N.P. James has 3 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 2 narrators. The most-rated is Anthony Caro: Steel Eye Span.
William Blake: In the Shadow of the Vortex
Summary
Review of the exhibition of visionary artist William Blake at Tate Britain, September 2019. The exhibition is arranged in eight rooms of the downstairs gallery spaces of Tate Britain, low-lit, maroon-painted walls, a very comprehensive collection of a highly original and complex visionary creator. Blake’s parents ran a successful hosiery and haberdashery shop in Broad Street Soho, in a local inhabited by well-to-do middle classes; bankers, fashionistas, gentry. Born in 1757, Blake felt his calling was to art from childhood, and he was encouraged by his parents purchase of colours, paints and casts, and support for his studies at the Royal Academy. His early studies, carefully completed works from the figure show a degree of competence and conscientious determination. It is precisely here that the original vision is inseminated: the pale grisaille ink and watercolour conceptions plant classical statuesque models into a supernatural arena of unfettered imagination. The canon of Western art, of Titian, Veronese, Michelangelo, Raphael, are absorbed by Blake but regurgitated as something quite alien and spectral, subject to a passionate and individual sensibility.
©2019 Cv Publications (P)2019 Cv Publications
Grand Scale Symphony: Anselm Kiefer at White Cube
Summary
A review of Anselm Kiefer exhibition at White Cube Bermonday tours room by room, with analytic descriptions of the large scale works on view. Superstrings, the Norms, Gordian Knot One enters the massive White Cube Gallery in Bermondsey and finds oneself in a darkened avenue bordered by large vertical paintings. Vitrines framed with broad metal casing contain accumulations of mixed media, the Superstrings. On closer attention, scrawed on the glass formulas for the scientific specialist, e.g. in Vitrine number 1 to the left reads Vu+xqa i/2 kud(lodk)ekx, whatever that means. Behind this a confusion of coiled cord, tangled loops of white and black lengths, suspended against a bleached-out suggestion of industrial landscape, silhouetted shapes of buildings and chimneys. Another formula scrawled on the glass. V(Nkov):xeinx encased. Are these scientific string theory? (1) In this panel the bunched confusion of cords lies on a silvered textured ground, which may be canvas but resembles parchment. In the fourth vitrine is a mesh of wire squared grid imposed over an absolute forest of black cord, fused and gutted, with white cord disposed at the base. The message seems to be the toppled towers of science, corrupted by the sensual intuitive surge of the artwork. The formulae are reduced to a scrawled nonsense. Vitrine number 6 is a chaotic tangle of elements....
©2019 Cv Publications (P)2020 Cv Publications
Anthony Caro: Steel Eye Span
Summary
An interview with leading British sculptor Sir Anthony Caro (1924-2016) recorded by Nicholas James at his Barford Street sculpture studio Camden Town in 1994, used as a basis for a feature in Art Monthly 1994. Also includes the essay "Caro to Wilding: Shifts in Modern British Sculpture", comparing the work of Caro with Alison Wilding.
©1994, 2020 Nicholas Philip James (P)2021 Cv Publications