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Showing posts from February, 2020

Picture Postcards from the Alps

Visit the evocative Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller exhibition at the National Gallery in London and you could think it was sponsored by the Austrian Tourist Board, because these oil paintings so beautifully depict the magnificent Alpine scenery that has long attracted visitors.  Those towering mountains with their craggy grey peaks, so high they're topped with a glacier, the rich green meadows, some above the treeline, others on lower slopes or down in the valleys where the rivers meander. It's all there. But look a little longer and you become aware that some things are missing; where are those familiar chairlifts, cable cars, broad ski pistes, railways and roads? There are only a scattering of houses; maybe just a few inns and hotels catering for the adventurous, for Austrian tourism is in its infancy. That's because Waldmüller was born in Vienna in 1793 and died near the Vienna Woods in 1865.  Waldmüller: Landscapes , a free single-room display of just over a dozen paintings...
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Opening and Closing in March

He was only 25 when he died in 1898, yet Aubrey Beardsley 's sensuous, subversive and often risqué drawings are among the most memorable images of the late Victorian era. An exhibition opening on March 4 at Tate Britain in London will be the largest to showcase his original works since the mid-1960s. It runs through until May 25. Over at Tate Modern, the doors open on March 12 on Andy Warhol . The show will feature more than 100 works from across Warhol's colourful career, with images from Marilyn Monroe to Lenin and Mao, not forgetting the odd can of Campbell's soup. On for not just 15 minutes, but almost six months, through to September 6. In the middle of the 16th century, King Philip II of Spain commissioned Titian to paint a series showing Classical myths. The six pictures, dubbed by Titian "poesie" because he saw them as the visual equivalents of poetry, are being reunited for the first time in 400 years for an exhibition at London's National Galler...
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Angelica Kauffman: Breaking Through the 18th-Century Glass Ceiling

In the late 18th century, Angelica Kauffman was famous throughout Europe, one of the leading international painters of the day. A success in London, Venice and Rome, she attracted commissions from Catherine the Great, the Emperor of Austria and the Pope. She was a close friend of Goethe, a founding member of Britain's Royal Academy. When she died in 1807, her lavish funeral in Rome drew enormous crowds. A far from ordinary life, then. And for an 18th-century woman in the male-dominated world of art, an utterly extraordinary one. She achieved equal pay, got women wearing trousers, drew male nudes and even had a pre-nup. It's a story that's arrestingly told in  Angelica Kauffman: Artist, Superwoman, Influencer , a fine exhibition now on at the Kunstpalast in Dusseldorf that will be heading to London, and naturally the  Royal Academy , this summer. Kauffman was born in Chur in eastern Switzerland in 1741 and was a child prodigy, not just as a painter but also as a singer...
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An Art Revolution in Flanders

In the early 15th century, Jan van Eyck truly was a revolutionary painter. To appreciate just how groundbreaking the art he made was, you need to head to Belgium this spring to take the unparalleled opportunity to see more than half of his extant pictures gathered together for one absolute blockbuster of an exhibition. Van Eyck: An Optical Revolution  at Ghent's Museum of Fine Arts presents newly restored panels from the magnificent  altarpiece  in the city's St Bavo's Cathedral painted by van Eyck and his brother Hubert, a selection of other religious paintings full of astonishing detail and colour, and portraits conveying a realism that no one had been able to achieve previously. Van Eyck's stunning artistic and technical breakthrough, including his use of the oil paint that made his depictions so much richer and more vibrant, is made all the more clear as we go through this show by being presented alongside contemporary paintings in egg tempera from Italy that ap...
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Movies on Canvas: Wenders' Homage to Hopper

Have you ever thought that an Edward Hopper painting is like a scene from a classic Hollywood movie? Take Gas , for example: a lonely gas station on the edge of the woods at dusk, with a balding man tending to the pumps in the harsh glare of the electric light. What's going to happen next, when a car pulls in to fill up? Hopper's intimate relationship with the cinema is a central theme of an absolutely excellent new exhibition about the painter at the Fondation Beyeler on the outskirts of the Swiss city of Basel. Don't take our word for it; the man who knows all about it is the great German director, Wim Wenders .  Hopper's "affinity with film is unparalleled, both in his themes -- American landscape or the existential exposedness of man in the 20th century -- and in his lighting and framing," Wenders says. "Hopper was also a frequent moviegoer, often going to the cinema every day for weeks on end, especially when he didn't know what to pain...
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