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Showing posts from February, 2018

'Too Bold to Have Been Painted by a Woman'

So the question to ask about the  Michaelina Wautier  exhibition at the Royal Academy in London must be: Is the hype about this recently rediscovered 17th-century woman painter justified? The answer: Yes, absolutely.  She really does merit acknowledgement -- and not just because we recognise a woman working in a man's world. Her art shows she was extremely talented, producing superb canvases covering a diverse range of subject matter. What's more, she painted very large pictures featuring male nudes, such as Bacchus, despite her contemporaries thinking that was not the sort of thing a female artist could do. And her portraits are wonderfully lively and lifelike. This is Martino Martini, an Italian Jesuit missionary who travelled to China in the 1640s. It was painted in 1654, when Michaelina was around 40. Martini, who was staying at the Jesuit College in Brussels, is depicted wearing traditional Chinese silk court attire and a hat of fur and feathers. A rather substantial...
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Opening in March

The blockbuster is Picasso 1932: Love, Fame, Tragedy at Tate Modern, which runs from March 8 to September 9. It's the first ever solo Picasso show there, and the Tate is calling it one of the most significant it's ever staged. More than 100 works will take the visitor on a month-by-month journey through a pivotal year in Picasso's life. When it was on at the Musee Picasso in Paris, this exhibition was called 1932: Année Erotique , but you can imagine the Tate might have had trouble with that for its posters on the Tube... Be warned, this show appears to set a new standard for London ticket prices at £22 (they cost half that -- 12.50 euros -- in Paris). The National Portrait Gallery offers Victorian Giants: the Birth of Art Photography   from March 1 to May 20, featuring pictures by Lewis Carroll and Julia Margaret Cameron. There's more camerawork at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich in The Great British Seaside , including new material by Martin Parr. Ta...
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Picasso: Twice as Pricey at the Tate as in Paris

It's getting more expensive to visit London's big art exhibitions, with prices in 2018 crossing the £20 mark. The Picasso 1932 show at Tate Modern starting in early March looks to be setting a new benchmark. The headline price for tickets to Picasso, described by the Tate as "one of the most significant shows the gallery has ever staged", will be £22, or £25 including a Gift Aid donation. The exhibition is a joint effort with the Musée Picasso in Paris, where it's just finished its run. In Paris, though, full-price tickets cost just 12.50 euros, or £11, half the London level. Exhibition prices at the Tate have been hovering just under the £20 mark recently. The Modigliani show on Bankside and the Impressionists on Millbank both cost a headline £19.70 (£17.70 without a Gift Aid donation), while the Bacon and Freud show starting at Tate Britain on February 28 is £19.50 (though it's £17 if you book in advance). Both the recent Cezanne show at the Nat...
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Ocean Liners -- How the Other 1% Lived

The ritual humiliations of the security queue, the lack of leg room, the warnings to keep your seat belt loosely fastened: That's not the way to travel. This is the way to travel. Or it used to be: An elegant ship, even more elegant fellow passengers, the finest of food and a speedy, comfortable and romantic voyage across the seas. It's all recalled in Ocean Liners: Speed and Style ,   an entertaining exhibition at London's Victoria & Albert Museum that awakens a nostalgia for an era that most of us never knew.  Film, models, posters and original artefacts from vessels like the Queen Mary, the United States and the Canberra help to tell the story. And, of course, from perhaps the most famous liner of all, the Titanic. Among the iconic posters in the first room is one advertising the Titanic's planned first sailing back east across the Atlantic from New York, a voyage that never took place.    The golden age of the liner was perhaps between the two w...
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Charles I -- The Very Image of a King

We all know what Charles I looked like, don't we? It was just how Anthony Van Dyck painted him: Van Dyck's triple portrait is the first image that catches your eye as you enter Charles I: King and Collector  at the Royal Academy in London, a terrific exhibition that's chock-full of great works of art. This show has at its centre two rooms of aggrandising pictures of Charles by his Flemish court painter, on horseback, with his family, in his robes of state. So it comes as somewhat of a surprise to find one or two portraits of the King by other artists that make him appear a little different. There's something slightly wrong with them, you feel, because you're so used to the Van Dyck look. Gerrit van Honthorst's Charles  seems somehow more boyish, less certain of himself, while a full-length view by Daniel Mytens captures some splendid tailoring but doesn't quite give us the self-confidence of a man who believed himself endowed with the divine righ...
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Opening in February

Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon are the stars of Tate Britain's big overview of British 20th-century figurative painting, All Too Human: Bacon, Freud and a Century of Painting Life , which starts on February 28 and runs until August 27. It promises about 100 works, with Walter Sickert, Stanley Spencer and Frank Auerbach among the other artists featured.  Over at the National Gallery, a small free display in Room 1 marks the 400th anniversary of the birth of Bartolome Esteban Murillo by showcasing his only two known self-portraits. They can be seen from February 28 to May 21. Dulwich Picture Gallery's new exhibition is devoted to the Canadian artist David Milne, a contemporary of Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven, the subjects of an enlightening Dulwich show a few years ago. David Milne: Modern Painting  opens February 14 and is on until May 7. The Victoria & Albert Museum has a new show looking at the golden age of luxury sea travel: Ocean Liners: Speed & ...
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Charles II -- the Remaking of a Monarchy

There's one image that dominates Charles II: Art & Power  at the Queen's Gallery in London, and it's the King himself. After years of Civil War and a puritanical decade of republican rule, the monarchy has been restored. And so here is Charles, channelling Henry VIII in sumptuous scarlet and with glittering new regalia: The portrait, painted by John Michael Wright in about 1676, 16 years after the Restoration, vividly demonstrates the style of the man who had to rebuild the monarchy, and the royal art collection accumulated by his father (the subject of a separate exhibition now at the Royal Academy) that had been sold off under the Commonwealth.  How Charles II did that is the story of this show, which starts with the final portrait of Charles I, painted a month before his execution in 1649.  As is often the case at the Queen's Gallery, there's a fair amount of exposition in the form of prints and archive material before you get to the more exciti...
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Impressionists in London -- A Mixed Bag of a Show

Monet, Pissarro, Sisley -- names calculated to get the crowds flocking to Tate Britain for Impressionists in London . Legros, Dalou and Carpeaux -- well, probably not, but you'll be seeing more of them than you might have bargained for if you go to this rather misleadingly named exhibition. The show's subtitle is French Artists in Exile 1870-1904, which probably gives a rather better sense of what you are going to see. The story starts with the flight of artists and dealers to London in 1870-71 amid France's military defeat by Prussia and the bloody suppression of the popular uprising that was the Paris Commune. The scene is well set in the first room, which introduces us to the devastation and carnage behind the exodus. Claude Monet crossed the Channel to avoid conscription while Camille Pissarro's house was used as stables by the Prussians. There are a few works from that early period on display -- the relative lightness of a Monet view of the Thames contrasting w...
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