The Gold Drawings: Evelyn De Morgan at Leighton House
As far as is known, Evelyn De Morgan made only seventeen ‘gold drawings’. Eleven of these are arranged along Leighton House’s basement gallery, tracing a filigree thread across the four dark walls. The room is low-ceilinged, and its walls are the same matte grey as the carefully selected woven
Anarchic Humanism: Alice Neel at the Barbican Art Gallery
Alice Neel sits naked in front of me. In oil-paint form, that is, but the effect is no less striking for it. The artist’s first self-portrait, created when she was in her 80s, epitomises the irreverence, the subversion and the brash humanity that pulses within her work. These urges are somewhat te
Painting Poetry: Dia al-Azzawi at the Ashmolean
Dia al-Azzawi’s notebooks do not seem to contain notes. This is my immediate perception upon entering the intimate gallery, tucked inside the Ashmolean. I am met not with precise script in neat folios, but instead with inked pages, some reaching across entire walls, others bound into rippling conc
Fuseli and the Modern Woman: Fashion, Fantasy, Fetishism
Sophia Fuseli burned her husband’s drawings. Of the tossed sheaves, around fifty were spared and temporarily decorate the walls of the Courtauld Gallery. Each page is a giddy mass of penwork – confident strokes of graphite and washes of pale ink – so that Henry Fuseli’s (1741-1825) sketches
