RA Magazine Blog Listing

RA Magazine Editor Sarah Greenberg looks around the world to select her favourite exhibitions and new museums this Spring.

Who at some point has not felt like Jacob wrestling with the angel? The Bible tells of a mortal struggling with the Divine, holding fast to the angel all through the night and refusing to let go until, at dawn, he prevails and receives a blessing – an answer to his prayers.

Simon Schama – the charismatic historian, polymath and now adviser to David Cameron – delivered an intriguing and original lecture entitled ‘Beasts and Beastliness in Contemporary Art’ as a special FT VIP event for Frieze.

Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684-1721) has long been considered an art-historical man of mystery. Even his friends and contemporary biographers complained that they barely knew him. Indeed Watteau’s art and life remain as elusive as the figures in his drawings, which are about to go on display at the RA in the first major exhibition of these works in Britain.

Last weekend's opening of Turner Contemporary saw a reported 15,000 visitors flock to the stunning new Margate art gallery designed by David Chipperfield RA. The gallery's first exhibition, 'Revealed: Turner Contemporary Opens', features work by six contemporary artists, four of whom created new work for the occasion, inspired - like the gallery's namesake JMW Turner - by the scenery of the North...

If the words ‘chocolate box’ spring to mind when you see Degas’ ballerinas, then think again. Because, argues Ann Dumas, co-curator of Degas and the Ballet: Picturing Movement, ‘Degas was one of the most radical, experimental artists of his day, fearlessly pushing beyond accepted boundaries in both subject and technique, and embracing the technological discoveries of the exciting age in which he...

We're posting the latest RA Magazine 'Out to lunch' feature here so we can show you the photos of the delicious food that architect Piers Gough RA and I enjoyed on our visit to NOPI.

Spring will come early to the Royal Academy, in the form of David Hockney RA’s monumental Yorkshire landscape The Arrival of Spring. And what a glorious spring it is.

Bad boy behaviour, the whiff of scandal, weird sexual antics. No, it’s not ‘Sensation’, it’s Johan Zoffany RA, whose colourful life (1733–1810) and art demonstrate that the Georgian age was not always gracious and the path to artistic success never did run smooth.

Why do galleries and auction houses keep saying they want to be more like museums? Despite their riches, do they crave the cultural kudos that only distinguished curators and an adoring public can confer? Or is it more of a marketing technique to lure in new buyers and press and lift the value of their art to ‘museum quality’? Perhaps it's a bit of both.

RA Magazine Editor Sarah Greenberg maps out her top shows and events of Frieze week. With mobile-friendly map and print-friendly listings.

Sotheby’s public view of top lots from its summer sales has some real gems. Whether or not you are going to bid for them, it is worth popping into the showrooms to take a look - it may be your last chance to see these fabulous works before they vanish into private collections.

The word masterpiece is being tossed around the art world with abandon these days, with Christie’s calling the public show of its top lots ‘Masterpieces’ and a major London art fair called ‘Masterpiece’ opening at the end of this month. Is this hyperbole, or are there any works worthy of the name? I went along to the Christie’s view in their King Street headquarters to find out.

‘The Scream’ by Edvard Munch is one of the world’s most iconic paintings - will it become the world’s most expensive, when it is sold at Sotheby’s New York on 2 May? When I went to view it at Sotheby’s this week, it certainly exceeded all expectations.

Estimated to fetch £1m-1.5m (over £100,000 per centimetre) this long lost imperial seal of the Qianlong Emperor looks set to be the star lot of Bonhams Asian art sale this week.

After a tour of the sale rooms, Sarah Greenberg chooses her favourite works from this evening's Impressionist Modern auction at Christie's.

If you're in the Bond St area today by lunch time, run - don't walk - to Sotheby's for a last chance to see the public view, where you can glimpse some fabulous works from their Impressionist Modern sales that may soon vanish into private collections.

While many artists paint self-portraits at one time or other, Bacon painted them obsessively. This week only, lucky Londoners can see three Bacon studies for self-portraits within a five-minute walk from each other. Posted: 25 June 2012 by Sarah Greenberg, RA Magazine Editor

John Constable’s masterpiece ‘The Lock’ (1824) from the Thyssen-Bornemisza collection in Madrid is a top lot of Christie’s Old Master sale on 3 July. In this stunning painting, along with his other ‘six-footers’, Constable looked at the landscape from the ground up, creating a new point of view. But I was stopped in my tracks by Constable’s smaller, sublime sky study Storm Clouds over Hampstead...

Picasso’s paintings of his mistress Marie-Therese are among the most tender images of love in twentieth-century art, while Schiele’s drawings of his mistress Wally are among the most tormented. Magnificent examples of both are on public view at Sotheby’s Bond Street this week.

A trio of exceptional paintings – by David Hockney RA (b.1937), Francis Bacon (1909-92) and Peter Doig (b.1959) – is now on view at Christie’s, providing the opportunity to see some of the best of British painters of the 20th century and giving a masterclass in modern painting.

Sarah Greenberg, Editor of RA Magazine, remembers a friend and champion of the arts, while Charles Saumarez Smith, Chief Executive of the RA, has written her obituary in the Telegraph

The art critic Robert Hughes, who died on August 6, was among the greatest art critics of his generation, bringing an intelligent, irreverent and irresistibly readable voice to writing on art. In the way that Picasso was able to break the rules of art because he knew them so well, Hughes’ knowledge of art ran so deep that he was able to joke about it and wear his learning lightly, to talk about...

