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Showing posts with the label Kunstmuseum Basel

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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Ukrainian Art Heads West

As war continues to rage in Ukraine, the country's art galleries have sent some of their prized works to safety in western Europe, and they'll be on show over the winter in exhibitions in Switzerland and Spain.   More than 100 pictures from Kyiv's National Art Gallery, formerly known as the Kyiv Museum of Russian Art, will be on display at both the Kunstmuseum in Basel and the Musée Rath in Geneva. The Kyiv gallery, one of Ukraine's biggest, has been marking its centenary this year. It suffered damage in a Russian rocket attack and approached the Kunstmuseum in the spring seeking temporary homes for some of its collection of over 14,000 works.  The show in Basel, entitled Born in Ukraine , runs until April 30 and features 63 paintings by 40 Ukrainian artists from the 18th to the 20th centuries. Entry is free of charge. As the name indicates, all the artists featured were born on what is present-day Ukrainian territory, though many trained in Russia. There are a lot o...
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Opening in March -- in a Few Places

So museums and galleries in Britain won't be welcoming art-lovers back for a while yet (not until mid-May in England, according to Boris Johnson's current timetable), but they're open in Austria, Belgium and Spain and will be unbolting their doors again in Switzerland from the start of March.   That means we do have a few exhibitions to tell you about this month, and let's start in Switzerland, because the new show at the Kunstmuseum in Basel is scheduled to be making its way to London and New York before too long, assuming there are no more lockdowns.... Sophie Taeuber-Arp: Living Abstraction  from March 20 to June 20 celebrates one of the most influential avant-garde artists of the 20th century. She's perhaps better-known in German-speaking countries (her face is on the Swiss 50-franc note ) for her geometric designs across a wide range of media, including textiles, sculpture and painting. The exhibition is due at  Tate Modern in July and then  MoMA in Novem...
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