Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts with the label Edouard Manet

Tales of the Unexpected in Southampton

There are some familiar names and familiar paintings in  Art Then! British Painting, Sculpture and Drawing, 1910-1960 at Southampton City Art Gallery, but it's the unfamiliar that makes it especially worth the trip to a venue you might not normally consider for an exhibition. This show provides an excellent overview of art trends in this country in the first half of the 20th century. And it's free!  Southampton has a very good collection, but we often get the feeling that a lot of interesting works are in store behind closed doors. Pleasant surprises await when they finally see the light of the day, in this case in combination with a selection from the extensive Ingram Collection of modern British art. In all, there are more than 100 works by over 100 artists, demonstrating how the British reacted to the latest developments in art on the Continent. So let's start with a couple of hidden gems from the Southampton treasure trove, first of all a Landscape that really stoppe...
Post a Comment
Read more

Subscribe to updates

New Exhibitions in November

Jan van Eyck -- one of the greatest names in art history. Six centuries ago, he was at the forefront of a revolution in Flanders that saw the adoption of oil paint to create meticulously detailed, lifelike pictures. Now the National Gallery in London is offering you a once-in-a-lifetime chance to see all nine of his known surviving portraits together in one exhibition.  Van Eyck: The Portraits   runs from November 21 to April 11. The Portrait of a Man with a Blue Chaperon  will travel from the Brukenthal Museum in Romania to be there. We last saw it in Ghent in 2020, in a blockbuster van Eyck show that had to close early because of Covid . Tate Britain explores a creative partnership that lasted more than 50 years and its legacy in  Vanessa Bell & Duncan Grant: Inside Bloomsbury . In excess of 300 works, including paintings, textiles and furniture, will be in the show that runs from November 12 to April 11. And the studio that Bell and Grant shared until 1939 wi...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Cliffs, the Clouds and the Waves

What motif could be more Impressionist than a view of the cliffs or beaches of the Normandy coastline? And with this year marking the 150th anniversary of the first Impressionist exhibition, we've been to Normandy to take in a show focusing on that very subject.     Impressionism and the Sea  at the Musée des impressionnismes in Giverny sets the scene as you enter, with the cries of screeching seagulls and the sound of waves lapping on the beach. The curators bring you Claude Monet, Paul Gauguin, Camille Pissarro and other names you'll be expecting, but there are some lesser-known artists to conjure with too.  Partly, we assume, because there are so many other exhibitions about Impressionism going on this year, most of the pictures in Giverny have an unfamiliar feel. The stand-out Monet doesn't show the beach at Etretat , with its striking cliff formations, but the strand and cliffs at Les Petites Dalles, further east, beyond Fécamp.  Nevertheless, it's ver...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Artists Are in Revolt

The revolution won't happen overnight, but it's coming. And it will take place in 1874, when the rebels who'll become known as the Impressionists hold their first exhibition in Paris.  To see how the Impressionists got there, and what they were rebelling against, we've come to Cologne, and the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, for an utterly enjoyable exhibition about the art of the 1860s and 70s that found official approval from the French state and from the traditionalist critics -- and the art that didn't. The show is entitled  1863 Paris 1874: Revolution in Art -- From the Salon to Impressionism , and this is the striking image that greets you as you enter, a painting that we've never seen before (it belongs to the Spanish central bank ) but which seems to sum up the entire topic for you in one go.  The Catalan artist Pere Borrell del Caso actually created this trompe l'oeil in 1874, completely independently of the Impressionists. It wasn't originally called ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Eva, Elisabeth, Angelica, Laura and Gwen

It turns out that the free exhibition at the National Gallery in London offering you the chance to Discover Manet & Eva Gonzalès provides you with the opportunity to discover a whole lot more besides; there are portraits and self-portraits going back to the late 18th century in a display that puts women artists and the challenges they faced at the forefront. Eva Gonzalès was Edouard Manet's only formal pupil, and his fairly monumental portrait of her, nearly 2 metres high, is a rather strange picture at first sight. She's working on an already framed painting; she seems to be sitting, awkwardly posed, rather too far away from the canvas, the floor is carpeted, and she's wearing a most unsuitable snowy white dress; you wouldn't want to get any paint on her clothes or the carpet. It wasn't an easy painting for Manet to get right; there were apparently numerous sittings and a lot of reworking. You might assume that the elegantly clad young woman dabbing at a pictu...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Bührle Collection: Fine Art, Controversial Origins

It was by accident, not design, that we found ourselves viewing the art collection of a German-turned-Swiss arms manufacturer. On our recent trip to Paris, we were on our way to see the excellent show about the Nabis at the Musée du Luxembourg when we walked past the Musée Maillol, which was showing a loan exhibition from the Emil Bührle Collection in Zurich, with Monet, Manet, van Gogh and more. That looks interesting, we thought, let's pop in and see it on the way back. So we did, and it turned out to be very enjoyable. But back to the paintings in a minute. Because, as debate rages over the funding of art and museums, with the Sackler family now under attack for their pharmaceuticals company's role in the opioids drug-abuse crisis sweeping America, it's impossible not to acknowledge a certain degree of queasiness about the way this collection, one of the most prestigious in private hands in Europe, was built up. Emil Georg Bührle was a controversial figure who di...
Post a Comment
Read more

Black Models: History Told Anew at the Musée d'Orsay

The year is 1843. And the theme of this hard-hitting painting is slavery, in all its gory detail, as practised in France's West Indian colonies. Slavery, you say? What about liberté, égalité, fraternité? Ah yes, slavery was abolished in 1794, after the French Revolution. But, and this takes a bit of getting your head round, it was reestablished by Napoleon eight years later. By the 1840s there was a strong abolitionist movement going in France, and an effective way to spread the message was to shock the public with the visual truth of what slavery actually meant. This painting by Marcel Verdier,  Beating at Four Stakes in the Colonies , is perhaps the most searing image in a sprawling exhibition at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, Black Models: From Géricault to Matisse , focusing on the way black people have been depicted in French art over the past 200 years or so and taking in broader themes of black history along the way. In Verdier's picture, a black slave is stretched...
Post a Comment
Read more

Courtauld: The Man who Brought the Impressionists to Britain

Manet, Renoir, Van Gogh: Names now so mainstream that it's hard to comprehend how challenging their art was a century and more ago. One man and his deep pockets did perhaps more than anyone else to bring their work to Britain: Samuel Courtauld. His vision is being celebrated in the hugely enjoyable  Courtauld Impressionists  exhibition at London's National Gallery. Courtauld was a textile manufacturer who in the early part of the 20th century not only built up his own impressive collection of modern French art (subsequently forming the  gallery  that bears his name) but also helped fund and acquire similar works for the nation. With the Courtauld on the Strand closed for refurbishment for the next two years, there's a rare chance to admire both sets of paintings hung side by side in the National Gallery, including some of the most recognisable images in art history, revealing how much Britain is indebted to Courtauld's daring taste for the avant-garde. Cour...
Post a Comment
Read more