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Showing posts from August, 2020

New Exhibitions in July

It's not opening until September 10, but tickets to see The Bayeux Tapestry at the British Museum go on sale at 1000 on July 1, so if you want to see it this year you'll probably need to get in early. Follow the link for details. Booking for the rest of the run, from January 1 through to July 11, 2027, will open later in 2026. If you've never seen this most astounding of historical artefacts in its natural habitat in Normandy, you'll want to seize the chance in London.  But what about this month? Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller (1793-1865) is regarded as one of Austria's finest 19th-century painters, and there's a free single-room show devoted to his views of the Alps, Vienna and Sicily from July 2 at the National Gallery. Waldmüller: Landscapes  is on till September 20.  Richard Dadd (1817-1886) was already known as a successful painter of Shakespearean fairy scenes before he began experiencing delusions, leading him to kill his father. Confined to Bethlem and Broa...

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Opening in September

We're going to start our September preview in Paris, where an absolute stunner of an exhibition is set to open belatedly at the Petit Palais: The Golden Age of Danish Painting . That Golden Age lasted for just over 60 years from the start of the 19th century when artists such as Christen Købke expressed a growing national pride in works of precision and clarity tinged with romanticism. We got to see this fabulous show early last year at the National Museum in Stockholm. It's on in Paris from September 22 to January 3, and if you get the chance to go, don't hesitate. A few minutes walk away, at the Musée de l'Orangerie,  Giorgio de Chirico: Metaphysical Painting opens on September 16. De Chirico's enigmatic art from the first two decades of the 20th century draws on the German Romantics and prefigures the Surrealists. After it closes on December 14 it will transfer to the Kunsthalle in Hamburg early next year. If you head down the Seine from Paris to the Musé...

The Artist Who Was Everywhere

If you lived in Britain, particularly in London, during the middle of the 20th century, Barnett Freedman was all around you. As the go-to commercial artist during a period spanning the 30s to the 50s, his work was all over the Tube and London buses, on advertising, stamps and book tokens, as well as adorning the covers of collectable books and providing their illustrations. It's a career that's celebrated, more than six decades after Freedman's death, in a hugely enjoyable exhibition, Barnett Freedman: Designs for Modern Britain , at the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, which has just reopened after months of coronavirus-induced closure. The Pallant is our local art gallery, and its director, Simon Martin, said he didn't want to "sanitise the experience" of museum-going on reopening. So, while visitor numbers are limited and timed tickets are compulsory, we were pleased that once you got inside, there's actually very little that you would notice tha...