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Showing posts from October, 2019

Men Behaving Badly; Women and Children Too

When we visit the Netherlands or come across the Dutch abroad, we always feel they know how to relax and enjoy life. Visit Museum De Lakenhal in Leiden and you'll see in their latest exhibition that this joie de vivre has a long tradition. The gallery is looking back 400 years to the birth in the city of Jan Steen, who frequently painted his countrymen having a good time. And yes, on occasion, perhaps just a little bit too much of a good time.  In this show,  At Home with Jan Steen -- 400 Years of Merrymaking , you will discover why the Dutch use the expression "a Jan Steen household" for a home where, well, things are maybe just a bit too free and easy. This is the painting that sums it up: What a jolly time everyone is having in The Merry Family . To the accompaniment of music, they are indeed making merry: singing, drinking and smoking. All are taking part; the old, the young, and even a baby wielding a spoon. The baby's not partaking of the alcohol or tobacco, adm...
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Opening and Closing in November

There's a blockbuster of an exhibition about to open in London on November 2: Tutankhamun -- Treasures of the Golden Pharaoh at the Saatchi Gallery. Of more than 150 artefacts on show from the Egyptian king's tomb, unearthed almost a century ago, 60 are leaving Egypt for a first and final time on a world tour before they return to be displayed in a new Grand Egyptian Museum. The show's just been to Paris, where it drew almost 1.5 million visitors. It's on in London until May 3. Tickets are, as you might expect, not cheap. Five hundred years after the death of Leonardo da Vinci, the National Gallery is offering visitors an immersive exhibition designed to reveal the secrets of his painting The Virgin of the Rocks , taking you from inside the artist's mind (!) to how the picture might have looked in its original setting. Leonardo: Experience a Masterpiece opens on November 9 and runs until January 12. We'll be expecting something a little less hi-tech from ...
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Thoroughly Modern Millet

Few painters have inspired as many other artists as Jean-François Millet. For the German Impressionist Max Liebermann, Millet was "the most groundbreaking artist in modern painting", while for Vincent van Gogh, the Frenchman was "that essential modern painter who opened the horizon to many."  What made Millet so thoroughly modern? It was his rough brushwork, his simplified forms with strong contours. These were radically new compositions featuring high horizons and empty expanses. And yet in his own time, Millet's warts-and-all depictions of the harsh reality of rural life were just too avant-garde, too controversial for many. Take  Man with a Hoe from the start of the 1860s.  The critics attacked the ugliness of the man leaning on his hoe, taking a brief breather from his back-breaking work. They decried the style as caricatured. For Millet, though, this was an image full of compassion for the peasant's lot, full of detail like the purple thist...
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Hitler's Designs on Power

What seems to be the hottest exhibition ticket in the Netherlands at the moment? Rembrandt, Van Gogh? No, it's Design of the Third Reich  at the Design Museum in Den Bosch. Surprised? Don't be. It's superbly done, well explained and really engrossing.  The Nazis didn't achieve power in Germany without making themselves and their message attractive to millions of people, and the design of their emblems, electoral posters, the very styling of Adolf Hitler contributed to that. And those efforts didn't stop once they'd taken over. This show doesn't make any attempt to downplay the evils of Nazism, the horrors of the concentration camps and of World War II -- this is, after all, the 75th anniversary of the liberation of parts of the southern Netherlands, including Den Bosch, from German occupation -- but the aim is to try and understand the role design played in it all -- even if that role wasn't always a very coherent one.  The decision to stage thi...
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When Diego Met Rembrandt -- the Rematch

Two museums in two countries collaborate on a big exhibition, to be shown in both, and you tend to assume that, apart from a few tweaks, you'll see much the same in each city. What we weren't quite expecting when we went along to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam to see Rembrandt-Velázquez  this month was to find not only a completely different approach to the show we'd seen at the  Prado in Madrid  during the summer, but for the most part a completely different set of paintings.  The Prado exhibition bringing together the great Dutch and Spanish masters of the 17th century included some superlative pictures, but we were less than convinced by the curators' premise that, beneath the surface, there weren't really any national differences in the approach to art 400 years ago. It seemed a bit too much of an obvious pro-European political message and led to comparisons between paintings that we felt at times were rather contrived.  This show in Amsterdam, by con...
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Jazz It Up! Into the Night at the Barbican

Night is falling, and in Paris and Vienna, Berlin and New York, the clubs and cabarets are getting ready for business. There's music to be made, avant-garde art on the menu, a hint of rebellion in the air. That's the atmosphere we were hoping for in Into the Night: Cabarets and Clubs in Modern Art , an exhibition at London's Barbican Art Gallery. So can you feel the energy, sense the vibe? Frankly, no. Keep your jacket on, they advised us at the cloakroom, it's a bit cold in there. And they were right. It's not that there's a lack of interesting material on show here; there's some compelling art and some cracking stories to tell. But sadly, it's largely a dry and clinical exhibition-going experience. Where's the music, where's the action? Where's the life? Only occasionally do you feel truly drawn in to the maelstrom of artistic experimentation. Anyway, Fremder, étranger, stranger, where shall we begin our night on the tiles? How about ...
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Delft's Other Master -- Pieter de Hooch

Think of Delft, and you think, inevitably, of one artist: Johannes Vermeer . But in the middle of the 17th century, Vermeer wasn't the only painter from this city in southern Holland set for a particular place in art history.  Vermeer's enigmatic genre scenes are incomparable, but one of his fellow members of the Delft artists' guild was to produce some of the most characteristic pictures of the Dutch Golden Age: images of domesticity that almost sum up the period. His name was Pieter de Hooch, and this autumn and winter he's getting the attention he deserves in a show at the Museum Prinsenhof in Delft.  We have to admit to a bias towards Golden Age painting, but  Pieter de Hooch in Delft: From the Shadow of Vermeer is the best exhibition we've seen in 2019. It's not big, but it's beautifully put together and incredibly informative. And astonishingly, this is the first time de Hooch has ever had an exhibition devoted to him in the Netherlands.  ...
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Hogarth -- The Complete Box Sets Available Now!

We've all done it on a wet weekend, haven't we? Gorged ourselves on a box set, watching one episode after another after another, combining gluttony and indulgence, just two of the vices that the great storyteller of the Georgian age, William Hogarth, was able to illustrate so memorably, along with all their consequences. Hogarth was the master of the 18th-century equivalent of the box set, the moral tale told in a series of paintings or engravings, and in London this autumn you get the chance to enjoy the art equivalent of that Netflix or iPlayer binge. Go along to Sir John Soane's Museum to see, for the first time ever, all of Hogarth's series of pictures together on show in one place. Debauchery, infidelity, addiction, insanity, political chicanery: Hogarth: Place and Progress has got the lot. And, astonishingly at a time when exhibitions in London are getting more and more expensive, this opportunity to get this close up to the defining works of one of Britain...
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