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Showing posts from May, 2018

New Exhibitions in November

Jan van Eyck -- one of the greatest names in art history. Six centuries ago, he was at the forefront of a revolution in Flanders that saw the adoption of oil paint to create meticulously detailed, lifelike pictures. Now the National Gallery in London is offering you a once-in-a-lifetime chance to see all nine of his known surviving portraits together in one exhibition.  Van Eyck: The Portraits   runs from November 21 to April 11. The Portrait of a Man with a Blue Chaperon  will travel from the Brukenthal Museum in Romania to be there. We last saw it in Ghent in 2020, in a blockbuster van Eyck show that had to close early because of Covid . Tate Britain explores a creative partnership that lasted more than 50 years and its legacy in  Vanessa Bell & Duncan Grant: Inside Bloomsbury . In excess of 300 works, including paintings, textiles and furniture, will be in the show that runs from November 12 to April 11. And the studio that Bell and Grant shared until 1939 wi...

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Opening in June

The Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition  this year is a little bit special: It's the 250th, and Grayson Perry heads the committee that's picked the 1,200 or so art works on show from June 12 to August 19. Concurrently, the RA is putting on The Great Spectacle: 250 Years of the Summer Exhibition telling the story from Joshua Reynolds to the present day. There are two linked shows at the National Gallery as well, running from June 11 to October 7. Thomas Cole: Eden to Empire  is the first exhibition in the UK devoted to the British-born American landscape artist inspired by Turner and Constable (tickets can be had for less than £10 on weekdays, so the National is clearly not expecting Monet-size crowds.) At the same time, there's a free display with Ed Ruscha 's modern take on Thomas Cole's work in Room 1. Tate Britain marks the centenary of the end of World War I by examining the immediate impact on British, French and German art.  Aftermath , running from ...

Monet -- Battle the Crowds to Get to Rouen Cathedral

There's no getting away from it: Monet & Architecture at London's National Gallery is a crowded exhibition. The first couple of rooms in particular are a bit of a slog as you try to manoeuvre your way along what is essentially a queue of people looking at the earliest (and to be honest, largely least interesting) of the 70-odd works. But stick with it: You'll eventually come to Rouen Cathedral and to Venice, and thankfully, and rather surprisingly, there's less of a crush to view the momentous art capturing gradations of light and weather on magnificent buildings that you've probably really come to see. It's often a bit of a problem with the National Gallery's subterranean Sainsbury Wing exhibition space: Some of the rooms are quite small, and here they're fairly densely hung, at least initially. This show, the gallery says, presents a new way of looking at Monet's art, demonstrating how he used architecture to create his compositions. It ma...