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...
What a riot of colour! An explosion of sheer outrageous exuberance! The exhibition is called Les Nabis et le Décor , it's on at the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris, and it celebrates a decade or so at the end of the 19th century when a group of young French painters broke down the boundaries between the fine and decorative arts to produce work that was completely original. Who were the Nabis? Artists such as Edouard Vuillard, Pierre Bonnard and Maurice Denis, who wanted to move on from Impressionism, which they saw as being too close to reality. Nabi is Hebrew for prophet, and the Nabis wanted to proclaim a new art. They were fascinated by the flatness of Japanese prints, by the post-Impressionism and innovative use of colour of Paul Gauguin, and they wanted to create contemporary interiors that were utterly at odds with the historical pastiche in vogue at the time. The aim of this exhibition is to recreate some of those interiors, now largely dispersed. And the curators have succ...