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Showing posts from September, 2022

New Exhibitions in July

It's not opening until September 10, but tickets to see The Bayeux Tapestry at the British Museum go on sale at 1000 on July 1, so if you want to see it this year you'll probably need to get in early. Follow the link for details. Booking for the rest of the run, from January 1 through to July 11, 2027, will open later in 2026. If you've never seen this most astounding of historical artefacts in its natural habitat in Normandy, you'll want to seize the chance in London.  But what about this month? Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller (1793-1865) is regarded as one of Austria's finest 19th-century painters, and there's a free single-room show devoted to his views of the Alps, Vienna and Sicily from July 2 at the National Gallery. Waldmüller: Landscapes  is on till September 20.  Richard Dadd (1817-1886) was already known as a successful painter of Shakespearean fairy scenes before he began experiencing delusions, leading him to kill his father. Confined to Bethlem and Broa...

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Opening and Closing in October

There are a tremendous number of exhibitions opening this month, starting in London with Paul Cezanne at Tate Modern. Cezanne's painting revolutionised art at the end of the 19th century, and the Tate is promising us a "once-in-a-generation" show, the first big retrospective in the UK for more than 25 years, with around 80 works, more than 20 of them never before seen in Britain. They include The Basket of Apples from the Chicago Institute of Art, where the previous version of this show earned rave reviews. Cezanne is on in London from October 5 to March 12.  It's certainly not once in a generation for an exhibition about Lucian Freud, but it is the 100th anniversary of his birth this year, and his seven-decade career is surveyed at the National Gallery. Lucian Freud: New Perspectives will have more than 60 paintings, from early, intimate works to his late monumental fleshy nudes. It runs from October 1 to January 22, before heading to the Thyssen-Bornemisza muse...

Venice in Peril, Part 2

You've just been to one exhibition about Canaletto and Venice, and then a second one comes along straight away, a bit like delayed vaporettos on the Grand Canal.  Canaletto's Venice Revisited at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich contrasted the painter's classic views of the lagoon city with the threat it faces today from rising sea levels and mass tourism, and  Canaletto and Melissa McGill: Performance and Panorama  at the Lightbox in Woking takes a similar tack. But if Greenwich's display of statistics about population decline and increasing flooding and an array of disposable plastic boots for tourists left us rather depressed, we found something surprisingly soothing and uplifting about the American artist Melissa McGill's attempt to alert us to the same problems.  Back in 2019, McGill created the Red Regatta project, which saw dozens of traditional Venetian sailing boats hoisted with sails she had hand-painted in varying shades of red traversing the ci...