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Issue Number: 118
Art never stands still. As painter Keith Tyson says of his exhibition at Pace London in the RA’s Burlington Gardens space, ‘I called the show ‘Panta Rhei’, which means everything flows. My paintings have a sense of flow and movement. I’m trying to create layers and connections’. Tyson is citing the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus, who conceived the idea of flux in his famous paradox: ‘The only constant is that everything changes. No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.’
RA Magazine is changing too. We are the first art magazine to offer extra content that you can access straight off the page from your smartphone device. If you download our free App and scan certain images with your smartphone, the pages will come alive before your eyes. You can watch videos, like the interview with Keith Tyson mentioned above and a tour of Joe Tilson’s Tuscan studio. Helen Rosslyn, Director of the London Original Print Fair, offers tips for collecting prints, actor Ethan Hawke narrates a film on George Bellows, author Julian Barnes discusses Manet’s portrait of Emile Zola, and you can see a slideshow of RA Schools students’ work. Look out for the red smartphone icon on editorial and advertising pages and read the instructions on page 14 of the magazine. If you don’t have a smartphone, you can still view most of this content by visiting www.royalacademy.org.uk/magazineapp.
A sense of flow and change also permeates the paintings of Manet. The artist seems constantly to move back and forth across history, referring to masters such as Velázquez, Goya and Vermeer, while remaining utterly of his time. The painter RAs Tom Phillips, Christopher Le Brun, Michael Craig-Martin and Sean Scully provide illuminating insights into Manet’s enigmatic canvases. As Tom Phillips puts it, Manet had an incredible ability to ‘shift gear’, to ‘paint fast and slow’ and convey time and motion in his brushstrokes.
The American artist George Bellows also sought to express the commotion of his time, what Jackson Lears calls ‘the energies convulsing the city’, as he painted the transformation of Manhattan into a modern metropolis in the early 20th century.
This spring Houghton Hall is returning to its glorious past and making connections with the present, writes Jenny Uglow. The neo-Palladian palace in Norfolk, built by Britain’s first Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole, with interiors by William Kent, is staging an exhibition of the Walpole collection, sold to Catherine the Great after the politician’s death to pay off his debts. The return of these fabled old masters, lent by the Hermitage, is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see them in the spaces originally designed for them by Kent.
Kent also had a hand in designing the interiors of Burlington House, and here too, new developments are underway. Architect David Chipperfield RA explains how the Keeper’s House development will open up a new part of our historic building to Friends, creating a new Friends room, restaurant, bar and garden area and enhancing the experience of the RA, both for Friends and the public. So it’s all change. As the philosopher said, you never step into the same river.
Sarah Greenberg, Editor
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