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Showing posts from June, 2022

Fire and Water, Sun and Sky

"Fire and water.... the one all heat, the other all humidity -- who will deny that they both exhibit, each in its own way, some of the highest qualities of Art?" That was the Literary Gazette 's verdict in 1831 on JMW Turner and John Constable, probably the most admired of all British landscape artists. Almost exact contemporaries whose work is being celebrated at Tate Britain in  Turner & Constable: Rivals & Originals , a thoroughly engrossing exhibition that bathes you in the drama of Turner's golden sunlight, contrasted with perhaps the more understated charms of Constable's cloud-filled skies.  "The Sun is God" are supposed to have been Turner's last words, and throughout this show you can't get away from his solar worship -- one striking watercolour records The Sun Rising over Water . And that's it, that's all there is, but to be frank, you don't really notice the water. It's the bright yellow Sun that holds your eye,...
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Opening and Closing in July

The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford is reviving Pre-Raphaelites: Drawings & Watercolours , a show that closed after just five weeks last year due to the Covid pandemic. On from July 15 to November 27, this exhibition features more than 100 works from the museum's own outstanding Pre-Raphaelite collection; Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Holman Hunt and Millais are the big names.  There are two new exhibitions coming to the Lightbox in Woking, a venue we always enjoy visiting. Starting on July 9, Eric Ravilious and Edward Bawden are the stars of a collaboration with the Fry Art Gallery in Saffron Walden that looks at the story of the artists' colony at Great Bardfield in Essex; more than 30 paintings and drawings will be on display.  The Ingram Collection & the Fry Art Gallery: 'Bawden, Ravilious and the Art of Great Bardfield'  runs until October 9. The second show, beginning on July 16, sets 20 paintings, prints and drawings of Venice and England by Canaletto alongside ...
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Glyn Philpot: Buried Treasure

If Glyn Philpot had stuck to his very lucrative line in society portrait painting, the retrospective of his work at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester wouldn't have an awful lot to recommend it, frankly. But then, he probably wouldn't be getting a retrospective at the Pallant, and the reason to visit Glyn Philpot: Flesh and Spirit is to see the astonishing, unexpected pictures Philpot created in the late 1920s and 1930s when he said goodbye to the stuffed shirts and fancy frocks and embraced modernism with a vengeance.  This is the first major Philpot exhibition in almost 40 years. How has his work sailed under the radar for so long? Among the first paintings that greet you in this show are a set of striking images of Henry Thomas, a former seaman from Jamaica who modelled for Philpot as well as working as a domestic servant for him.  This image recalls the format of a Renaissance portrait or the head of a ruler on a coin, but it's a dignified black man, not a white king ...
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Vorsprung durch Technik

Football: shared memories of great players, the not-so-great players who fouled them, World Cups, triumphs, near-misses and disasters; more personal recollections of muddy school pitches, away trips to grounds in the back of beyond, pools wins and Subbuteo.    Football: Designing the Beautiful Game at the Design Museum in London brings it all flooding back. No dry display, this, as you might fear, of how the equipment and stadiums of the world's most popular sport have been optimised and marketed down the years; it's a show that pulls you in and holds your interest through the full 90 minutes and into extra time. Top-level soccer these days is such a slick, modern entertainment product, you can easily forget the way it used to be. The curators take you right back to the game's Victorian beginnings: A  Harrow School ball  looks more like a pouffe -- it's easier to imagine sitting on it than kicking it or heading it -- while the heavy leather boots  of the type w...
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Disney, Cinderella and The Swing

Mickey Mouse and rococo frippery -- it's not an obvious connection. But a visit to  Inspiring Walt Disney: The Animation of French Decorative Arts  at the Wallace Collection in London shows just how much the classic cartoon films produced by the pioneer of movie animation were influenced by the art and design of 18th-century France.  Disney first went to France just after the end of World War I, as a Red Cross ambulance driver. Back in the US, he and his brother Roy founded their studio in 1923, and in 1935 the Disneys returned to France during a grand tour. A home movie early in this exhibition records the Disney family as tourists in Paris and Versailles, soaking up the architecture, and the decor. As a holiday memento, Walt took back to California more than 300 illustrated books to form the nucleus of a research library that's provided source material for Disney movies ever since.  The Wallace presents a selection of those films -- and a lot of preparatory artwork...
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