Waldemar Januszczak | |
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| Born | 12 January 1954 |
| Occupation(s) | Art critic and television presenter |
Waldemar Januszczak (born 12 January 1954) is an Polish - British art critic and television documentary producer and presenter. Formerly the art critic of The Guardian , he took the same role at The Sunday Times in 1992, and has twice won the Critic of the Year award.
Januszczak was born in Basingstoke, Hampshire, to Polish refugees who had arrived in England after the Second World War.
In Poland his father had been a policeman in Sanok, [1] a job which included exposing Communists. In the UK he worked as a railway carriage cleaner, but died, aged 57, when a train ran over him at Basingstoke railway station. His widow, then aged 33, found work as a dairymaid. Waldemar was one year old at the time. [2]
The young Januszczak attended Divine Mercy College, a school for the children of Polish refugees which the Congregation of Marian Fathers had set up at Fawley Court, Henley-on-Thames. According to Januszczak in Holbein: Eye of the Tudors, he attended St Anne's (Roman Catholic) Primary School in Caversham, Berkshire, from ages 5 to 11. [3]
After studying history of art at the University of Manchester, Januszczak became an art critic, and then books editor, of The Guardian . In 1989 he was appointed head of arts at Channel 4 television. In the seven years he spent there he televised the Turner Prize for the first time and the Glastonbury Festival. He also started the controversial series J'Accuse, commissioned a celebrated final interview in 1994 with the playwright Dennis Potter by Melvyn Bragg, and started the music series The White Room.
In 1992 he became art critic for The Sunday Times . He has been voted Critic of the Year twice by the Press Association. [4]
Januszczak has been described as "a passionate art lover, art critic and writer. His presentation style is casual but informed, enthusiastic, evocative and humorous. He bumbles about on our TV screens, doing for art what David Attenborough has done for the natural world", and someone who acts out of "a refusal to present art as elitist in any way. He makes it utterly accessible and understandable." [5]
In 1997, he took part in a Channel 4 discussion called The Death of Painting, occasioned by the absence of painters from that year's Turner Prize. The programme was made famous when an apparently drunk Tracey Emin swore at the other participants and left after ten minutes. [6] In 2002, when insurance broker and art collector Ivan Massow lashed out at conceptual art in general and said that Emin could not "think her way out of a paper bag", Januszczak observed in a letter to The Independent that "thinking" would not be very helpful in those circumstances. [7]
In 2004 he differed from most critics in his defence of the art of Stella Vine, singling her out for praise in his otherwise hostile review of the Saatchi Gallery's New Blood show ("although I didn't much want to like Vine's contribution, I found I did. It had something."), and continuing to champion her, seeing "a combination of empathy and cynicism that can be startling." [8] Later that year he took part in a Christmas special critics edition of the television quiz show University Challenge . [9]
Reviewing the exhibition Americans in Paris at London's National Gallery in 2006, he described James McNeill Whistler's Symphony in White No 1 as "a clumsy bit of cake-making with thick smudges of white rubbed into the canvas in coarse, dry skid marks". "Even Whistler's renowned mother manages here to underwhelm", he complained. Hoaxed by artist Jamie Shovlin, Januszczak later that year 'revealed' in his paper how the 1970s glam rock band Lustfaust had "cocked a notorious snook at the music industry in the late 1970s by giving away their music on blank cassettes and getting their fans to design their own covers". [10] The band had never existed outside Shovlin's fiction. [11] Januszczak replied that Shovlin should be applauded for his capacity to remind us of the crucial place of the artist in today's society as he made clear that "Reality simply cannot be trusted any more". [12]
In October 2008, Januszczak co-curated a show at the British Museum called Statuephilia, in which modern sculptures by six artists were shown next to their more ancient counterparts. The show was inspired during his creation of the series The Sculpture Diaries, a three-part series on sculpture around the world, which was first aired on 31 August 2008 on Channel 4.
One of the original presenters of The Late Show on BBC 2, Waldemar Januszczak has made many appearances on television, presenting programmes on the history of art, and appearing on The Culture Show and Newsnight Review . Beginning on 27 November 2012, he presented a four-part series The Dark Ages: An Age of Light about the art and architecture of the Dark Ages on BBC Four.
In October 2019 he directed and narrated Handmade in Bolton on BBC Four, a short documentary series featuring Shaun Greenhalgh and fronted by Janina Ramirez. [13]
He currently produces content for the art channel Perspective, part of the Little Dot Studios Network (All3Media) and for Sky Arts.
 | This section of a biography of a living person needs additional citations for verification .(November 2021) |
Januszczak has been making films since 1997 with his production company ZCZ Films.
The Turner Prize, named after the English painter J. M. W. Turner, is an annual prize presented to a British visual artist. Between 1991 and 2016, only artists under the age of 50 were eligible. The prize is awarded at Tate Britain every other year, with various venues outside of London being used in alternate years. Since its beginnings in 1984 it has become the UK's most publicised art award. The award represents all media.
The Young British Artists, or YBAs—also referred to as Brit artists and Britart—is a loose group of visual artists who first began to exhibit together in London in 1988. Many of the YBA artists graduated from the BA Fine Art course at Goldsmiths, in the late 1980s, whereas some from the group had trained at Royal College of Art.
