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Showing posts with the label Henri Matisse

Very Rich Hours in Chantilly

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...
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Opening and Closing in September

Which exhibition are we most looking forward to this month? It has to be Frans Hals at the National Gallery in London, which starts on September 30. It's the first major retrospective of the great portraitist of the Dutch Golden Age in three decades, and it will assemble around 50 of his works, including a couple of his large-scale group portraits of militiamen from the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. A must-see, particularly if you missed the fantastic show focusing on Hals's male portraits at the Wallace Collection a couple of years back. All that swaggering loose -- or even louche -- brushwork is on display at the National Gallery until January 21, before transferring to the Rijksmuseum in February and then the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin in July.  Hals was originally from Antwerp, and it was in the Flemish port city that his close contemporary Peter Paul Rubens spent much of his life and career. The new exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery i...
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The Mysteries of the Orient

Painters are such liars. Well, some of them, anyway. Take Jean-Léon Gérôme, a French 19th-century artist who travelled extensively to Egypt and rendered on canvas the exoticism of the Orient for a western audience.  Snake Charmer is so lovingly detailed, so meticulously painted, it must be true. Except it's complete tosh, an utter fabrication. In a Muslim society, a small boy was never going to be performing naked in public. Why does he look like an antique statue, anyway? How has this motley audience come together in this rather splendid interior? And hang on, these turquoise tile panels are from Turkey, not Egypt.... from the Topkapi Palace in Constantinople, except that Gérôme has reassembled them in a completely different way. The picture is from Oriental Visions: From Dreams into Light , a fascinating exhibition at the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris that looks at how European (mostly French) painters were stimulated, initially by fantasies of the East, and then later b...
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