Muse Reviews: 2 March

A round-up of the week’s reviews…

Portrait of Loïe Fuller (1902), Frederick Glasier. Wikimedia Commons

Loïe Fuller at La Casa Encendida, Madrid (Beatrice Schulz)

‘Paris audiences were seduced by her intuitive improvisation, which she combined with complex mechanical set-ups involving several electricians who would manually switch on and off lights that Loïe had coloured herself with gels.’

Under Milk Wood, Peter Blake

Enitharmon Editions, London (Matthew Sperling)

‘Enitharmon’s new home is two doors down from the London Review Bookshop, and next door to the shop which sells the largest range of rubber stamps and scrapbooks in England. The neighbourly conjunction of art history, independent book-selling and hobbyist enthusiasm is perhaps fortuitous, since flourishing as a publisher of poetry and livres d’artiste demands a combination of all three things.’

Schooner and Icebergs (c.1928), Christopher Wood

Art and Life at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge (Matilda Bathurst)

‘Kettle’s Yard also holds the largest collection of paintings and drawings by Alfred Wallis. While Wood dramatised and mythologised life, and Murray sought to contain it within vessels of mesmeric harmony, Wallis’ paintings achieve their expressive power through a primitivism practiced without self-consciousness.’

Click here for Apollo’s pick of what’s on in the art world

Collage Master: Richard Hamilton at Tate Modern, London (Catherine Spencer)

‘While later images such as the deliberately grotesque Shock and Awe (2010), for which Hamilton spliced Tony Blair with the figure of a gun-toting cowboy, have been critiqued for their lack of subtlety, the schlocky-horror Portrait testifies that Hamilton, for all his refinement, never shied away from blatancy and delighted in a bit of mischievous shock and awe on his own terms.’

Lilicoptère (2012), Joana Vasconcelos. Courtesy Haunch of Venison/Christie’s, London. Photo: Alan Seabright

Joana Vasconcelos in Manchester (Emma Crichton-Miller)

‘Vasconcelos’s work, with its witty appropriations of traditional Portuguese crafts – lace-making, crochet, ceramics – and traditional Portuguese imagery – saints, animals, flowers – makes a perfect fit for a museum incorporating significant collections of Victorian art, in a city built on trade in textiles and ceramics. The artist has been given the run of the place, making and placing 18 works, as she put it to me, ‘wherever I could connect with something.’’

Click here for Apollo’s pick of what’s on in the art world