The New Royal Academy and Tacita Dean, Landscape review - a brave beginning to a new era

★★★★ THE NEW ROYAL ACADEMY AND TACITA DEAN, LANDSCAPE Brave beginning to new era

From an institution known for excellent exhibitions to a hub of learning and debate

This weekend the Royal Academy (R.A) celebrates its 250th anniversary with the opening of 6 Burlington Gardens (main picture), duly refurbished for the occasion. When it was dirty the Palladian facade felt coldly overbearing, but cleaning it has highlighted the bands of sandstone and brown marble columns that lend warmth to the Portland stone. Originally built in the garden of Burlington House as the HQ for the University of London, this Victorian edifice turns out to be rather handsome. 

Red, Wyndham's Theatre - Mark Rothko drama paints a vivid picture

★★★★ RED, WYNDHAM THEATRE Mark Rothko drama paints a vivid picture

Alfred Molina gives a towering performance as the self-absorbed artist

The band’s back together. Alfred Molina plays Rothko for the third time in Michael Grandage’s revisiting of John Logan’s richly textured two-hander, first seen at the Donmar in 2009 and then bypassing the West End for Broadway.

Brighton Festival 2018 Preview

BRIGHTON FESTIVAL 2018 PREVIEW Highlights of the south coast's premier arts festival

Theartsdesk celebrates its media partnership with the south coast's premier arts festival

This weekend sees the Brighton Festival 2018 kick off. Anyone visiting the city on Saturday 5 May would find this hard to miss as the famous Children’s Parade makes its way around the streets, a joyous dash of colour and creativity. This year’s theme, in honour of Brighton Festival guest director David Shrigley, is “Paintings”. Thus every school in the area has been assigned a famous painting on which to base their parade presentation. The results are guaranteed to be an eye-boggling public showcase.

After the success last year in taking the Festival to outlying areas of Brighton, Your Place returns in 2018. This means that, once again, local groups and committees in Hangleton and East Brighton have joined forces with the Festival - its artistic and theatrical resources and contacts - to put on a raft of events and activities in those areas. Much of this will be happening later in the month on the weekends of 19-20 May and 26-27 May.

Elsewhere its art a-go-go from the start with a free exhibition at the Phoenix Gallery from Californian painter Brett Goodroad, whose figurative abstract work is attuned to the subconscious, and David Shrigley’s Life Model II, a free interactive piece wherein visitors can contribute their own visions of his nine foot tall female sculpture.

Shrigley will also be putting on his own “alt-rock/pop pantomime”, Problem in Brighton, which will surely be worth a look, and giving a talk (“numerous rambling anecdotes but will not be in the slightest bit boring”) later in the festival (23 May).

Others involved in interviews and talks include novelists Rachel Cusk and Rose Tremain, local Green MP Caroline Lucas, London psychogeographer Iain Sinclair, children’s author Michael Rosen, and musicians Brett Anderson and Viv Albertine. In fact, this year’s Festival is particularly strong on contemporary music, with performances by Ezra Furman, The Last Poets, Deerhoof, Malcolm Middleton, Amanda Palmer, This Is The Kit, Joep Beving, Les Amazones D’Afrique, Jungle, Xylouris White and others.

All the above, of course, only skims the surface of Brighton Festival 2018’s hive of activity. There’s also a feast of theatre, circus, classical, children’s fare, dance and hosts more. It’s a very good time to hit the south coast.

Overleaf: Watch a 15-minute guide to BSL-interpreted, captioned and highly visual performances at Brighton Festival 2018

Martin Gayford: Modernists & Mavericks review - people, places and paint

★★★★ MARTIN GAYFORD: MODERNISTS & MAVERICKS People, places and paint

Utterly human account of the painters of London over the 30 years since 1945

Back in the early Sixties Lucian Freud was living in Clarendon Crescent, a condemned row of houses in Paddington which were gradually being demolished around him. The neighbourhood was uncompromisingly working class and to his glee his neighbours included characters from the seamier side of the criminal world.

Picasso 1932: Love Fame Tragedy, Tate Modern review - a diary in paint?

★★★ PICASSO 1932, TATE MODERN Compelling account of the artist's year of wonders

Biography prevails in a compelling account of the artist's year of wonders

Painted in ice-cream shades punctuated with vivid red, the series of portraits made by Picasso in the early weeks of 1932 are as dreamy as love letters. His mistress Marie-Thérèse Walther – we assume it is she – lies adrift in post-coital languor, her body spread before us as a delicious and endlessly fascinating confection.

Come to Dust: Glenn Brown, Gagosian Gallery review - seductive and disturbing

★★★★ COME TO DUST: GLENN BROWN Old masters given freakish new life at Gagosian Gallery

Old masters given freakish new life

When I began studying art history, my Bible was Ernst Gombrich’s The Story of Art. The reproductions are mostly in black and white and, thumbing through my dusty old copy, I find a photograph of the Jesuit church in Rome, whose ceiling was transformed by the painter Giovanni Battista Gaulli into a glorious vista of the heavens teaming with cherubs, angels and saints.

Selma Parlour: Upright Animal, Pi Artworks review - incandescent colours

Opaque paintings evoke Renaissance perspective, classical architecture and satellite landscapes

In the dark days of January, white cube galleries are luminous spaces. This is especially true of Pi Artworks right now: the Fitzrovia gallery is showing an incandescent array of 23 paintings by Selma Parlour. Taken in at once and at first sight, her abstract works arrest the eye with unlikely chords of colour and angular planes that suggest competing vanishing points.

Rose Wylie: Quack Quack, Serpentine Gallery - anarchy at 83

★★★★★ ROSE WYLIE: QUACK QUACK, SERPENTINE GALLERY Anarchy at 83

The octogenarian who paints with the fresh eye of a child

Three years ago Rose Wylie won the prestigious John Moore’s Painting Prize. She was 80 years old and had been painting away in relative obscurity for many decades. You might suppose, then, that the prize was given in recognition of past achievements – a reward for dogged perseverance.

Modigliani, Tate Modern review - the pitfalls of excess

★★★ MODIGLIANI, TATE MODERN Blockbuster show of the Paris bad boy succumbs to surface

Blockbuster show of the bad boy of the Paris scene succumbs to surface

Modigliani was an addict. Booze, fags, absinthe, hash, cocaine, women. He lived fast, died young, cherished an idea of what an artist should be and pursued it to his death. His nickname, Modi, played on the idea of the artiste maudit – the figure of the artist as wretched, damned.

Lake Keitele: A Vision of Finland review, National Gallery - light-filled northern vistas

★★★★ LAKE KEITELE: A VISION OF FINLAND Northern lights at the National Gallery

One of the National Gallery's most popular postcards comes under the spotlight

Finland is celebrating its centenary this year and the National Gallery's exhibition of four paintings by Akseli Gallen-Kalela (1865-1931) of a very large lake in central Finland is a beguiling glimpse of the passion its inhabitants attach to its scenic beauty, in winter darkness and here, summer night. Finland possesses almost 190,000 lakes, depending on your definition.

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