Skip to main content

The White Cliffs of Normandy

The White Cliffs of Dover, Beachy Head and the Seven Sisters, the Needles and Durdle Door -- the southern English coastline has plenty of spectacular chalk and limestone features, but just across the Channel the French have got something equally if not more stunning: the chalk cliffs at Etretat.  Surrounding the bay of what was once a small fishing village, three natural arches and a 70-metre freestanding needle of chalk are a breathtaking sight (we were there a couple of years ago), and they're now a huge tourist attraction. But even before the tourists got there, some of the most famous names in French art had discovered a motif of which they rarely tired; as Normandy Tourism puts it: "Nature has carved unusual shapes out of the white cliffs in Etretat, and as a result, this picturesque spot attracted many Impressionist painters, who sought to capture the cliffs on canvas."  Etretat, Beyond the Cliffs: Courbet, Monet, Matisse  is devoted to those depictions of the white...
Post a Comment

Subscribe to updates

Opening in July

Edinburgh takes centre-stage in July, with the start of two big exhibitions. Rembrandt: Britain's Discovery of the Master runs at the Scottish National Gallery from July 7 to October 14 and aims to show how the taste for Rembrandt's work has evolved over four centuries. It features major paintings by Rembrandt in British collections as well as some that used to be in the UK but are now overseas. There'll also be work by British artists influenced by Rembrandt, including Hogarth, Reynolds, Kossoff and Auerbach.
A week later, on July 14, Emil Nolde: Colour Is Life opens at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. Running until October 21, this show comprises about 100 works, including 40 paintings from the Nolde Foundation in Seebüll on Germany's border with Denmark. Nolde's vibrant Expressionism led to his art being labelled as degenerate by the Nazis, yet he was also a supporter of National Socialism. It's worth noting that when this exhibition was on at the National Gallery of Ireland earlier this year, there was some controversy about perceptions of anti-Semitism in Nolde's work.
The Musée des Impressionnismes in Giverny, just a short walk from Monet's house and garden on the banks of the River Seine to the north-west of Paris, organises a couple of Impressionist-themed exhibitions every year, and its new show, starting on July 27, is a retrospective of the neo-Impressionist Henri-Edmond Cross, whose works influenced Fauvism and Cubism. This exhibition is on until November 4, after which it moves to the Museum Barberini in Potsdam, just outside Berlin, a very impressive new gallery in one of Germany's most attraction-filled small cities.

And finally, off to the seaside for two new shows at the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague, a classic 1930s building situated halfway between the city centre and Scheveningen, the former fishing village that became a a fashionable resort on the North Sea coast. Beach Life focuses on the late 19th-century Hague School's views of Scheveningen and shows how artists like Anton Mauve and Willem and Jacob Maris interpreted the interplay of light, sky and water. It runs from July 6 to September 16.

The other exhibition, which starts on July 14, takes us ahead several decades to show the inspiration the Dutch coast had on artists in the early 20th century, including Piet Mondriaan, Jan Toorop and Jacoba van Heemskerck. By the Sea continues until November 18.

Images

Rembrandt van Rijn, Reverend Johannes Elison, 1634, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, William K. Richardson Fund
Emil Nolde, Large Poppies (Red, Red, Red), 1942. (c) Nolde Stiftung Seebüll
Jan Toorop, Sea and Dune at Zoutelande, 1907, Gemeentemuseum Den Haag

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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

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