Edward Lucie-Smith has 10 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 8 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4★ across 3 ratings. The most-rated is Public Art in a Modern Society.
Public Art in a Modern Society
Summary
How do we expect public art to function in a contemporary society? By public art, we mean art that to some extent at least ambushes us. We encounter it as we go about our everyday lives, not in some special art-dedicated space. In other words, certainly not in a museum. However, Aida Mahmudova notes, in her introduction to this public art project for Baku organized by Yarat! Contemporary Art Space, conditions for public art, and also what it hopes to achieve, are now very different from the way in which art of this kind operated previously.
©2014, 2018 Cv Publications (P)2018 Cv Publications
Pollock/Picasso: The European Vanguard Versus American Modernism
Summary
This audiobook considers the magnetic poles of post-war modernism and the towering figures of Pablo Picasso and Jackson Pollock. The essay considers the history of French avant-garde art led by Picasso to the post-war years and the increasing dominance of American artists foregrounded by the advent of Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s.
©2016, 2017 Cv Publications (P)2017 Cv Publications
The Private John Singer Sargent
Summary
An essay by Edward Lucie-Smith explores aspects of the mysterious and private character of the renowned American society artist John Singer Sargent.
©2015 Cv Publications (P)2017 Cv Publications
Ai Weiwei: And the Evolution of Political Art
Summary
To start this off I can’t do better than quote the piece by Ben Luke, resident art critic of the London Evening Standard, that appeared shortly before my time of writing, and a couple of weeks before the relevant exhibition opened at the Royal Academy: “Ai Weiwei”, Luke said, “is probably the most famous artist in the world. He has transcended the world of museums and galleries, and exerts a newsworthiness that no other artist competes with.” This statement, if one bothers to look through the kind of publicity that Ai now attracts - thanks to the digital revolution most of this is easily available with a few clicks on one’s computer - is self-evidently true. Even the very biggest art stars of the past - not Picasso in his dotage, for example, nor Andy Warhol in the 1960s during the epoch of The Factory and the New York nightclub Studio 54, nor even Joseph Beuys, at the time when his 'Organisation for Direct Democracy Through Referendum' formed the central point of reference at the 1972 Documenta 5 in Kassel - enjoyed the same degree of global celebrity. In large part this is due to the operation of the Web itself. Picasso died in 1973, Beuys in 1986, and Warhol in 1987. Though we still speak glibly of the two latter as 'contemporary artists', really they belong to a different world in terms of celebrity and how it is created.
©2015, 2017 Cv Publications (P)2017 Cv Publications
The Modern Shaman
Summary
There is an increasing tendency to set up body artists and performance artists - the two categories are often interchangeable - as the real heroes and heroines of the contemporary avant-garde. In fact, we need to look much further back for its beginnings. The first body art performer, as well as the first professional bodybuilder, was the showman, Eugene Sandow (1867-1925). Though Sandow’s heyday occurred before the birth of the Modern Movement, there are compelling reasons for giving the primacy to him.
©2014, 2017 Cv Publications (P)2018 Cv Publications
David Hockney: British National Treasure
Summary
An essay by Edward Lucie-Smith on David Hockney's portraits exhibited at the Royal Academy's "82 Portraits and One Still-Life", and also "David Hockney and the Yorkshire Landscape" at RA in 2012. David Hockney has, after a much reported domestic catastrophe in Bridlington - the untimely death of a young member of his entourage - returned to the peace and quiet of California. He nevertheless remains a British national treasure. No other British artist enjoys so much affection - combined with a real, solid, celebrity status - among his compatriots. The huge turnout for the private view of his new exhibition at the R.A. - an institution of which he is of course a member - offered ample proof of that, if any were needed. No hyped-up YBA could have matched it, though Damien Hirst is, one suspects, a considerable richer man, with a wider and hungrier international market. The show was entitled "82 Portraits and One Still-Life". The still-life is there, laid out on blue bench, as a substitute for a sitter who at the last minute couldn’t come on the appointed day. All the sitters occupy the same armchair, placed at exactly the same distance from the artist. They are all seen full length. Sometimes the floor on which their feet rest is blue, while the wall behind them is green. Sometimes it’s the other way round. All were painted on canvases of exactly the same size, in, at most, three sessions. Sometimes only in two. The lighting is the same throughout - clear and shadow-less, though the chair is allowed to cast a small shadow now and then to emphasize its three-dimensionality. Hockney has no interest in the moodiness and mystery of Rembrandtian chiaroscuro. He also seems to have little interest in brushwork as such. There are none of the flickering brushstrokes - the little glittering dabs of paint - you find in high-fashion Edwardian portraits by Sargent and Boldini, to whom Hockney can now, in respect of his position within our society, be compared.
©2014 Cv Publications (P)2021 Cv Publications
Realism in the Caribbean
Summary
Art in the Caribbean is culturally of great complexity. This complexity reflects the intricacies of the colonial history of the region, with the different islands and territories divided between many different European powers. Artists in each territory tended to mesh into a different education system and a different set of preconceptions about art.
©2014, 2017 Cv Publications (P)2017 Cv Publications
Yayoi Kusama
Summary
Yayoi Kusama is now one of Japan’s best-known contemporary artists. She was the recipient of her country’s Praemium Imperiale for painting in 2006 - the most prestigious award Japan can offer to any painter, native or foreign. Her rise to fame has been unconventional, even by the standards of the art world of the 21st century, where eccentricities of all kinds pass without question.
©2014, 2017 Cv Publications (P)2017 Cv Publications
Art, Poetry and WW1
Summary
In this study, Art, Poetry, and WW1 by Edward Lucie-Smith of writing, poetry, and painting in the centenary year of the outbreak of the First World War, the author considers the historical impact on the general psyche of the calamitous events, reflected in the expression of poets and visual artists. The volume includes Eric Kennington, C. R. W. Nevinson, John Singer Sargent, William Orpen, Stanley Spencer, and Paul Nash; and writers Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg, Wilfred Owen, Edward Thomas, and T. S. Eliot. In Europe, the painters Otto Dix, Max Beckman, Franz Marc, Gino Severini, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and Ludwig Meidner. He establishes a continuity to the theme with reference to works by Velázquez, Watteau, Goya, and others, in their treatment of the spectacle of battle and the horrors of war and human conflict.
©2014, 2017 Cv Publications (P)2018 Cv Publications
Contemporary Art, The Med
Summary
There are three things that we have to take into account when attempting to assess the impact of the contemporary sensibility in art on the culture of the various countries bordering the Mediterranean. First, the way in which each of these territories responds to the idea of the contemporary is bound up with its own cultural history. Every Mediterranean coastline possesses a hinterland, and this hinterland exercises an enormous influence on what is seen on the coast itself.
©2014,2018 Cv Publications (P)2018 Cv Publications