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Showing posts from August, 2020

Very Rich Hours in Chantilly

It is a once-in-a-lifetime experience: the chance to see one of the greatest -- and most fragile -- works of European art before your very eyes. The illustrated manuscript known as the  Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry contains images that have shaped our view of the late Middle Ages, but it's normally kept under lock and key at the Château de Chantilly, north of Paris. It's only been exhibited twice in the past century. Now newly restored, the glowing pages of  Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry are on show to the public for just a few months. "Approche, approche," the Duke of Berry's usher tells the visitors to the great man's table for the feast that will mark the start of the New Year. It's also your invitation to examine closely the illustration for January, one of the 12 months from the calendar in this Book of Hours -- a collection of prayers and other religious texts -- that form the centrepiece of this exhibition in Chantilly.  It's su...

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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...