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Stubbs, a Thoroughbred Painter of Horses

No one before had ever painted horses like George Stubbs. Not only did they look incredibly lifelike, he seemed able to capture their individual character -- a talent that ensured he could command extremely high prices for his work from wealthy and influential patrons.  There's now a rare chance to appreciate the only one of the painter's outstanding lifesize equine canvases still in private hands in a small free exhibition,  Stubbs: Portrait of a Horse , in Room 1 at the National Gallery in London. This is Scrub, eight times a race winner, who like the gallery's Whistlejacket belonged to one of those rich patrons, the Marquess of Rockingham, and he commissioned both pictures in about 1762.  Scrub, again like Whistlejacket, was depicted not just as a racehorse, under the control of a jockey or stable boy, but in a grand manner, intended to serve as the steed in an equine portrait of George III, who had recently come to the throne. Other specialist painters would be u...
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Opening and Closing in April

Even though more than half of adults in England have had a coronavirus jab, museums won't be welcoming visitors again before May. And with case numbers mounting in several European countries, who knows when they'll be reopening in France or the Netherlands. 

So let's concentrate on the few places in Europe where we have got confirmed dates for new exhibitions in April, starting in Madrid, where the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum is presenting a retrospective on Georgia O'Keeffe, one of the greatest names in 20th-century American art. A selection of around 80 works, providing a complete survey of O'Keeffe's career and including her famed flower paintings and images of New Mexico, opens on April 20 and runs until August 8. And assuming travel restrictions do ease at some point, if you can't see it in Madrid, this exhibition will be moving on to the Pompidou Centre in Paris and the Fondation Beyeler just outside Basel. 
Stockholm's National Museum reopens on April 6, with Zorn -- A Swedish Superstar the big attraction. This show is intended to mark last year's 100th anniversary of the death of Anders Zorn, arguably the biggest name in the history of Swedish painting and known for his naturalistic approach to recording rural life and his realistic nudes and portraiture. There will be about 150 works on display in the exhibition, which runs until August 29.

In Denmark, the National Gallery in Copenhagen reopens on April 21, with Kirchner and Nolde Up for Discussion. This show focuses on the inspiration found by the German Expressionists Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Emil Nolde in their travels through Africa and the Pacific in the period running up to and during World War I. How to reinterpret these works with their bold colours and brushwork but sometimes questionable subject matter in the light of modern attitudes? Nolde, part-Danish, pro-Nazi, presents a real challenge, as we know from a 2018 show in Edinburgh. 

Last chance to see....

It seems a very long time ago that we immersed ourselves in Olafur Eliasson: In Real Life at Tate Modern in London. Having been on and off at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao for more than a year, the show, which we don't recollect as being terribly suited to experiencing in a pandemic, finally closes there on April 11. A new Eliasson exhibition is due to open at the Fondation Beyeler in Basel in April, but there's no firm start date yet. 

Images

Georgia O'Keeffe, Series I--No.3, 1918, Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee. © Milwaukee Art Museum, VEGAP, Madrid, 2021
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Seated Nude with Fan, 1911, Museum Gunzenhauser, Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz
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