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Showing posts from January, 2022

Opening in March

We'll start off this month by going back to Tuscany in the early 14th century, to the beginnings of modern western European painting. Duccio and Simone Martini were among those in the city of Siena reinventing art. There are more than 100 exhibits in  Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300-1350 , which runs from March 8 to June 22 at the National Gallery in London. The show was previously on at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and reviews were generally very good. There's a second show opening later in the month at the National, and it's quite an exotic one, devoted to a 19th-century Mexican artist whose work has not been shown in Britain before.  José María Velasco: A View of Mexico , running from March 29 to August 17, features sweeping landscapes by a painter who was interested not only in the natural world but in the rapid modernisation of his country.  Just around the corner at the National Portrait Gallery, there's a rather more conventional draw:  Edvard Munch ...
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Opening and Closing in February

London's Courtauld Gallery has just reopened after renovation, and its first big exhibition,  Van Gogh: Self-Portraits ,   starts on February 3. This show -- the first to cover the full range of Vincent van Gogh's self-portraiture -- will bring together around half those he created over his short career: 16 of them, from his time in Paris in 1886 to his stay in the asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in September 1889. It runs until May 8. At Tate Modern they're tackling another popular subject, surrealism, in the shape of  Surrealism beyond Borders , which starts on February 24. The Tate says previous stories of surrealism have focused on Paris in the 20s -- not in our exhibition-going experience -- and that this one will rewrite the history of the genre, reaching across 50 years and looking at art in centres from Buenos Aires to Seoul. This show comes from the Met in New York; the New Yorker called it "deliriously entertaining", though the Wall Street Journal sai...
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What Tommy Came Marching Home To

If you're interested in social history, you'll find much to enjoy in  The 1920s: Beyond the Roar , the new free exhibition at the National Archives in Kew.  The starting point is the 1921 census of England and Wales, the full record of which has just been made public. The exhibition shines a light on various aspects of the 20s through the census and its statistics and the Archives' vast holdings of documents, as well as photographs and film. The decade was an age of major change, technological and social, and those changes were in part the result of World War I and the terrible bloodshed during more than four years of conflict. More than 700,000 British soldiers died, but when the surviving Tommies came marching home after November 1918, it was a very different world they were returning to.  There were fewer men, for one thing. On census night in England and Wales in 1921, they counted just under 18.1 million males -- but 19.8 million females. While men were away dying in...
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On the Road with Albrecht Dürer

Albrecht Dürer: one of the great names of Renaissance art. His printmaking secured the man from Nuremberg lasting fame across Europe in his own lifetime, with his AD monogram becoming a pioneering symbol for quality and authenticity. In his native Germany, where Dürer is one of the key figures in the country's cultural history, we've seen some wonderful and exhaustive -- if exhausting -- exhibitions of his work, particularly at the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg itself.  Dürer's Journey's: Travels of a Renaissance Artist  at the National Gallery in London doesn't approach those heights; for one thing, there aren't really that many of Dürer's greatest hits -- you won't be seeing his Hare , or his Rhinoceros -- and while there are some fascinating woodcuts and engravings by the German, we got the impression that his paintings here were a little bit overshadowed by the work of other artists on show -- Giovanni Bellini and Quinten Massys, to name...
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