Gerhard Richter: Panorama at Tate Modern - Art museums & institutions - Time Out London

This is an amazing show. Every room contains something to inspire and delight:

Richter didn’t so much resuscitate painting as submit it to prolonged interrogation - pulling it up by its lapels and demanding it take stock of itself. He was no less forgiving of himself or his family, painting his Nazi-sympathizing father and ‘Uncle Rudi’ (in full uniform) in the same year as his ‘Aunt Marianne’ (1965), who was sterilised and euthanised for being schizophrenic. Why should we not also scrutinise ourselves a bit more, asks Richter’s strange mirrored and glazed sculptures, which blur and distort pictures and viewers alike. The sense of meanings shifting, swelling and dropping away like waves is just as disorienting as the jumps between Richter’s abstract colour charts and his romantic landscapes. His pure, DayGlo abstracts are twenty-first century Jackson Pollocks, but he also makes beautiful portraits. Go figure.

My favourite is “Reader” from 1994, a photo-realistic portrait of Richter’s wife reading a newspaper, with light and shadow dancing reverentially around her features.

I first saw it about ten years ago at the MOMA in San Francisco (though my memory could be deceiving me). It was strikingly beautiful then, and it’s even more beautiful now.

Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape, Tate Modern, review - Telegraph

Sunday afternoon, grey skies, pouring rain. I took refuge in the Tate Modern:

Along with Picasso and Dalí, the great Catalan modernist Joan Miró belongs to a triumvirate of Spaniards who dominated 20th-century art. (Juan Gris was a fluent Cubist, but he didn’t devise his own pictorial language.) Like his compatriots, Miró lived a long and prodigious life – he died on Christmas Day in 1983, aged 90. Famously, he wanted to “assassinate” painting, but he left behind thousands of works of art. More than 150 of his paintings, prints and sculptures have arrived at Tate Modern, for the first important London retrospective since another exhibition at the Tate, organised by Roland Penrose in 1964.

The exhibition covers six decades. There are early masterpieces such as The Farm (1921-22), once owned by Ernest Hemingway. There are mid-career triumphs, including Still Life with Old Shoe (1937), and a room full of exquisite paintings from the Constellations series of 1940-41. There are late flourishes: several enormous triptychs featuring colourful smudges, dark fuzzy blobs and spindly lines, like enlarged microscope slides of cellular life. One set of gigantic paintings should be known as the “Traffic-Light Triptych”, on account of Miró’s liberal use of red, amber and green. The effect is Rothko on happy pills.

These days, though, exhibitions are expected to come up with a “take”, and the spin of Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape is that the artist was a political animal. Where others see joy in Miró’s paintings, the Tate’s curators, Marko Daniel and Matthew Gale, spy “anxiety” about contemporary political events – clapping the artist in the irons of interpretation. As a result, the Miró on view at the Tate has a hint of a limp, inasmuch as it is possible to impede a giant’s gait.

I disagree with this newspaper review. Like most people, my preconceptions about Miró were limited to the effervescent energy of his paintings. This exhibish placed his work firmly in its historical context – the political upheavals of 20th Century Spain – and as such it was a real education. This interpretation is not a set of irons, Mr. Professional Art Critic. It’s basic research.