Skip to main content

The Fabric of Faith

We must confess that religious paintings are not our favourite subject, and we've tended to regard Spanish Catholic art as being, well, just a little too religious to cope with. So we approached the Francisco de  Zurbarán  exhibition at the National Gallery in London with a certain amount of trepidation. A degree of contrition is due.... Yes, there were monks, altarpieces and lots of saints, but we were blown away by Zurbarán's ability to depict textures and fabrics and to convey an intensity of feeling.  It's an absolutely excellent exhibition, full of truly beautiful paintings. Such religious art was intended to bring the faithful closer to God, to bridge the gap between Heaven and Earth, in an age when many could not read. Zurbarán was a master at it. Let's start with a saint: Just take a look at the fabrics, trimmings and gems in this picture. And the garments are even more striking when you are stood in front of this nearly life-size figure.  This is Casild...
Post a Comment

Subscribe to updates

Opening and Closing in August

Let's start off this month with Hockney and Piero: A Longer Look at the National Gallery in London. This free one-room show, running from August 8, brings together two David Hockney paintings with a picture from the gallery, Piero della Francesca's The Baptism of Christ, that is depicted in both works. On until October 27.
The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford's new exhibition is Money Talks: Art, Society & Power, starting on August 9. This show aims to look at art on currency, and currency in art, bringing together notes and coins from history as well as work by artists from Rembrandt to Andy Warhol and Grayson Perry. It runs until January 5. 

Starting on August 24 is the last of the major exhibitions around Germany marking the 250th anniversary of the birth of Caspar David Friedrich. This one is on at the Albertinum and the Royal Palace in Dresden, where Friedrich lived and worked for more than 40 years. Caspar David Friedrich: Where It All Started is on until January 5. 
Heading north to Copenhagen now, for a show at the SMK, Denmark's national gallery, with the rather convoluted title Against All Odds -- Historical Women and New Algorithms. This exhibition, on from August 31 to December 8, looks at 24 women artists from 1870 to 1910 who left the Nordic countries to pursue their ambitions elsewhere in Europe. The Finn Helene Schjerfbeck is among the best known. And if you're attracted by that show, you'll also want to take the short stroll across the park to the Hirschsprung Collection for Women Visualising the Modern: Danish Art 1880-1910. That one is open from August 28 to January 12. 

Last chance to see....

You have until August 26 to get to Rottingdean, on the eastern edge of Brighton, for Prydie: The Life and Art of Mabel Pryde Nicholson 1871-1918. It's the first exhibition in over a century of the work of the wife of William Nicholson and the father of Ben Nicholson, in their former home, and entry is free. 
The new football season is just starting, but September 1 is the final day of Football: Designing the Beautiful Game at Wolverhampton Art Gallery. We saw the original version of the show at London's Design Museum in 2022. 

Images

David Hockney (born 1937), My Parents, 1977, Tate. © David Hockney; Photo: Tate, London
Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840), Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, around 1817, Hamburger Kunsthalle. © SHK/Hamburger Kunsthalle/bpk; Photo: Elke Walford
Mabel Pryde Nicholson (1871-1918), The Grange, c. 1911, Scottish National Gallery

 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

An Englishman Abroad: John Frederick Lewis

The Victorians had a taste for the exotic. The chance to be transported, as if on a magic carpet, away from rainy, smoky Britain to the delights of the East. And so they were captivated by the pictures John Frederick Lewis made of Egypt. Drawings and paintings so full of detail, so full of local colour, they were seen by his contemporaries as "accurately and intimately true".  John Frederick Lewis: Facing Fame at the Watts Gallery in Compton, Surrey traces the story of an English artist who not only travelled to the Orient, he was so wooed by it that he stayed in Cairo for a decade. And who, when he eventually returned to Britain, continued to paint Oriental-inspired scenes. "There was something un-English about him," John Ruskin said.  And here we are in Cairo's El Khan Khalil textile market. Full of colourful fabrics and carpets, turbanned extras, the obligatory sleeping dog and an Islamic arch. And in the foreground, a prosperous merchant himsel...
Post a Comment
Read more

What's On in 2026

Coming up in 2026: Lots more big exhibitions starring women artists, including Frida Kahlo, Leonor Fini, Leonora Carrington and Gwen John , as well as a host of names from the 17th-century Low Countries. And women almost certainly embroidered the Bayeux Tapestry, a contender for this year's hottest ticket in London.   Here's a selection of shows that have caught our eye around Britain and Europe, in more or less chronological order; as ever, we make no claim to comprehensiveness, and our choice very much reflects our personal taste. January We'll start the year at the Fondation Beyeler on the outskirts of Basel, where they're devoting an exhibition to Paul Cezanne . Focusing on the artist's later years, the show will bring together some 80 oil paintings and watercolours. January 25 to May 25.  February Two leading British women artists feature in exhibitions opening this month, with the National Museum in Cardiff honouring the best-known female painter Wales has pr...
1 comment
Read more

The Highs and Lows of the Nahmad Collection

It's widely referred to as the world's most valuable private art collection : the one assembled over decades by the Nahmad brothers, dealers Ezra and David . Worth an estimated $3 billion or more, it's said to include hundreds of Picassos. Some 60 works from it are now on display at the Musée des impressionnismes in Giverny as  The Nahmad Collection: From Monet to Picasso . Intended, apparently, to demonstrate how art developed from the early 19th century through Impressionism and on to the start of the modern era, towards the liberation of colour and form, this is an exhibition that ends up coming across as somewhat incoherent. We're not really told much about the Nahmads or their collecting choices -- and as you search the Internet, things become slightly mysterious: Is Ezra alive or dead? The art, presumably, is supposed to speak for itself, but it's a rather eclectic, if not confusing, selection; some of the works are fantastic, some are distinctly ho-hum.  Let...
Post a Comment
Read more