Tracey Karima Emin is an English artist known for autobiographical and confessional artwork. She produces work in a variety of media including drawing, painting, sculpture, film, photography, neon text and sewn appliqué. Once the "enfant terrible" of the Young British Artists in the 1980s, Tracey Emin is now a Royal Academician.
Sir Grayson Perry is an English contemporary artist, writer and broadcaster. He is known for his ceramic vases, tapestries, and cross-dressing, as well as his observations of the contemporary arts scene, and for dissecting British "prejudices, fashions and foibles".
The Saatchi Gallery is a London gallery for contemporary art and an independent charity opened by Charles Saatchi in 1985. Exhibitions which drew upon the collection of Charles Saatchi, starting with US artists and minimalism, moving to the Damien Hirst-led Young British Artists, followed by shows purely of painting, led to Saatchi Gallery becoming a recognised authority in contemporary art globally. It has occupied different premises, first in North London, then the South Bank by the River Thames, and finally in Chelsea, Duke of York's HQ, its current location. In 2019 Saatchi Gallery became a registered charity and began a new chapter in its history. Recent exhibitions include the major solo exhibition of the artist JR, JR: Chronicles, and London Grads Now in September 2019 lending the gallery spaces to graduates from leading fine art schools who experienced the cancellation of physical degree shows due to the pandemic.
Matthew "Mat" Collishaw Hon. FRPS is a contemporary British artist based in London.
Imagine is a wide-ranging arts series first broadcast on BBC One in 2003, hosted and executive produced by Alan Yentob. Most series consist of 4 to 7 episodes, each on a different topic. Episodes have been directed by, among others, Geoff Wonfor, Lucy Blakstead, Jill Nicholls, Roger Parsons and Zoë Silver.
Front Row is a radio programme on BBC Radio 4 that has been broadcast regularly since 1998. The BBC describes the programme as a "live magazine programme on the world of arts, literature, film, media and music". It is broadcast each weekday between 7:15 p.m. and 7:45 p.m., and has a podcast available for download. Podcasts consisted of weekly highlights until September 2011, but have been full daily episodes since. Shows usually include a mix of interviews, reviews, previews, discussions, reports and columns. Some episodes however, particularly on bank holidays, include a single interview with prominent figures in the arts or a half-hour-long feature on a single subject.
Stuckism is an art movement that began in London, England, in 1999. In 2000, Melbourne artist Regan Tamanui started the first international branch of the movement. As of 2010, there are seven Australian Stuckist groups, who have held shows—sometimes concurrently with UK activities—received coverage in the Australian press and on TV, and also been represented in UK shows. The Stuckists take a strong pro-painting and anti-conceptual art stance, and were co-founded by Charles Thomson and Billy Childish.
The Late Show (1989–1995) was a British television arts magazine programme that was broadcast on BBC2 weeknights at 11.15pm—directly after Newsnight—often referred to as the "graveyard slot" in terms of television scheduling.
Adrian Searle is an art critic for The Guardian, and has been writing for the paper since 1996. Previously he was a painter.
Sarah Kent is a British art critic, formerly art editor of the weekly London "what's on" guide Time Out. She was an early supporter of the Young British Artists in general, and Tracey Emin in particular, helping Emin to get exposure. This has led to polarised reactions of praise and opposition for Kent. She adopts a feminist stance and has stated her position to be that of "a spokesperson, especially for women artists, in a country that is essentially hostile to contemporary art."
Neo-conceptual art describes art practices in the 1980s and particularly 1990s to date that derive from the conceptual art movement of the 1960s and 1970s. These subsequent initiatives have included the Moscow Conceptualists, United States neo-conceptualists such as Sherrie Levine and the Young British Artists, notably Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin in the United Kingdom.
State Britain is an installation artwork by Mark Wallinger displayed in Tate Britain in January 2007. It is a recreation from scratch of a protest display about the treatment of Iraq, set up by Brian Haw outside Parliament and eventually confiscated by the police. Haw's display contained several hundred items donated by members of the public. As well as continuing the protest, Wallinger's recreation in a different context also brings up questions of authenticity. Wallinger won the Turner Prize in 2007 for this piece.
Sir Nicholas Serota Makes an Acquisitions Decision is one of the paintings that was made as a part of the Stuckism art movement, and is recognized as a "signature piece" for the movement, It was painted by the Stuckism co-founder Charles Thomson in 2000, and has been exhibited in a number of shows since, as well as being featured on placards during Stuckist demonstrations against the Turner Prize.
Jamie Shovlin is a British conceptual artist.
James Fox is a British art historian and BAFTA nominated broadcaster. Fox specialises in 20th-century art and is currently Director of Studies in History of Art at Emmanuel College, Cambridge.
Russell Barnes is a British television producer and director, known primarily for documentaries about science and contemporary history. He was educated at Bedford Modern School and studied history at Christ's College, Cambridge.
The Dark Ages: An Age of Light is a four-part documentary television series written, directed, and presented by the British art critic Waldemar Januszczak looking at the art and architecture of the so-called Dark Ages that shows it to be an era with advancements contrary to popular perceptions of the period. It was broadcast by the BBC in November and December 2012.
Simon Russell is a British composer for TV and film.
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