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Showing posts from July, 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 August

One of the most stunning objects in the recently ended World of Stonehenge exhibition at the British Museum was this exquisite Bronze Age golden sun pendant, uncovered in Shropshire only in 2018. The breathtaking piece is now embarking on a national tour , starting at the Royal Cornwall Museum in Truro from August 6 to November 5 and moving on to Lincoln, Sunderland and Stornoway over the course of the next 14 months.  August is generally a quiet period for exhibition openings, but there are two shows starting in Germany before the end of the month that are well worth highlighting. One is a treat for enthusiasts of German Expressionism: The Museum Folkwang is marking its 100th anniversary in Essen with a show examining the history of its extensive collection of Expressionist art -- very German but banned by the Nazis as degenerate. Expressionists at Folkwang features around 250 works, including loans from elsewhere, and runs from August 20 to January 8. It's only 40 minutes by tr...
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Sickert: From Music Hall to Pop Pioneer

Walter Sickert -- the gloomiest, murkiest of English artists? We've definitely been a little too harsh.  There's certainly a fair bit of gloom and murk in the big Walter Sickert exhibition at Tate Britain, but there's a lot that's much lighter and full of entertainment. From Sickert's inventive music-hall scenes, this fascinating show takes you through luminous townscapes and on to a revelatory final room that shows the painter in his later years as an unwitting pre-war pioneer of Pop Art.  And let's hear it for the Tate for once; we've sometimes found the way they curate their exhibitions infuriating -- the Hogarth and Europe show this past winter was in thrall to political correctness -- but this one is beautifully and logically put together; a straightforward retrospective, and all the better for it.  The first two rooms of the eight in the exhibition look at Sickert's self-portraits and his apprenticeship years in the 1880s (his early stuff, under ...
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