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Showing posts from August, 2019

'Too Bold to Have Been Painted by a Woman'

So the question to ask about the  Michaelina Wautier  exhibition at the Royal Academy in London must be: Is the hype about this recently rediscovered 17th-century woman painter justified? The answer: Yes, absolutely.  She really does merit acknowledgement -- and not just because we recognise a woman working in a man's world. Her art shows she was extremely talented, producing superb canvases covering a diverse range of subject matter. What's more, she painted very large pictures featuring male nudes, such as Bacchus, despite her contemporaries thinking that was not the sort of thing a female artist could do. And her portraits are wonderfully lively and lifelike. This is Martino Martini, an Italian Jesuit missionary who travelled to China in the 1640s. It was painted in 1654, when Michaelina was around 40. Martini, who was staying at the Jesuit College in Brussels, is depicted wearing traditional Chinese silk court attire and a hat of fur and feathers. A rather substantial...
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Opening and Closing in September

From The Angel of the North to Another Place , Antony Gormley 's sculptures provide some fantastic open-air art experiences. How about indoors, though? We'll find out when he takes over the main galleries at the Royal Academy in London from September 21 to December 3. Over at Tate Britain, the biggest exhibition in 20 years of the works of William Blake  opens on September 11. The show is designed to offer visitors the chance to sense how Blake's radical and rebellious art must have come across when first shown two centuries ago. Until February 2. It's curtain up at the Foundling Museum on September 20 on Two Last Nights! Show Business in Georgian Britain , an exhibition looking at how similar, and how different, theatre-going was then and now. Hogarth is, of course, involved. The fat lady sings on January 5. And for those of us in south-east England, there's a chance to get a bit better acquainted with the Fauvist-influenced post-Impressionism of the 192...
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Fly Me to the Moon, via Greenwich

You'd have had to be on another planet or in a remote part of the world without Internet access to have missed that it's fifty years since Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the Moon (or since NASA faked the entire thing, if you subscribe to the conspiracy theory).  Only 10 other men have followed their giant leap, and none since 1972, which is something surely nobody would have expected in 1969. Thomas Cook was even printing luggage labels for the package tourists it was going to take there, and you can see one of them in  The Moon , the latest exhibition at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich.  The curators use the anniversary not only to relive the breathtaking scenes from 1969 and to explore how the race to get there developed but to examine the significance and allure of the Moon around the world, before bringing us bang up to date with the latest plans for a permanent human presence on Earth's only satellite.  As the show reveals, human...
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Famous in Finland: Helene Schjerfbeck

It's time for another encounter with a neglected Nordic painter -- one neglected by the British anyway.  Helene Schjerfbeck , the subject of a substantial show at the Royal Academy in London, is one of the biggest names in the history of Finnish art, but we have to admit we'd actually never heard of her till the RA announced this exhibition.  What unfolds before us is the story of an painter who appears to have pursued a relatively conventional career for a couple of decades before, in the second half of her life, withdrawing in difficult circumstances to what must have been relative artistic isolation in small Finnish towns and producing some remarkably expressive, if odd, work. Finland.... Beyond the occasional encounter with Akseli Gallen-Kallela , we're in uncharted artistic territory here, in a far-away country of which we know very relatively little, with a history that's at odds with the western European mainstream: Under Russian rule until 1917, it foug...
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Vallotton: Overlooked and Underappreciated

Switzerland, Orson Welles's character Harry Lime opined in The Third Man , had enjoyed 500 years of democracy and peace, yet its greatest contribution to culture was the cuckoo clock. Maybe Harry, like a lot of people, had just never heard of Félix Vallotton. The Swiss-turned-French artist has never been the subject of a full exhibition in Britain before, but that's all put right now at the Royal Academy in London with Félix Vallotton: Painter of Disquiet , with lots of loans from museums in France and Switzerland to introduce you to his often surprising work. We've actually come across pictures by Vallotton in several shows on both sides of the Channel in recent months, so we felt sure we'd enjoy this exhibition. We weren't, though, expecting to find it such a smash hit from start to finish. Vallotton, who was born in Lausanne in 1865 and who moved to Paris at the age of 16, is not an easy artist to classify. He had a spell as one of the avant-garde Nabis gro...
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First, Fatten Your Dormouse

So, fancy popping out for a drink at the caupona this evening? Or shall we stay in instead? Ask the neighbours round for a nice krater of Falernian wine, and get the slaves to whip up some of your favourite dishes? Glires for starters.... In Last Supper in Pompeii , at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, we find out how food and drink wasn't just a Roman love affair, it was a matter of life and death, and the afterlife too. Because, however advanced and sophisticated the Romans may have been in many respects, life expectancy was still short, and the grim reaper could be along to fetch you off in the morning. That's why this grinning skeleton embellished a mosaic floor panel in the dining room of a house in Pompeii, the Roman city that exemplifies the here-today-gone-tomorrow nature of life, buried as it was by volcanic ash when Mount Vesuvius exploded in 79 AD. But even as death walks towards you as you recline on your couch, he's got a wine jug in each hand.... So carpe...
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