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Showing posts from December, 2021

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 and Closing in January

The highest-profile opening in London this January? It might well be Francis Bacon: Man and Beast at the Royal Academy. Starting on January 29, this exhibition will focus on Bacon's fascination with animals, featuring pictures in which the boundaries between humans and animals are constantly blurred. Spanning his entire career, the show will include a trio of bullfight paintings never before exhibited together. If your New Year's resolution is to go vegetarian, this one may be a bit on the fleshy side. Until April 17.  For something perhaps a bit less unsettling, head to Room 1 at the National Gallery to see Gainsborough's Blue Boy . Thomas Gainsborough's full-length canvas of a child was exhibited at the National for three weeks in 1922 before sailing across the Atlantic to the Huntington Library in California. It's a painting that's long had a hold on the imagination; it's been frequently referenced in Hollywood movies, and now it's being loaned out b...
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What's On in 2022

We're on the cusp of 2022, but the New Year has a 2021 ring to it as some galleries play catch-up, putting on Covid-cancelled exhibitions that we had already highlighted as this year's ones to look forward to. And a couple of shows mentioned below were also on the schedule for 2020. This round-up of some of what's caught our eye among the displays planned by museums and galleries around Europe for the next 12 months may not be definitive, but it is in chronological order as we publish. Watch out for our monthly What's On for precise dates nearer the time. Here goes, with fingers crossed now that museums in various countries are closed again....   February The Courtauld Gallery in London has just reopened after renovation, and its first big exhibition since then starts on February 3: Van Gogh Self-Portraits . It will bring together more than 15 pictures, around half of Vincent van Gogh's total output of self-portraits across his career, and is the first devoted to hi...
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Transported to Another World: Ancient Peru

Wouldn't it be nice to get away for a while, to spend some time in a really exotic environment? Well, you can. Just book a ticket to Peru: a Journey in Time at the British Museum, where the past, the present and the future merge into an other-worldly experience.  And this is another world, a very strange different world, where the inhabitants make curious but stunning artefacts, where they sacrifice humans to appease the gods, where great civilisations develop, but without the invention of the wheel, or the invention of writing. If you have no script, images play a huge part in everyday life. And in this absorbing show we're confronted by a succession of arresting objects made by the peoples who lived in Peru over the course of several thousand years. Such items were used in ceremonies to seek the assistance of higher powers for the living and to prepare the dead for the afterlife. And these were not merely inanimate objects; they were seen as living beings themselves.  The f...
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Elizabeth and Mary: Strong Wills, Sharp Quills

Mary, Queen of Scots: She acceded to the throne when just six days old, spent her childhood in France, was married three times and was forced to abdicate by an uprising. She fled south seeking the protection of her cousin Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen of England. But the Catholic Mary had once claimed the crown of the Protestant Elizabeth, and she spent nearly two decades in custody, never actually coming face-to-face with her cousin, before she was eventually executed for plotting against Elizabeth. What a story. Dynastic ambition, power politics, religious strife, sex and quite a lot of violence. Gorgeous costumes too. No wonder it's had such a hold on the imaginations of dramatists and musicians down the centuries. Schiller's play, Donizetti's opera, films starring the likes of Katharine Hepburn, Vanessa Redgrave and Glenda Jackson.  Elizabeth and Mary: Royal Cousins, Rival Queens  at the British Library in London captures some of the drama and spectacle of the events. The...
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