ArtSeptember 2010 Exhibition note On "Rude Britannia: British Comic Art” at the Tate Britain, London. “Rude Britannia” at the Tate could have been a good exhibition. British artists have always excelled at rudeness, in particular comic rudeness, in all the meanings of the word “rude”—impoliteness, impropriety, indecency. The British have a national gift for being offensive. All the classics of British rudeness are here: the great eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century caricaturists, Hogarth, Gillray, and Rowlandson; the vulgar Ally Sloper; and the exquisite indecencies of Aubrey Beardsley’s illustrations to Lysistrata from the Victorian era. Here too is the work of Henry Mayo Bateman and William Heath Robinson, two of the great British cartoonists of the early twentieth century, and of Donald McGill, the artist of the “naughty” seaside postcards immortalized by George Orwell. From our own time are the savage satirical Gerald Scarfe, cheeky Beryl Cook, the comic book Viz, ... This article is available to subscribers and for individual purchaseSubscribe to TNC (Print and Online editions) Subscribe to TNC (Online only) This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 29 September 2010, on page 42 Copyright © 2012 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/Exhibition-note-6277
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On “Ai Weiwei: Dropping the Urn, Ceramic Work 5000 B.C.–A.D. 2010” at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London & “The Flamboyant Mr. Chinnery: An English Artist in India and China” at Asia House, London. On "Building the Revolution: Soviet Art & Architecture 1915–35" at the Royal Academy, London. On "Postmodernism, Style & Subversion" at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. by Karen Wilkin On “Rembrandt and Degas: Two Young Artists” at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA. On "New Formations: Czech Avant-Garde Art & Modern Glass from the Roy and Mary Cullen Collection” at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. On "Johann Zoffany RA: Society Observed” at the Yale Center for British Art.
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