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Showing posts from April, 2022

Opening and Closing in April

We'll start this month at the King's Gallery in London, where more than 300 artworks and other objects from the Royal Collection will be on display from April 11 for  The Edwardians: Age of Elegance . Illustrating the tastes of the period between the death of Victoria and World War I, the show features the work of John Singer Sargent , Edward Burne-Jones , William Morris and Carl Fabergé, among others. On to November 23. More Morris at, unsurprisingly, the William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow.  Morris Mania , which runs from April 5 to September 21, aims to show how his designs have continued to capture the imagination down the decades, popping up in films and on television, in every part of the home, on trainers, wellies, and even in nuclear submarines.... From much the same era, Guildhall Art Gallery in the City offers  Evelyn De Morgan: The Modern Painter in Victorian London  from April 4 to January 4. De Morgan's late Pre-Raphaelite work with its beautifull...

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Opening and Closing in May

It's a motif that recurs in art down the centuries, going back to ancient times: a woman at a window. A new show at Dulwich Picture Gallery in south-east London builds an exhibition on the theme around its own Girl at a Window by Rembrandt with more than 40 works going right up to the present day, though don't expect Vermeer  or Caspar David Friedrich . Reframed: The Woman in the Window runs from May 4 to September 4.  We've seen Edvard Munch in Oslo at the old Munch Museum and the old National Gallery, but we've never been to the significant Munch collection at KODE in Bergen, collected during the painter's lifetime by the industrialist Rasmus Meyer. Eighteen works from the collection, dating from the 1880s and 1890s, will be on show at the Courtauld Gallery from May 27 to September 4 in Edvard Munch: Masterpieces from Bergen . Will this be as popular as the Van Gogh Self-Portraits show at the Courtauld, which finishes on May 8 but is completely sold out? A fre...

Glimmers from the Mists of Prehistory

There's stone, bone, bronze and, extraordinarily given that these objects are thousands of years old, a surprising amount of wood. But it's the gold that steals the show in  The World of Stonehenge at the British Museum in London.  Between 1900 and 1600 BC -- yes, almost 4000 years ago, and that's quite a concept to get your head round -- craftsmen were able to create this remarkable gold cape , which was uncovered by workmen in North Wales in 1833.  It's a stunning object in its own right, beautiful and mysterious. Imagine the sunlight glinting on it as the person who wore it -- and they must have been someone of great rank or status -- displayed it to.... whom? Worshippers, subjects? On some great day of celebration, presumably. On the other hand, the wearer would have been unable to move his or her upper arms....  Enormous skill and hard work went into its making, those patterns beaten out with only the most basic of tools. And consider the wealth it must have ta...