Egon Schiele - The Courtauld Gallery

Egon Schiele, Standing Nude with Stockings, 1914

Egon Schiele: The Radical Nude is at the Courtauld Gallery until 18 January 2015.
Schiele's forensic and unflinching drawings of male and female bodies executed in a fluent yet seemingly neurotic line and touched, or washed, with sickly colour can still shock a century after they were made. As Laura Cumming observes: they are beautiful and horrifying in equal measure. Shocking, too, is the realisation that no works by Schiele are to be found in British public collections - which makes this exhibition all the more exciting.
Read reviews by Alastair Sooke, Waldemar Januszczak,  Jackie Wullschlager, Jonathan Jones, and Laura Cumming (at the end of her piece on Moroni).
Click on images to elarge.

Egon Schiele, Nude Self-Portrait, 1910

Egon Schiele, Seated Female Nude with Raised Right Arm, 1910

Egon Schiele, Squatting Female Nude, 1910

Egon Schiele, Two Girls Embracing, 1915

Egon Schiele, Male Lower Torso, 1910

Egon Schiele, Kneeling Nude with Raised Hands (Self-Portrait), 1910

Egon Schiele, Woman with Black Stockings, 1913

Giovanni Battista Moroni - Royal Academy of Arts

Giovanni Battista Moroni, Young Lady, c1560-65

Giovanni Battista Moroni is at the Royal Academy of Arts until 25 January 2015.
This is a thrilling opportunity to see a comprehensive display of Moroni's exquisite portraits. Moroni (1520/4 - 1579) lived and worked in, and around, Bergamo in northern Italy painting the local nobility and other residents. While this is certainly the first major survey of his work to be seen in this country, Moroni is not quite the undiscovered master that some press reports seem to suggest - a fine collection of his work will be familiar to visitors to the National Gallery where they have been on show since their purchase in the 1860s and 70s.
Read reviews by Laura Cumming, Richard Dorment, Waldemar Januszczak, Jonathan Jones, Charles Hope and a 'preview' by Claudia Pritchard.
Click on images to enlarge.

Giovanni Battista Moroni, Portrait of a Lady ('La Dama in Rosso'), c1556-60

Giovanni Battista Moroni, Isotta Brembati, c1555

Giovanni Battista Moroni, Gian Girolamo Albani, c1570

Giovanni Battista Moroni, Gian Gerolamo Grumelli, c1560

Giovanni Battista Moroni, Prospero Alessandri, c1560

Giovanni Battista Moroni, Don Gabriel de la Cueva, Count of Albuquerque, 1560

René Burri, 1933 - 2014

René Burri, Self-Portrait, Coronado, New Mexico, 1973/83

René Burri, photographer, died on 20 October, 2014.
René Burri, a longstanding member of Magnum, was perhaps the archetypal photojournalist in the heyday of that profession: he travelled the world filing work for Life, Paris-Match, Stern, Du, The Sunday Times and many others. He covered the Vietnam War, the Suez crisis, made work with Picasso, Le Corbusier and Che Guevara. In her obituary notice Amanda Hopkinson says he "combined an ability to get along with people with Henri Cartier-Bresson’s knack for disappearing into a crowd."
Read obituaries in The Guardian, The New York Times and at Phaidon; read a short interview with Burri on his 'best shot'; watch a short video in which Burri talks about the making of six of his most iconic photographs; watch a video of Burri talking about colour photography.

René Burri, Che Guevara, 1963

René Burri, Picasso, 1957

René Burri, Sao Paolo, Brazil, 1960

René Burri, Former Summer Palace. Dead lotus flowers on the Kunming Lake, Beijing, 1964

René Burri, San Cristobal, Mexico City, 1976

René Burri, Moscow, 1988

René Burri,Warsaw, 1989

René Burri, Beirut, Lebanon, 1991

René Burri, Havanna, Cuba, 1993

Ray K. Metzker, 1931 - 2014

Ray K. Metzker, Philadelphia, 1963

Ray K. Metzker, photographer, died on 9 October 2014.
Ray Metzker was an original and stylish Modernist photographer. He was trained at the Institute of Design, Chicago  - originally founded as the New Bauhaus - where he studied under Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind. He consistently experimented with the formal possibilities of black and white photography in single images as well as 'composites' of multiple exposures. His pictures are bold, dramatic, high contrast images pushed to the edge of, and into, abstraction. He seems to have had a bit of a thing about cars - and, since I do too, my selection of his work here is exclusively from those featuring cars. This may not be fully representative of the breadth of his work - but they are all great images!
Read an obituary in The New York Times; see more images at Laurence Miller Gallery.
Click on images to enlarge.

Ray K. Metzker, Philadelphia, 1963

Ray K. Metzker, Spain, 1960

Ray K. Metzker, Philadelphia, 1964

Ray K. Metzker, Philadelphia, 1963

Ray K. Metzker, Philadelphia, 1963

Ray K. Metzker, Philadelphia, 1963

Ray K. Metzker, Philadelphia, 1980

Ray K. Metzker, Philadelphia, 1963

Ray K. Metzker, Marseille, 1961

Ray K. Metzker, Philadelphia, 1963

Ray K. Metzker, Philadelphia, 1964

Ray K. Metzker, Washington DC, 1964

Anselm Kiefer - RA: Annenberg Courtyard: Velimir Khlebnikov: Fates of Nations: The New Theory of War. Time, Dimension of the World, Battles at Sea Occur Every 317 Years or Multiples Thereof, Namely 317 x 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 . . . . . . . ., 2011-14

Selected images of Anselm Kiefer's installation - Velimir Khlebnikov: Fates of Nations: The New Theory of War. Time, Dimension of the World, Battles at Sea Occur Every 317 Years or Multiples Thereof, Namely 317 x 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 . . . . . . . ., 2011-1 - in the Annenberg Courtyard in front of the RA; the installation is part of Anselm Kiefer, a wonderful exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts until 14 December 2014 - see also blog entry below. (Click on images to enlarge.)
The work  is described, by the RA, as follows:

Anselm Kiefer often dedicates his works to intriguing figures of the past, be they poets or philosophers. This piece is one of a number of works emerging from Kiefer’s ongoing exploration of the Russian Futurist avant-garde writer, theorist and absurdist Velimir Khlebnikov (1885-1922).

After years of study, Khlebnikov concluded that a major sea battle took place every 317 years, or multiples thereof. Kiefer celebrates this heroic and ludicrous activity with a work that is both monument and anti-monument. Measuring almost 17 metres in total and consisting of two large glass vitrines, Kiefer creates a transparent, reflective sea-scape in three dimensions that calls to mind the Romantic sublime of painters from JMW Turner to Caspar David Friedrich. Kiefer uses the frames of the vitrines to stage a mysterious drama, in which viewers, seeing each other and their own reflections, become participants.