1 week ago War Paint – Women at War review – female conflict artists get their moment in the spotlight

From quilting in Japanese prisoner camps to graffiti in Sudan via Rachel Whiteread, Maggi Hambling and Lee Miller, this documentary covers myriad artistic responses to warMargy Kinmonth’s latest feature documentary represents the third in a trilogy of films about artists and war, following Eric Ravilious: Drawn to War, which focused on the second world war artist of the title, and the more first world war-skewed War Art with Eddie Redmayne, which showed on ITV. This time the focus is on female artists and war – as the title suggests with its cringe-inducing pun on a slang term for makeup.It’s a perfectly valid and potentially fruitful subject, but the analysis here is often frustratingly superficial. Kinmonth puts herself front and centre as the onscreen interviewer and narrator, so one has to blame her directly for the daftness of some her questions. For instance, she asks sculptor Rachel Whiteread: “I’m wondering, is there a difference in the perception of female artists to men, a...

Events

1 week ago Hidden Portraits: The Untold Stories of Six Women Who Loved Picasso by Sue Roe review – artist as lothario

Françoise Gilot is the most compelling figure in this biography of the painter’s lovers – but you get the feeling she would have loathed this book“No woman leaves a man like me,” Pablo Picasso is supposed to have declared to Françoise Gilot, his partner and the mother of two of his children, in the spring of 1953. The couple had by this point been together for a decade, their first encounter having taken place in 1943 in a black market cafe in Paris (Picasso, who was then 61, had approached the 21-year-old Gilot bearing a bowl of cherries). But now he’d become involved with Jacqueline Roque, the woman with whom he’d go on to spend the final years of his life.What to do about this? Gilot would not confront him. Better simply to call his bluff. “I am very secretive,” she said in an interview in 2016. “I smile and I’m polite, but that doesn’t mean that I will do as I said I will do He thought I would react like all his other women. That was a completely wrong opinion.” The following ye...

Culture

3 w. ago ‘Just be radical’: the feminist artist giving Matisse a modern punk twist

In her irreverent new exhibition, Sylvie Fleury is pairing the great modernist’s drawings and cutouts with her own fashion-focused workWhen Henri Matisse described his work as “in step with the future”, he was thinking about his revolutionary cutouts, made with collaged coloured paper, rather than, say, the evolution of the women’s movement or consumer culture. The leading Swiss artist Sylvie Fleury came of age with the latter, but when she was invited to select drawings and cutouts from the Matisse estate for an exhibition, she was struck by the enduring immediacy of his vision. “My feeling with modernist artists is that, a lot of the time, they were trying to define what was happening within the history of art,” she says preparing for Drawing on Matisse, her showwhich situating 16 of his works within and alongside her impishly feminist and fashion-focused sculpture. “With Matisse, it was more like: ‘Just do it, be radical.’”Fleury well understands the power of disru...

Politics