The RA's major exhibition 'David Hockney RA: A Bigger Picture' is only weeks away and the exhibition's catalogue is currently in production. In the meantime, these two new Hockney books are hot off the press just in time for Christmas (and would make perfect stocking fillers).

To walk around 'Model' with Antony Gormley was by turns inspiring and daunting, even a bit frightening given how dark the space is inside his monumental sculpture and how uncanny and unexpected it is to be part of this vast, dark space – one he says has 'the darkness of the imagination rather than of nightmares'.

The art world descends on London next week for Frieze Art Fair (13-16 October), the annual contemporary art jamboree that will see 170 galleries from around the world represented in a vast temporary pavilion in Regent’s Park.

Frieze Art Fair under a big white tent in Regent's Park is London's art circus, where art meets commerce and crowds throng to see the spectacle of it all. Click here for more Frieze week coverage

Small but perfectly formed, The Pavilion of Art and Design is instant gratification for the eyes. A select group of just over 50 galleries, mainly from continental Europe, show twentieth-century art and design in a tent pavilion in London's Berkeley Square. The atmosphere is calm, comfortable and uncrowded, made for careful looking. And the stands are designed to allow you to imagine yourself living...

As the Summer Exhibition gets underway, the RA truly starts to feel like an Academy. Artists and architects roam the galleries discussing, debating and hanging art – both their own and that of others – as they set about the herculean task of hanging well over 1,000 works (selected from over 10,000, in a process shown above) in a matter of weeks.

The first man-made metal, it is strong and enduring, an alloy of base metals that becomes more than the sum of its parts, a product of human ingenuity and created by almost every civilization. Indeed, in his feature on the RA’s Bronze exhibition, the broadcaster Michael Wood writes, ‘Civilisation came with the working of bronze.’

I have looked at countless portraits but I never sat for one until recently, when Humphrey Ocean RA painted me for this page, as part of the redesign of RA Magazine's print edition.

These days it seems we all need a plan B, and the artist Thomas Scheibitz calls attention to this in the title of his new show, ‘A moving Plan B’, that opened last night at Spruth Magers Gallery, a five-minute walk from the RA.

This Summer Waddesdon Manor – the Rothschild stately home in rural Buckinghamshire – is showing ambitious contemporary art inside and out.

We're posting the latest RA Magazine 'Out to lunch' feature here so we can show you the photos of the meal Eileen Cooper RA and RA Magazine Editor Sarah Greenberg shared.

Phyllida Barlow was recently elected a Royal Academician. Tomorrow (22 October) is your last chance to see her exhibition 'RIG' at Hauser & Wirth Piccadilly.

There is an interesting split in Humphrey Ocean RA: he often wears bright colours – a dash of red or orange – and has an eternally cheerful, vivacious and optimistic disposition, yet he frequently paints grey scenes of post-war suburban buildings many people would overlook as, well, dull. This is particularly evident in his current exhibition in the glorious medieval chapel and buildings of Jesus...

When I recently sat for my portrait by Humphrey Ocean RA, the experience was both familiar and alien. After all, I have spent years looking at portraits, talking to artists, visiting their studios and writing about them. But I never knew what it was like to be the subject of a work of art, to sit still, keep quiet and be painted, until now.

David Chipperfield RA's new Hepworth Wakefield Museum is a triumph. From the outside, the jagged grey granite building perched above the River Calder looks stunning, even if its uncompromising modernity strikes a slightly forbidding note.

When is the last time you were announced in a receiving line, invited to wear medals and heralded with trumpet fanfares? Unless you frequent diplomatic parties, it’s an experience from another century and one of the rituals that makes the RA’s Annual Dinner such a spectacular and eccentric experience.

What is it about British summer traditions that calls for a steel band? We all expect it for the Ashes, but for art? Anyone who was in Piccadilly yesterday late morning would have noticed the extraordinary sight of a steel band stopping traffic and leading a merry band of Royal Academicians to a Calypso beat with hundreds of artists in tow. The procession led to St James’s Piccadilly for a blessing...

The RA Annual Dinner feels like walking into a fairytale banquet: men wear white tie and medals, ladies wear evening gowns with glittering jewels, trumpeters play a fanfare into dinner and the British arts establishment sups surrounded by the paintings of the Summer Exhibition and the historic silver that has been donated by Royal Academicians since the RA was founded in 1768.

Axel Vervoordt's last two exhibitions at Palazzo Fortuny during the Biennale have become legendary for their beauty and, especially, the way they mix ancient and modern art, known and unknown artists, artefacts and masterpieces.

A vaporetto strike on the first day of the Venice Biennale does not bode well, especially when it begins at midnight and you're staying on an island that can only be accessed by boat.

The Biennale sprawls outside of its original pavilion gardens – the Giardini – and takes over the city, which is part of the fun. I spent Wednesday looking at some of the pavilions outside the Giardini and seeing the Arsenale.

If my tour of the Giardini of the Biennale, is anything to go by, mazes are a big theme this year. Here are a few: