Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from May, 2021

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

Subscribe to updates

Opening in June

Peter Paul Rubens' Rainbow Landscape -- that symbol of hope seems a fitting image to start with this month as the weather finally turns summery and the coronavirus pandemic looks to be on the wane, variants permitting. June 3 will see the painting brought together at London's Wallace Collection with its companion piece, A View of Het Steen in the Early Morning  from the National Gallery, for the first time in 200 years. Het Steen was Rubens' country estate outside Antwerp, and these paintings appear to have been made for his own pleasure. Rubens: Reuniting the Great Landscapes  is free of charge, though there's a suggested £5 donation, and it runs until August 15.  Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirror Rooms at Tate Modern is, in principle, meant to be open to the general public from June 14, but the Tate says all tickets up to October 24 are sold out and the next lot won't be released until September. So you can either mock up your own Kusama-inspired immersive installati

Opening in May

Those government-designated hotbeds of coronavirus infection that are England's public museums are due to open again on May 17, and all those exhibitions that have been stuck behind closed doors for months now will suddenly be able to welcome the public. So there's a lot of new shows to get through this month.... When the first lockdowns hit Europe last year, David Hockney was at his home in Normandy, and he spent three months recording in drawings on his iPad how nature in his immediate surroundings evolved day by day. The results can be seen at London's Royal Academy from May 23 to September 26 in  David Hockney: The Arrival of Spring, Normandy, 2020 , which features 116 works. You'll be familiar with Hockney's iPad drawings if you saw A Bigger Picture , the exhibition of his landscapes at the RA in 2012 (astonishing to think it was that long ago). The Normandy show goes on to Bozar in Brussels in October. Tate Modern also has a French theme, with the start on Ma