Summer Exhibition 2019, Royal Academy of Arts - ★★★★★ - Until August 12, 2019


The Summer Exhibition is a definitional event of summer in London. It is always a highlight and once again there is lots to see, enjoy and debate. This year's show, co-ordinated by Jock McFadyen RA, started with 16,000 entries leading to a display of just over 1,500 works. As usual most pieces are for sale and contribute to funding students at RA schools. Some of our favourites were Banksy's "Keep Ou", "The Garden of Earthly Delights" by Clare Douglass and Harald Smykla's "Emergency Press Bloom" duo. The mix of whimsy and politics seemed so true to the moment. But there is so much more here. The Summer Exhibition is always more of an experience than a mere art display. Go along with friends and you are bound to find work that stimulates, delights, amuses, confuses, and enrages. This is a social event, not to be missed by locals or visitors to the capital. It is a summer picnic for the senses and the intellect.

Reviewed by J.C.

 Our Score:  ☆☆☆☆☆ 

WHEN, WHERE, GETTING THERE:
Until August 12, 2019
Daily: 10 am - 6 pm & Fri: 10 am - 10 pm
Time slots every 30 minutes. Last entry 45 minutes before closing.
Main Galleries, The Sackler Wing of Galleries,
The Ronald and Rita McAulay Gallery, Royal Academy of Arts.
Nearest tube: Piccadilly Circus
https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibition/summer-exhibition-2019
Map & Location: Burlington House, Piccadilly, Mayfair, London W1J 0BD, UK

Most Popular

José María Velasco: A View of Mexico ★★★★ The National Gallery | Mar 29 - Aug 17, 2025

Image
This exhibition is a fine introduction to a 19th Century painter who is well-known in Mexico, but who has been under-appreciated outside of his native country. The academic style of José María Velasco fell out of favour in Europe with the growing influence of the Impressionists, and his reputation was also eclipsed by the great Mexican muralists who followed him. This current display of his work does justice to the subtlety and genius of this artist and is a wonderful invocation of his country at a turning point in its history. Velasco celebrates the natural world while he hints at the changes to be wrought by the oncoming industrial reality. We are moving from an agricultural society with humans living in harmony with nature to an industrial model and the subjugation of the natural world. Velasco lived in a world that was not only on the cusp of enormous social change however. It was one that was also facing a profound reassessment of its values. The artist himself was both a man of f...
Full Details »

Supersonic Man ★★★★ Southwark Playhouse, Borough | Apr 9 - May 3, 2025

Image
Based on the true story of Peter Scott-Morgan, who with his partner, Francis, became the first gay couple to be married in England, Supersonic Man tells the story of Adam who, like Scott-Morgan, decides to fight his motor neurone disease through robotics and radical surgery. It is an inspiring tribute to someone who boldly faced life and its challenges on his own terms, and it is an interesting insight into the media mechanics that can make such a decision possible. Like the protagonist of this musical, Scott-Morgan harnessed the power of the media through the creation of a television documentary which chronicled his medical journey. The show's smart mocking of the manipulative cynicism that lies just behind our culture of celebrity, plus the resilient wit and self-deprecating humour of Adam himself largely save this piece from falling into becoming simply an exercise in suffocating sentimentality. While the show succeeds in portraying the real pain and mood swings of the sufferer...
Full Details »

Midnight Cowboy - A New Musical ★★ Southwark Playhouse, Borough | Apr 4 - May 17, 2025

Image
James Leo Herlihy's novel of 1965, which was later made into a very successful film, tells the story of naïve young man, Joe Buck, who comes to New York City to get rich as a gigolo. He discovers that his chosen career path is not as simple to pursue as he thought, and he ends up being taken advantage of by both his clients and by his new acquaintance, Ratso. The latter is a disabled survivor who knows how to work the streets and who is as shrewd as Joe is gullible. Oddly enough, despite their initial differences, these two outsiders become friends. They start to depend on each other and come to share a dream which is to escape their current hardship and to flee to the paradise of Florida. Herlihy's book and the film neatly contrasted the shocking grittiness of life on the streets and the touching relationship of the two broken dreamers. It was a sentimental tour de force , but it is not an easy balance to achieve – and it doesn't quite work here. While Max Bowden gets it l...
Full Details »

Men’s Business ★★ Finborough Theatre | Mar 18 - Apr 12, 2025

Image
The philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, once said that without government, life would be “nasty, brutish, and short.” The same might be said of this play, and the way the lives of its characters are presented. Charlie is a butcher who has "an affair" with Victor, a steel worker. Their abusive, sadomasochistic carry-on is no doubt symbolic (probably of the human condition) but in the end, it just becomes tedious. Neither of the characters develop, and their mean-spirited and violent interchanges are numbingly repetitive. Endless abuse and relentless couplings doesn't make for very interesting theatre, and this pair become almost cruel parodies of working class people. In fact, there is a point where one has the uncomfortable feeling that the playwrights are actually being quite condescending to these two pathetic individuals and their pathology, while the audience is being invited to become uncomfortable voyeurs at a very sad display of human dysfunction. Although a lot of time is...
Full Details »

