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Showing posts from August, 2020

Opening and Closing in January

Let's kick off the New Year with something a bit out of the ordinary: Brasil! Brasil! The Birth of Modernism at London's Royal Academy. This show features more than 130 works by 10 key 20th-century Brazilian artists, and most of them have never been on show in the UK before, providing a chance to look at modern art in a way that breaks from the European and North American perspective we're so used to. On from January 28 to April 21.   There are more familiar names at Bath's Holburne Museum: Francis Bacon, Peter Blake, Gerhard Richter and Andy Warhol among them. Iconic: Portraiture from Bacon to Warhol  focuses on the middle of the 20th century when many artists began to use photographs as sources for their paintings. The exhibition runs from January 24 to May 5.  From January 22, the Louvre in Paris offers the chance to take  A New Look at Cimabue: At the Origins of Italian Painting . Cimabue, one of the most important artists of the 13th century, was among the...

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Opening in September

We're going to start our September preview in Paris, where an absolute stunner of an exhibition is set to open belatedly at the Petit Palais: The Golden Age of Danish Painting . That Golden Age lasted for just over 60 years from the start of the 19th century when artists such as Christen Købke expressed a growing national pride in works of precision and clarity tinged with romanticism. We got to see this fabulous show early last year at the National Museum in Stockholm. It's on in Paris from September 22 to January 3, and if you get the chance to go, don't hesitate. A few minutes walk away, at the Musée de l'Orangerie,  Giorgio de Chirico: Metaphysical Painting opens on September 16. De Chirico's enigmatic art from the first two decades of the 20th century draws on the German Romantics and prefigures the Surrealists. After it closes on December 14 it will transfer to the Kunsthalle in Hamburg early next year. If you head down the Seine from Paris to the Musé...

The Artist Who Was Everywhere

If you lived in Britain, particularly in London, during the middle of the 20th century, Barnett Freedman was all around you. As the go-to commercial artist during a period spanning the 30s to the 50s, his work was all over the Tube and London buses, on advertising, stamps and book tokens, as well as adorning the covers of collectable books and providing their illustrations. It's a career that's celebrated, more than six decades after Freedman's death, in a hugely enjoyable exhibition, Barnett Freedman: Designs for Modern Britain , at the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, which has just reopened after months of coronavirus-induced closure. The Pallant is our local art gallery, and its director, Simon Martin, said he didn't want to "sanitise the experience" of museum-going on reopening. So, while visitor numbers are limited and timed tickets are compulsory, we were pleased that once you got inside, there's actually very little that you would notice tha...