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Showing posts from March, 2019

Tales of the Unexpected in Southampton

There are some familiar names and familiar paintings in  Art Then! British Painting, Sculpture and Drawing, 1910-1960 at Southampton City Art Gallery, but it's the unfamiliar that makes it especially worth the trip to a venue you might not normally consider for an exhibition. This show provides an excellent overview of art trends in this country in the first half of the 20th century. And it's free!  Southampton has a very good collection, but we often get the feeling that a lot of interesting works are in store behind closed doors. Pleasant surprises await when they finally see the light of the day, in this case in combination with a selection from the extensive Ingram Collection of modern British art. In all, there are more than 100 works by over 100 artists, demonstrating how the British reacted to the latest developments in art on the Continent. So let's start with a couple of hidden gems from the Southampton treasure trove, first of all a Landscape that really stoppe...
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Opening and Closing in April

It's one of art's most famous images, though probably not the version you're most familiar with. A black-and-white lithograph of The Scream will be on show at the British Museum in London from April 11 to July 21 as part of Edvard Munch: Love and Angst . The exhibition will focus on the Norwegian Expressionist's prints, with nearly 50 from the Munch Museum in Oslo and a total of 83 artworks on display. Two key sections of the show demonstrate his passion for women, and his fear of them, the museum says. The next show at the National Gallery is of new work by Irish-born Sean Scully. Sea Star 's abstract stripes and chequerboards with their thickly applied paint are inspired by JMW Turner's seascape The Evening Star . April 13 to August 11, and admission is free. At the British Library, a new exhibition looks at Writing: Making Your Mark across 5,000 years and seven continents. More than 100 objects range from ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs through the first ...
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Sun, Sea and Sand -- Sorolla at the National Gallery

In the paintings of Joaquín Sorolla, you can feel the searing heat and the glaring sun of a Spanish summer. A century ago, Sorolla was Spain's greatest living painter, an artist who won many prizes and made a lot of money too, particularly in the United States. He didn't go down quite so well in Britain when he was alive, but now he's back, in a big and apparently very popular show at the National Gallery in London: Sorolla: Spanish Master of Light . There are several sides to Sorolla's work: He's perhaps best known for his impressionistic views of the Spanish coast and the people on it, though social realism also makes up a large part of his oeuvre, and he was a skilled portraitist. Sorolla was born in Valencia in 1863 and repeatedly returned to the coastal city, drawn by the motifs it offered. Sun, sea and sand are the ingredients of some of Sorolla's most striking paintings, exemplified by this 1909 snapshot (we're into the age of the Kodak camera h...
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The Russians Meet Munch: The Swan Princess in Oslo

There's been a recent flurry of exhibitions in London and elsewhere about the Russian revolution and Soviet art and design, but Russian art before 1900 isn't very well known in the West. So we seized the opportunity on a trip to Oslo this month to take in The Swan Princess at the Munch Museum, a show devoted to Russian art from 1880 to 1910 and mostly drawn from the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. It was a period when Nordic artists were looking to the past, to rural culture and to traditional myths and legends for inspiration. The Russians were doing something similar, many of them working from the artists' colony at Abramtsevo near Moscow. This show takes its title from one of the most famous artworks of the period. The Swan Princess by Mikhail Vrubel is drawn from a story by Pushkin, which was turned into an opera by Rimsky-Korsakov, and here is the swan transforming magically into a beautiful princess. It's a swirl of whites and greys with highlights in pink, to...
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The Golden Years of Danish Painting

Denmark: We know what you're thinking when you hear about Denmark. You're thinking hygge , even if you don't quite know what it is. You're thinking Nordic noir . Or maybe you're just thinking pastries . But we're thinking about painting. Because for the past 200 years, the Danes have been pretty good, punching above their weight. There's Vilhelm Hammershøi , and the Skagen school. And before them, there was the Golden Age. We've just been to see to an absolutely stupendous, all-encompassing exhibition bringing together many of the masterpieces of The Danish Golden Age at the National Museum in Stockholm. It's possibly one of the best shows we've ever been to.... and we go to a lot. Danish art's finest years lasted for a little over half a century, bookended by two traumatic events: the British naval bombardment of Copenhagen in 1807 aimed at stopping the Danes throwing their lot in with Napoleon, and the loss of Schleswig-Holstein follo...
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The Intimate World of Harold Gilman

Vuillard, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Hammershøi: The British painter Harold Gilman seems to have to sucked up a whole range of continental European artistic influences and, in the second decade of the 20th century, distilled them into a series of intimate, often enigmatic, colour-filled pictures. He died in 1919, aged 43, in the Spanish flu epidemic that swept away millions around the world at the tail end of World War I. An appropriate anniversary, then, for an exhibition about Gilman at the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, the first such show for 35 years. It's called Harold Gilman: Beyond Camden Town , because it focuses on the final decade of the artist's career, when he moved on from the rather more formal post-Impressionism of the Camden Town Group around the often very murky Walter Sickert. He continued to depict everyday subjects and apply his paint thickly but became, well, just a little bit more daring and experimental. At the start of this show there's a brownish...
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Tiny Paintings, Big Artists: Elizabethan Miniatures

Who were the first great English painters? The answer surely has to be Nicholas Hilliard and Isaac Oliver. They may have worked on a small, even minuscule, scale, but in the late Tudor and early Stuart periods, Hilliard and Oliver were artistic giants. Their story is told in  Elizabethan Treasures: Miniatures by Hilliard & Oliver , an exquisite, rewarding and eye-opening exhibition at London's National Portrait Gallery. Portrait miniatures were big in England and in France in the late 16th century: popular with royals and the aristocracy, and with the emerging middle classes too. This wasn't so much art for public display as to express a personal relationship, perhaps indicating the recipient was in the monarch's favour, or worn to demonstrate loyalty. Or to show burning passion: This  Unknown Man Against a Background of Flames , painted by Hilliard in about 1600, presumably intended this picture as a keepsake for his beloved to express his undying devotion. He...
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