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Showing posts from September, 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 October

There are an awful lot of new shows to talk about this month, particularly in London, and one that looks set to be a crowd-puller is Gauguin Portraits at the National Gallery. It's the first ever exhibition devoted to the portraits of Paul Gauguin and aims to demonstrate how he revolutionised the genre. There are more than 50 works, including high-profile loans from around Europe and North America, but ticket prices (£24 on the door at weekends) are £6 higher than for the recent Sorolla show and £2 up on last year's Monet blockbuster. October 7 to January 26. Dulwich Picture Gallery is marking the 350th anniversary of Rembrandt's death with Rembrandt's Light , an exhibition designed to showcase the artist's mastery of light and shadow and focusing on his middle period. It will have around 35 works, including some never seen in the UK before, and runs from October 4 to February 2. The recent show at the Foundling Museum showed just how much meaning William ...
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'More Sun, More Colour' -- The Scots Come to Woking

There's something very un-Scottish about the Scottish Colourists. So vibrant, so exuberant, so full of sun. Four artists who, in the first few decades of the 20th century, infused their art with a French spirit, the feel of the Mediterranean, Fauvist and Cubist influences. There are a lot of paintings by JD Fergusson, SJ Peploe, FCB Cadell and GL Hunter in Scottish galleries, but the Tate's website musters only five works between them. So Burning Bright: The Scottish Colourists  at the Lightbox in Woking offers those of us in south-east England the rare chance to appreciate these groundbreaking British modernists. The Colourists weren't a movement in the sense that they worked and exhibited together; indeed, the description Scottish Colourists wasn't coined until after World War II, by which time three of them were already dead. But they were friends, their careers followed similar courses and they absorbed the same European influences, having all gone to France bef...
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A Pyramid on Primrose Hill -- The London that Never Was

What London really needed in the 1820s, Thomas Willson thought, was a gigantic pyramid. Ninety-four storeys high, covering 18 1/2 acres on top of Primrose Hill . In the churchyards of inner London, space for graves was running out. Willson's planned Metropolitan Sepulcher would have contained tens of thousands of alcoves, each with room for 24 bodies, giving a total burial capacity of 5 million. Five million! Coffins would have been moved upwards on ramps around a central shaft. And there would have been a viewing platform at the top.... It was never built, of course, but it's only one of a number of remarkable schemes that failed to materialise in the capital, as revealed in an interesting, entertaining and enjoyable exhibition at the Guildhall Art Gallery -- The London that Never Was . Can you imagine the size and the visual impact of that structure? Every day, Londoners would have been reminded of their own mortality by the giant cemetery in the sky looming over them....
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Mist and Mirrors: Olafur Eliasson

Olafur Eliasson is very of the moment, isn't he? He wants to save the planet, and he hopes that if you go to see Olafur Eliasson: In Real Life at Tate Modern in London, the immersive art he's made that you encounter will heighten your sense of the world around you and make you even more minded to combat climate change. Of course, if you were planning to see this show in the first place, we suspect the chances are that you're already fairly environmentally aware. Eliasson wowed London with The Weather Project in Tate Modern's Turbine Hall back in 2003, and so, many of those flocking to this retrospective on the South Bank will be hoping for just as much wow this time round. Do they get it? Well, the best of the 40 or so works on show really do astonish and delight and surprise.... but to be honest, quite a few fall a bit flat. Perhaps that's because while most of these haven't been on display in Britain before, we have seen a fair number in the past, includ...
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