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Showing posts from December, 2024

Opening and Closing in August

Jean-François Millet -- one of the most influential artists of the 19th century with his depictions of toiling country folk -- is the subject of a free exhibition in just one room at London's National Gallery that opens on August 7. Millet: Life on the Land  mainly features work from British museums, but has a star attraction in the shape of  L’Angélus from the Musée d'Orsay. On until October 19.  In eastern Germany, Chemnitz is one of this year's European capitals of culture, and one of the major exhibitions on their programme starts on August 10. Edvard Munch -- Angst  in the Kunstsammlungen am Theaterplatz will recall, in part, a visit by Munch to Chemnitz 120 years ago. And, of course, there'll be a version of The Scream . Until November 2.  On the other side of the country, a rather different offering at the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn: an exhibition devoted to the German filmmaker Wim Wenders, creator of Wings of Desire and Paris, Texas , and marking his 8...

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What's On in 2025

What will be the exhibition highlights of 2025 around Britain and Europe? At the end of the year, Tate Britain will be marking 250 years since the birth of JMW Turner and John Constable with a potential blockbuster. Meanwhile, the Swiss are  making a big thing  of the 100th anniversary of the death of Félix Vallotton  (a real favourite of ours). Among women artists in the spotlight will be Anna Ancher, Ithell Colquhoun, Artemisia Gentileschi and Suzanne Valadon. Here's a selection of what's coming up, in more or less chronological order; as ever, we make no claim to comprehensiveness, and our choice very much reflects our personal taste. And in our search for the most interesting shows, we're visiting Ascona, Baden-Baden, Chemnitz and Winterthur, among other places.  January  We start off in Paris, at the Pompidou Centre; the 1970s inside-out building is showing its age and it'll be shut in the summer for a renovation programme scheduled to last until 2030. Bef...

Finland -- Snow, Lakes and Myths

Does this image seem vaguely familiar? There's a very similar painting in the National Gallery in London. It's by the Finnish artist Akseli Gallen-Kallela, and it depicts  Lake Keitele in the centre of the country at the start of the 20th century; an apparently peaceful and isolated midsummer scene, seemingly devoid of the impact of man. He made several versions of this picture.  But as so often in art, a painting can be more than it appears at first glance, as we were to find out in  Akseli Gallen-Kallela: Picturing Finland  at the Belvedere in Vienna. Those zigzag lines on the water are a natural phenomenon created by the wind and the currents, but the artist uses them to give his work a far deeper meaning. When he painted this, Finland was still a Russian possession, and Gallen-Kallela was heavily involved in the Finnish nationalist movement. For him, those stripes represented the traces left by the boat rowed across the lake by the old sage, Väinämöinen, in the F...

Rembrandt & van Hoogstraten: The Art of Illusion

It takes a split second these days to create an image, and how many millions are recorded daily on mobile phones, possibly never to be looked at again? You can see it all happening in the palatial surroundings of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, definitely one of those tick-off destinations on many travellers' bucket lists, where those in search of instant pictorial satisfaction throng the imposing statue-lined staircase for a selfie or pout for a photo in the café under the spectacular cupola. But we're not in Vienna for a quick fix, we're at the KHM to admire something more enduring in the shape of art produced almost 500 years ago by Rembrandt and his pupil Samuel van Hoogstraten that was intended to mislead your eyes into seeing the real in the unreal. Artistic deception is the story at the centre of  Rembrandt--Hoogstraten: Colour and Illusion , one of the most engrossing and best-staged exhibitions we've seen this year. And, somewhat surprisingly, a show wi...