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Showing posts from November, 2019

A Queer Tale of Deception

Truth is often stranger than fiction, isn't it? Head to the newly opened venue of Charleston in Lewes for  Dorothy Hepworth and Patricia Preece: An Untold Story , an exhibition that relates a piece of art history that, you have to say, would make a good film.  And here are the two principal characters: Dorothy, on the left, a talented graduate of the Slade School of Fine Art , and her fellow student, friend, lover, partner and collaborator Patricia, perhaps not quite so talented, but both passionate about art.  The photograph seems to tell you a lot. Dorothy looks a little bit awkward and ill at ease, slightly frumpy, androgynous even. Patricia appears confident, glamorous, exuberant, perhaps a little.... possessive? But maybe we're getting ahead of ourselves. We need to establish the plot....   The rather retiring Hepworth and the outgoing, gregarious Preece became inseparable as students, and they planned to set up a studio together after graduation. In 1922, Preece took exam
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Opening and Closing in December

It's the month before Christmas, and all through the house, there's not a lot stirring in terms of new exhibitions. At the Wallace Collection in London, December 4 sees the opening of Forgotten Masters: Indian Painting for the East India Company . Curated by writer and historian William Dalrymple , this is the first show in the UK of works by Indian painters for the trading company that effectively ruled large parts of the subcontinent in the 18th and 19th centuries. Until April 19. We've seen some superb exhibitions at the Kunsthalle in Hamburg in the past, and their new show brings together three really big names: Goya, Fragonard, Tiepolo . With around 100 works, the exhibition will examine the disparity of 18th-century art in an age of great political, technological and social change. December 13 to April 13. And in Italy, the Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara is devoting a show to Giuseppe De Nittis , the Italian painter closely associated with the French Impressio
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Leonardo at the Louvre: Too Big, Too Crowded

You have to suffer for your art. At least, you do when you go to see Leonardo da Vinci at the Louvre in Paris, possibly the most hyped exhibition of the year. But by no means the best. There's some astonishing art in this show, of course there is. How could there not be? Superb drawings, beautiful paintings like La Belle Ferronnière . But, oh, the crush. We've been to crowded blockbuster shows in the past, but this was like a pre-Christmas Saturday shopping on Oxford Street. Quite a lot of it is really badly laid out. And this is not the definitive Leonardo retrospective that the curators were aiming for in this 500th anniversary year of his death. You won't, for example, see the Lady with an Ermine from Krakow, which was in the National Gallery Leonardo exhibition in London eight years ago. Now, the Louvre may have just about the most fantastic array of art anywhere, but your visit can be almost as stress-inducing as a peak summer departure from Gatwick. It'
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Rembrandt -- The Story Starts Here

There have been a lot of Rembrandt exhibitions last year and in 2019, the 350th anniversary of his death, and we've felt a wee bit satiated, to be perfectly truthful.  The last big show in the Netherlands in this celebratory Rembrandt year is in Leiden, the city where the great artist was born in 1606, at the newly renovated and extended Museum De Lakenhal. It's about the start of his career, the period before Rembrandt really became Rembrandt. We approached it with a slight degree of trepidation; would this assembly of apprentice works actually constitute a decent exhibition?  We needn't have been concerned.  Young Rembrandt -- Rising Star  turns out to be the best Rembrandt show of all those we've seen recently, and in fact the best of the dozens of exhibitions we've been to around Europe this year. And if you can't get to Leiden, it'll be transferring to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford in February.  This show takes us through to about 1634-35
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The Pre-Raphaelites -- An Alternative History

Pre-Raphaelite Sisters  doing it for themselves. That's the premise of the show at the National Portrait Gallery in London, an attempt to reclaim, to reassert the significance of the roles of women as models, wives, artists, muses in that most Victorian of art movements, one that's traditionally seen as being dominated by men with an abundance, nay, a profusion of facial hair. So a Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood to rival the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais? It's a neat conceit, isn't it, but it's not one that's really borne out by this rather uneven exhibition. Because some of the dozen women highlighted here were certainly quite impressive artists in their own right -- and there's a couple of surprise discoveries to be made as we go through -- but in some cases we're talking about women who were mainly active as models. And, err, muses. There's an apparently deliberate reluctance to tal
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He Paints Horses, Doesn't He?

George Stubbs was the greatest painter of animals in British art. There's probably not much doubt about that. Just how much effort he put into achieving that status is demonstrated in an excellent exhibition, George Stubbs: 'All Done from Nature' , in the MK Gallery in Milton Keynes. We'll get back to Stubbs very shortly, but just in case you're thinking Milton Keynes is an odd place to go for a big art show, you'd be wrong, because the MK Gallery has recently been extended and boasts an impressively large exhibition space -- and an ambitious programme. This is the first big Stubbs overview in three decades, and the curators have assembled pictures from a wide range of lenders, the sort you tend not to pop into for a look at their paintings, like the Jockey Club and the Royal Veterinary College. Oh, and there's Whistlejacket , too, Stubbs's most famous, most impressive achievement. You can see Whistlejacket there on the back wall, released from h
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One Van Gogh Exhibition That Doesn't Deliver

Vincent van Gogh wasn't an easy man to get along with.  "Few could put up with him and his fanatic fierceness," recalled Anthon van Rappard, who became friends and started painting with him in 1880 in Brussels. "Our relations lasted five years, and if I hadn't stayed calm during his outbursts, they wouldn't have endured so long."  Van Gogh's Inner Circle , an exhibition at the Noordbrabants Museum in Den Bosch in the southern Netherlands, takes us through a history of Vincent's relationships -- blazing rows and simmering confrontations with his family and with fellow artists, as well as his deepest, most durable friendship with his younger brother Theo.  It's a fascinating topic, but a rather underwhelming show. There are a lot of letters in glass cases, which is perhaps not surprising in an exhibition about friendships and working partnerships. But ultimately, particularly when we get to the late blossoming of van Gogh's car
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The Sound of Silence -- Maes at the Mauritshuis

Shhh -- don't make a sound. You're eavesdropping on the Dutch Golden Age in the mid-17th century, and the man who's giving you a glimpse of this distant world is called Nicolaes Maes. He's a painter, and he's by no means a bad one. In fact, he's one of the most talented pupils of Rembrandt van Rijn. And, in such a crowded art market, one where you need to stand out, he's developed a little specialist genre of his own. Just take a peep through this doorway.... but quietly now.... the mistress of the house has her finger to her lips, in a painting aptly entitled The Eavesdropper . Over there, on the right, the servant is being distracted by an amorous man through the open window. And that means she's completely ignoring her charge, the child in the cradle. We're at Nicolaes Maes -- Rembrandt's Versatile Pupil at the Mauritshuis in The Hague, the first solo retrospective ever to feature the artist, and one that will be travelling to the Nati
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