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Showing posts with the label Jan Lievens

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 January

Let's start the New Year in Edinburgh, with two of the biggest names in Pop Art.  Eduardo Paolozzi, perhaps the pioneer of the genre with his collages from the late 1940s, was born in the Scottish capital a century ago, and you can see a retrospective of his varied work from January 27 in National Galleries Scotland's Modern Two building. Paolozzi at 100 is on until April 21.  Meanwhile, in Edinburgh's Old Town, Dovecot Studios will be presenting an exhibition of Andy Warhol's colourful commercial textile designs, dating back to the 1950s, before he found fame in New York. Andy Warhol: The Textiles is on from January 26 to May 18, when it might just be warm enough for you to enjoy an ice-cream sundae, if your tastebuds have been tickled by Warhol's fabric.  Rembrandt's earliest known works from the time when he was starting out as a painter in Leiden are pictures depicting four of the senses, and they're brought together at the city's Lakenhal museum f...

Talking Heads

Come out of  Turning Heads at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp and you'll start looking at the people of Belgium's second city in an entirely different way. You'll encounter living examples of the faces you have just seen on wood or canvas in the exhibition galleries, painted four or five hundred years ago by Peter Bruegel the Elder , Peter Paul Rubens and Jacob Jordaens. And realise that they're not that different.... This is such a fun show at Antwerp's newly renovated main art gallery, and an enlightening one. Alongside the great Flemish masters, there are pictures by the stars of the Dutch Golden Age -- Rembrandt , Hals and Vermeer -- and a lot more, exploring a genre that plays a big role in the painting of the Low Countries: the study of heads, both as preliminary sketches for spectacular group pictures and then as works of art in their own right.  Such paintings are known in Dutch as  tronies  -- portraits that aren't really portraits but chara...

Rembrandt -- The Story Starts Here

There have been a lot of Rembrandt exhibitions last year and in 2019, the 350th anniversary of his death, and we've felt a wee bit satiated, to be perfectly truthful.  The last big show in the Netherlands in this celebratory Rembrandt year is in Leiden, the city where the great artist was born in 1606, at the newly renovated and extended Museum De Lakenhal. It's about the start of his career, the period before Rembrandt really became Rembrandt. We approached it with a slight degree of trepidation; would this assembly of apprentice works actually constitute a decent exhibition?  We needn't have been concerned.  Young Rembrandt -- Rising Star  turns out to be the best Rembrandt show of all those we've seen recently, and in fact the best of the dozens of exhibitions we've been to around Europe this year. And if you can't get to Leiden, it'll be transferring to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford in February.  This show takes us through to about 1634-35...