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Showing posts from February, 2022

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 March

Picasso's artistic progress from teenager to 30-something comes under scrutiny from March 13 at the Sainsbury Centre in Norwich in  Pablo Picasso: The Legacy of Youth . More than 20 of his works will be on show in this exhibition looking at his advance to the head of the international artistic avant-garde at the start of World War I, and comparing his achievements with painters including Monet, Bonnard and Redon. It runs until July 17. Now, if you wanted to combine a trip to Picasso in Norwich with something else in East Anglia, how about David Hockney in Cambridge? Hockney's Eye: The Art and Technology of Depiction is on at the Fitzwilliam Museum and the Heong Gallery from March 15 to August 29, with free entry. The shows will explore Hockney's experiments in new ways of seeing the world as well as allowing you to compare his works with those of artists such as van Gogh, Constable and Andy Warhol.   If you missed the recent Laura Knight show at MK Gallery in Milton Ke...
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Something Borrowed, Something Blue

It was once the most expensive painting in the world, and when it was sold 100 years ago, 90,000 people came to see it over three weeks at the National Gallery in London before it set sail for California and the collection of the railroad and real-estate magnate Henry E. Huntington.  "We have been to say good-bye to a boy who is leaving England, in a day or two, forever," The Times wrote in January 1922. "He received us dressed in a beautiful blue satin suit." The gallery's then director wrote "au revoir" on the back of the painting.  Now, Thomas  Gainsborough's Blue Boy  is back at the National Gallery for a special centenary guest appearance, a chance to see what all the fuss was about and why Huntington paid the astronomical sum of $728,000 (£182,000) for it. All the hype surrounding the sale even inspired Cole Porter to write a song about it --  The Blue Boy Blues : "a silver dollar took me and my collar to show the slow cowboys just how b...
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The Changing Face of Vincent Van Gogh

It's really drawing the crowds, fully sold out for the next few weeks:  Van Gogh Self-Portraits  at the Courtauld Gallery in London. Van Gogh exhibitions aren't exactly thin on the ground, so is this one worth booking for? The answer is yes, very much so, because it assembles in one place for the first time almost half of his self-portraits, providing an exceptional opportunity to trace the development of Vincent's style over his short career on the basis of a single motif.  There are 15 painted self-portraits on view; one is from the Courtauld itself, with four from the US and the rest from continental Europe. So for most of us, it's a chance to see paintings that you're possibly only vaguely familiar with, such as this one from Chicago, made in Paris in spring 1887. It's an attempt by van Gogh to put into practice the new pointillist technique developed by Georges Seurat.  Instead of rigorously following Seurat's use of dots of pure colour, though, van Gog...
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