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Showing posts from June, 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 July

Olafur Eliasson is one of the biggest names in contemporary art, and Tate Modern in London is staging the most comprehensive British exhibition of the Icelander's work to date starting on July 11. Of the more than 30 works on show, from paintings and sculptures to large-scale installations, only one has been seen in the UK before. Olafur Eliasson: In Real Life runs until January 5. Over at the Royal Academy, it's time to welcome another Nordic artist, but one you may never have heard of. The RA describes Helene Schjerfbeck  (1862-1946) as one of Finland's best-kept secrets, and the show will trace a career that moved from early naturalism to highly abstracted late self-portraits. It's the first show about her in Britain and runs from July 20 to October 27. The Moon is a popular exhibition subject this year, the 50th anniversary of the first manned landing on Earth's nearest neighbour. The new show at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich aims to chart th...
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An Art Form for the Modern Age -- Magical Linocuts at Dulwich

There seems to have been a point about 90 years ago when many of the features of modern life were starting to become if not commonplace, then at least a lot more familiar: the radio, the telephone, aeroplanes, talking pictures, electric trains. And yet amid all that technological progress, an art school in Pimlico was showing that a less sophisticated medium could also be revolutionary. At Dulwich Picture Gallery in south-east London, they're celebrating the emergence of the linocut as a serious art form. Between the wars, a group of artists captured speed and movement in vibrantly coloured prints that tell a story of rapid change. Cutting Edge: Modernist British Printmaking  features names you may never have heard of, but it's art that's hugely appealing. The linocut was seen as a basic printmaking technique for children when Claude Flight set up his extremely informal Grosvenor School of Art in Pimlico in 1925. He regarded it as an egalitarian art form in keeping with...
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Leonardo: The Renaissance Man Dissected

It's not normally this crowded at the entrance to the Queen's Gallery in London; there are two queues outside the door, one to get tickets and a second of ticketholders waiting to actually enter the exhibition. But then, they don't normally have Leonardo da Vinci: A Life in Drawing  showing. Leonardo's pulling power is clear, as we reported earlier this year . Displays of his drawings from the Royal Collection to mark the 500th anniversary of his death attracted more than 1 million people at museums from Southampton to Glasgow. Now all those works, and more -- over 200 in all -- can be viewed together at the Queen's Gallery. It's quite a show. Because Leonardo was the definition of the Renaissance man. He was a painter, an engineer, an inventor, a scientist, an architect, and more besides. And the Royal Collection has the largest collection of his drawings in the world, more than 550. This is the only reliable portrait of Leonardo known to have survived, a...
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Vuillard: The Patterns of Poetry

A couple of months ago, we had the pleasure of seeing Edouard Vuillard on a big, big scale, in the shape of his exuberant 1890s interior designs in the wonderful show on Les Nabis et le Décor in Paris. But Vuillard's rather better known for pictures of a more modest nature, and the place to go right now to marvel at the intimacy and subtlety of his painting is the Holburne Museum in Bath. Edouard Vuillard: The Poetry of the Everyday is, surprisingly, the most extensive show of the artist's work in Britain in 15 years. It's not enormous, by any means, but its 40 or so paintings and prints have been drawn from galleries around Britain and from private collections; some may be familiar but others will be new and fresh. As a founder member of the Nabis, the group inspired by Paul Gauguin, Vuillard was at the cutting edge of an art that was becoming more concerned with shapes and colours than with the accurate representation of things. Patterns on wallpapers and on fabrics...
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Hogarth Deconstructed

Look at many a painting by William Hogarth and you can immediately see a story unfolding, quite often relating the disastrous results of falling into temptation. You might take a closer look to spot more clues to the moral tale, such as the black patches used in the 18th century to cover up the signs of syphilis in Marriage à la Mode ,  or linger over the amusing depictions of the hangers-on keen to relieve the heir Tom Rakewell of his money in A Rake's Progress . But how much do you miss? Of course, the significance of some of the details -- and in Hogarth, there are lots and lots of details -- becomes obscured as the centuries pass, but just how much time do you usually spend in front of a painting? Thirty seconds? A minute? There's always another picture to see, after all.... But in the latest exhibition at The Foundling Museum in central London, the focus is on just one Hogarth picture from its collection --  The March of the Guards to Finchley. It's your chance t...
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