It is a once-in-a-lifetime experience: the chance to see one of the greatest -- and most fragile -- works of European art before your very eyes. The illustrated manuscript known as the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry contains images that have shaped our view of the late Middle Ages, but it's normally kept under lock and key at the Château de Chantilly, north of Paris. It's only been exhibited twice in the past century. Now newly restored, the glowing pages of Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry are on show to the public for just a few months. "Approche, approche," the Duke of Berry's usher tells the visitors to the great man's table for the feast that will mark the start of the New Year. It's also your invitation to examine closely the illustration for January, one of the 12 months from the calendar in this Book of Hours -- a collection of prayers and other religious texts -- that form the centrepiece of this exhibition in Chantilly. It's su...
An advertising poster, you might think, is completely ephemeral -- just a sheet of paper that's here today, gone tomorrow, fading in the wind and rain and then pasted over by a newer, fresher advert. The most successful advertising, though, is anything but ephemeral. How many of those television commercials from your childhood still resonate today, for example? And as the advertising poster came into its own in late 19th-century Paris, it produced some of the most striking images in French art -- and became a collector's item in its own right. Now those posters can be seen en masse at the Musée d'Orsay in Art Is in the Street , a fun if somewhat bloated exhibition that gives due credit to the masters of the art: not just Alfons Mucha, Pierre Bonnard and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec , though they're here too, but also many others you've perhaps never heard of. This is a show that neatly brings together art and social history, often a winning formula in our eyes. An...