Skip to main content

New Exhibitions in April

You may have noticed that it's the 250th anniversary of John Constable's birth this year, while JMW Turner was born 250 years ago last year and Thomas Gainsborough's 300th birthday falls in 2027. Put them all together and you get  Gainsborough, Turner and Constable: Inventing Landscape  at Gainsborough's House in Sudbury, Suffolk. This show, running from April 25 to October 11, explores the emergence of English landscape painting through three of its greatest exponents, and it features mostly rarely seen works from private collections -- including Turner's Abergavenny Bridge , which hasn't been on public display since 1799!  Meanwhile, the show that's just been on at Gainsborough's House --  Love & Landscape: Stanley Spencer in Suffolk  -- transfers to the Stanley Spencer Gallery in Cookham, Berkshire, starting on April 4. On till November 1, the exhibition explores the pivotal role the time Spencer spent in Suffolk had on his career. You can read he...
Post a Comment

Subscribe to updates

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 90 new irises but also the teacher of Lucian Freud. Two venues in London celebrate this rather forgotten painter simultaneously in Artist Plantsman at the Garden Museum and Beyond the Garden Wall, showing his landscapes, at Philip Mould in Pall Mall. Both run from April 18 to July 22.
But there's no getting away from Monet. A new show at the Orangerie in Paris looks at the links between his late work and Abstract Expressionism in the US. The Water Lilies: American Abstract Painting and the Last Monet starts on April 13 and is on until August 20.

Images

Claude Monet, The Doge's Palace (Le Palais ducal), 1908. (c) Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York, Gift of A. Augustus Healy
Sir Cedric Morris, May Flowering Irises No. 2, 1935. (c) Philip Mould & Company, Courtesy the Cedric Morris Estate

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Carrington: You've Met Leonora, Now Discover Dora

Carrington: She only wanted to be known by her surname, unwittingly posing a conundrum for art historians, curators and the wider world a century later.  Because it's another somewhat later Carrington, the long-lived Surrealist and totally unrelated, who's recently become Britain's most expensive woman artist. But today we're at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester to see an exhibition not about Leonora but about Dora Carrington. She hated that name Dora -- so Victorian -- but with Leonora so much in the limelight (and the subject of a  recent show at Newlands House in Petworth, just a few miles up the road), the curators at the Pallant didn't have much option, so they've had to call their retrospective  Dora Carrington: Beyond Bloomsbury .  Leonora was a bit of a rebel, as we found out in Petworth. Dora too. But we ought to respect her wish. Carrington, then, has been a bit neglected recently; this is the first show of her works in three decades. And while ther...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Highs and Lows of the Nahmad Collection

It's widely referred to as the world's most valuable private art collection : the one assembled over decades by the Nahmad brothers, dealers Ezra and David . Worth an estimated $3 billion or more, it's said to include hundreds of Picassos. Some 60 works from it are now on display at the Musée des impressionnismes in Giverny as  The Nahmad Collection: From Monet to Picasso . Intended, apparently, to demonstrate how art developed from the early 19th century through Impressionism and on to the start of the modern era, towards the liberation of colour and form, this is an exhibition that ends up coming across as somewhat incoherent. We're not really told much about the Nahmads or their collecting choices -- and as you search the Internet, things become slightly mysterious: Is Ezra alive or dead? The art, presumably, is supposed to speak for itself, but it's a rather eclectic, if not confusing, selection; some of the works are fantastic, some are distinctly ho-hum.  Let...
Post a Comment
Read more

What's On in 2025

What will be the exhibition highlights of 2025 around Britain and Europe? At the end of the year, Tate Britain will be marking 250 years since the birth of JMW Turner and John Constable with a potential blockbuster. Meanwhile, the Swiss are  making a big thing  of the 100th anniversary of the death of Félix Vallotton  (a real favourite of ours). Among women artists in the spotlight will be Anna Ancher, Ithell Colquhoun, Artemisia Gentileschi and Suzanne Valadon. Here's a selection of what's coming up, in more or less chronological order; as ever, we make no claim to comprehensiveness, and our choice very much reflects our personal taste. And in our search for the most interesting shows, we're visiting Ascona, Baden-Baden, Chemnitz and Winterthur, among other places.  January  We start off in Paris, at the Pompidou Centre; the 1970s inside-out building is showing its age and it'll be shut in the summer for a renovation programme scheduled to last until 2030. Bef...
Post a Comment
Read more