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Showing posts from May, 2023

'Too Bold to Have Been Painted by a Woman'

So the question to ask about the  Michaelina Wautier  exhibition at the Royal Academy in London must be: Is the hype about this recently rediscovered 17th-century woman painter justified? The answer: Yes, absolutely.  She really does merit acknowledgement -- and not just because we recognise a woman working in a man's world. Her art shows she was extremely talented, producing superb canvases covering a diverse range of subject matter. What's more, she painted very large pictures featuring male nudes, such as Bacchus, despite her contemporaries thinking that was not the sort of thing a female artist could do. And her portraits are wonderfully lively and lifelike. This is Martino Martini, an Italian Jesuit missionary who travelled to China in the 1640s. It was painted in 1654, when Michaelina was around 40. Martini, who was staying at the Jesuit College in Brussels, is depicted wearing traditional Chinese silk court attire and a hat of fur and feathers. A rather substantial...
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Opening and Closing in June

The camera takes centre stage in London this month, starting at Tate Modern on June 13 with Capturing the Moment , a show that aims to explore the relationship between painting and photography through work by artists including Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol, David Hockney and Gerhard Richter. No rush: It's on until January 28.  Missed the National Portrait Gallery? It reopens after refurbishment on June 22 with Yevonde: Life and Colour , exploring the career of the pioneering London woman photographer who was an early user of colour film in the 1930s. "Be original or die," she said, and you can see just how original she was until September 15. Despite Yevonde, the early 60s in Britain still seemed to happen in black-and-white, and here's the chance to view the biggest cultural phenomenon of the decade through the lens of one of the four young Liverpudlians who were conquering the world. Paul McCartney, Photographs 1963–64: Eyes of the Storm  is on at the NPG from June 28 ...
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Wild about Oskar

Beautiful portraits of women in wonderful costumes always seem to attract readers to our blog, and we expect the paintings in this post will be no exception. There are some eye-catching, even startling pictures coming up. But we bet the artist will be completely unfamiliar to you. We'd never heard of him until quite recently.  Take this Woman in White.... not a Whistler, of course, but by Oskar Zwintscher. It's the precision of the execution that strikes you, so many textures and patterns competing for your attention, in the dress, the hair, the stockings, the chair, the tiles, the vase and flowers.... and that rather amazing floor covering (keep that in mind, we'll be returning to it later). And her dreamy gaze into the distance, avoiding eye contact with the viewer. An attention-grabbing image. From white to black, and another striking portrait. The 20th century has just begun, and there's certainly something very modern indeed, quite challenging in the way the sculpt...
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A Romantic Trip to Bavaria

He's the almost exact contemporary of JMW Turner and John Constable, and, like them, he's renowned for his atmospheric landscapes, but Caspar David Friedrich is a very different painter. One of the greatest artists of the Romantic movement, and one of the greatest from the German-speaking world, he's being celebrated in a series of exhibitions across Germany and beyond to mark the 250th anniversary of his birth next year.  We thought we should make an early start, and so we headed for Schweinfurt in northern Bavaria, where the Museum Georg Schäfer is hosting Caspar David Friedrich and the Harbingers of the Romantic . And before we go further, we have to tell you that it's a fantastic show -- one of the best we've been to over the past 12 months -- with some of Friedrich's finest pictures, beautifully presented.  Now Friedrich isn't that familiar to a British audience -- there's just one painting in London's National Gallery -- but in Germany he'...
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The Rossettis -- Tough Going at the Tate

Sometimes less is more, and conversely, more is quite often less. We'd been in  The Rossettis at Tate Britain for over an hour, when we realised with a sinking feeling that we weren't even half way through yet. This is a sprawling, confused, long hard slog of an exhibition, and in room 4 out of 9, we could already sense that many of our fellow visitors (and it was pretty packed in there) were flagging, overwhelmed by so much stuff.  There are essentially three of them in this show -- Christina the poet, her brother Dante Gabriel the painter-cum-poet, and his wife and muse Elizabeth/Lizzie (née Siddal), who also painted and drew, posed and composed, but died early. However, this was always going to be an exhibition focused on Gabriel, whose gorgeous paintings dominate the walls (once you get to them, which takes time). Most of Lizzie's artwork is really minuscule, and as for poetry.... well, presenting poetry is a bit challenging to the crowds flowing through a gallery.  ...
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