THISISPOPBABY - WAKE ★ Sadler's Wells Peacock Theatre | April 2 - 5, 2025

Image
This show promises to be a riff on an Irish wake. Apparently, it is intended as a celebration of life, but it unfortunately does not rise up to that billing. Although we are told at the beginning that we are in for what will literally be a life changing experience, the show proves to be considerably less than that. The production is a hodgepodge of various acts which oversells itself and really doesn't deliver. The spoken word intervals which are probably meant to tie things together thematically are just insistently pretentious and way too lengthy. And, what a man vainly attempting to windmill tassels from his naked bottom, while singing "Seduce Me," has to do with an Irish wake is far from clear. There is a smattering of breaking, some reasonably well-sung songs and a lot of mediocre choreography. Also on offer are some fairly competent step dancing moments, plus a couple of not very original gymnastics' and aerial acrobatics' routines. The low point is definite...
Full Details »

St. Martin in-the-fields: Lunchtime Concerts ★★★★ FREE

Image
Maybe the best musical value in London. The lunchtime concerts at St. Martin's are always a wonderful way to escape the hustle and bustle that is London and the sensory overload that is Trafalgar Square. This is a beautiful setting with great acoustics, and a church pew hard enough to make sure you don't nod off. Reviewed by J.C.  Our score:    ☆☆☆☆  WHEN, WHERE, GETTING THERE: Mon & Fri: 1 pm - 1:45 pm ( occasionally Tues & Thurs)  St. Martin in-the-fields, Trafalgar Square Nearest tube: Charing Cross https://www.stmartin-in-the-fields.org/whats-on
Full Details »

Astonishing Things: The Drawings of Victor Hugo ★★★★ Royal Academy of Arts | Mar 21 - Jun 29, 2025

Image
If previously you've only thought of Victor Hugo as a writer, this exhibition demonstrates that there is a great deal more to the celebrated creator of Les Misérables . As well as being a highly successful author, and a politician of deep conviction, Hugo was also a talented and intriguing artist, and this opportunity to see some forty of his almost two thousand drawings is a not-to-be-missed occasion. Divided into four sections (Writing & Drawing, Observation & Imagination, Fantasy & Reality, Ocean) the exhibition shows that Hugo's originality and dramatic sense were not confined to his novels and poetry. With its cunning perspective and tantalising implications, a work such as The Town of Vianden Seen Through a Spider's Web (1871) recalls a tale by Edgar Allan Poe, while The Shade of the Manchineel Tree (Notes from a Trip to the Pyrenees and Spain) (1856) with its eerie skull, has an equally wonderful Gothic feel. The enigmatic Mushroom (1850) which almost ...
Full Details »

Apex Predator ★★★★ Hampstead Theatre | Mar 22 - Apr 26, 2025

Image
A ten year-old son who is in trouble at school; a husband who is away, working day and night on a mysterious project; a baby who cries constantly while an upstairs neighbour plays his music too loudly; plus, on top of all this, a rude and threatening stranger on public transport and an exhibitionist in the park: Mia has lots of reasons to feel both victimised and stressed out. When she meets her son's new teacher, however, she may finally see a light at the end of the tunnel. The mysterious and quirky Ana radiates a sense of empowerment and confidence that is both bewildering and beguiling. John Donnelly has written a neat little thriller that grips the audience from its opening scene. It is ominous and delightfully spooky, while touching on a number of issues that could have been more fully developed. Although the notion of climate change and species extinction is referenced in the title and elsewhere, it could have been clarified and expanded to provide a more interesting themati...
Full Details »

The Carracci Cartoons: Myths in the Making ★★★ The National Gallery | Apr 10 - Jul 6, 2025 (Free Entry)

Image
This free show features two of the cartoons, or large charcoal drawings, created by the Carracci brothers, Annibale and Agostino, for the decoration of the Roman residence of the young cardinal Odoardo Farnese (1573-1626). Both works are actually attributed to Agostino Carracci with possible input from Annibale. Made on paper, the two large drawings were conceived as working tools intended for use in preparation to paint the fresco which was to decorate the ceiling of the Palazzo Farnese. They were designed to be used for the transfer of sections of that complex composition onto fresh plaster, and they offer a unique insight into the working practices of a Renaissance artist. The cartoons, which have long been the property of The National Gallery and have not often been on display, represent two scenes from Ovid's Metamorphoses : "Cephalus carried off by Aurora in her Chariot" (about 1599) and "A Woman borne off by a Sea God" (about 1599). They have been interpr...
Full Details »

Wilko: Love and Death and Rock 'n' Roll ★★★ Southwark Playhouse, Borough | Mar 20 - Apr 19, 2025

Image
Wilko Johnson was the lead guitarist for the 1970s rock band, Dr. Feelgood. Playwright Jonathan Maitland starts his portrait of the musician when he is diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer. The story then goes back to Johnson's youth when we see him trapped between a brutal father and an upwardly-mobile mother. It is a dichotomy that informs the guitarist's life. He constantly wavers between his persona as the outsider from Essex and the university-educated quoter of Wordsworth who loves astronomy. Maitland's subtitle for his piece "Love and Death and Rock 'n' Roll" also suggests this contradiction, being a variation on the title of the Ian Dury song "Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll." And indeed, the latter describes Johnson's life as accurately as the former. Unfortunately, like its protagonist, Wilko often seems uneasily caught between two stools. It skims over the biography, almost minimising the break-up of the band and the re...
Full Details »

The City Life Magazine | Reviews & Ratings