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Showing posts from May, 2018

A View of Popocatépetl

If you were asked to name a Mexican painter, you'd probably initially think of Frida Kahlo. Then, maybe, Diego Rivera. But the first historical Mexican artist -- indeed the first from Latin America -- to get an exhibition at London's National Gallery in its 200-year existence is José María Velasco. No, we didn't know anything about him either, so we were keen to see the show.    And what you discover in  José María Velasco: A View of Mexico  is certainly exotic, though not perhaps in the way you're expecting. Velasco, born in 1840, was trained in a tradition of European landscape painting, and while some of the pictures you see at the National Gallery have an air of the Old World, this one definitely doesn't:   The cactus is spectacular enough, with its green branches reaching into the blue sky above the hills beyond, but it's only when you notice the man in the shade beneath it that you realise how immense this plant really is. This is a painting that...
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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 ...
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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...
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