the Downtown Scene New York 1970s – does not rank among the pithiest of the decade. It makes this exhibition sound sprawly and messy. Which – like it or lump it – is what it is.