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Showing posts from March, 2018

Through the Eyes of Félix Vallotton

An exhibition devoted to one artist can be very satisfying: not only do you get to know them and what made them tick, how they developed and changed, but often you also have a history lesson. And all the pictures too. We've been to just such a solo show in Switzerland, and just like Swiss trains, it all worked beautifully. The artist: Félix Vallotton.  Vallotton Forever: The Retrospective at the Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts in Lausanne, the city of his birth in 1865, is the culmination of a year of Swiss events to mark the 100th anniversary of his death in 1925. It's an absolutely massive show, bringing together about 250 works from public and private collections. But Vallotton's output was so varied, exploring so many different artistic avenues, that it's a constant voyage of discovery.  So where to start? Perhaps in the mid-1890s, when Vallotton, who'd moved to the bright lights of Paris when he was just 16, joined the Nabis , the group of Post-Impressionists ar...
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Opening in April

If you enjoyed Claude Monet's views of Westminster in Impressionists in London  at Tate Britain, your next destination is clear: Monet and Architecture  just up the road at the National Gallery from April 9 to July 29. It's a new way of seeing Monet's work, the National says: the first exhibition looking at the great Impressionist's career through the buildings he painted, with more than 75 pictures together for the very first time. There's another blockbuster of a French-themed show coming at the British Museum: Rodin and the Art of Ancient Greece  opens on April 26 and can be seen until July 29. Rodin was captivated by the Parthenon sculptures when he saw them in 1881, and 100 years after his death, his work including The Thinker and The Kiss can be seen alongside them in a new light, the museum says. It's the season to get into the garden. So it's the perfect time to be inspired by the paintings of Cedric Morris, not only a botanist who cultivated ...
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All Too Human -- Raw Flesh from Spencer to Saville at the Tate

As you might expect, there's a fair bit of both Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon in All Too Human: Bacon, Freud and a Century of Painting Life at Tate Britain in London. But we've had quite a lot of both these big names on show recently, so you might get more out of it discovering something different from other artists in this exhibition. The premise, according to the Tate, is that the show "celebrates the painters in Britain who strove to represent human figures, their relationships and surroundings in the most intimate of ways." There's a certain feeling, though, that this show is made up of a number of disparate bits that don't quite hang together. And you wonder how David Hockney doesn't get a look-in in a survey of the last century of British figurative painting. The period before 1945 gets fairly short shrift as well, knocked off quickly in the first of 11 rooms. There are two Stanley Spencers on each side of the entrance door, both of his second ...
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David Milne -- Another Canadian to Discover at Dulwich

It's hugely satisfying going to an exhibition by an artist you know virtually nothing about and coming away full of enthusiasm for a new discovery. David Milne: Modern Painting  is the latest in a series of shows at London's Dulwich Picture Gallery to make Britons aware of Canadian artists who previously hadn't really penetrated the consciousness of the Old World. Apologies, Canadians; we really should do better. Milne was born in 1882, making him a contemporary of the Group of Seven and Tom Thomson, who featured in the excellent Painting Canada show at Dulwich in 2011, and of Emily Carr , whose work was on display there four years ago. Walk into the first room and you'll be struck by the brightness and freshness of Milne's early work, done in New York in his 20s. A sort of colourful impressionism with nods to America's Ashcan School. There are urban interiors and exteriors, in oils and watercolours, with a lot of interest in the advertising that will ha...
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Pop! Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll in Chichester

The year was 1967. In Chichester (of all places), Mick Jagger was on trial for drug possession, and amid the media frenzy he was photographed in the back of a police van handcuffed to fellow defendant, art dealer Robert Fraser. In 2018, Richard Hamilton's reworking of that press snapshot into one of the iconic images of British art in the 60s -- Swingeing London '67 -- is one of the highlights of  Pop! Art in a Changing Britain , in the very appropriate surroundings of Chichester's Pallant House Gallery. Hamilton, one of the pioneers of the movement in Britain, said that among the characteristics of Pop Art were that it was transient and expendable. And yet 50 years on, Pop is still all around us. Roy Lichtenstein's appropriation of the technique of the comic strip has become an advertising cliche, Eduardo Paolozzi's mosaics  and statues are all over London, and Peter Blake's Everybody Razzle Dazzle  ferry lights up the Mersey. This exhibition in Chiche...
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