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Showing posts from April, 2022

New Exhibitions in March

She was a highly successful artist in 17th-century Brussels, creating the sort of paintings you might have seen from Rubens or Van Dyck, but then she vanished from art history. It's only very recently she's been rescued from obscurity, her pictures rightfully reattributed.  Michaelina Wautier  comes to the Royal Academy in London on March 27 from the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, offering the first opportunity to encounter her work on a large scale. On till June 21.  And while we're on the theme of new discoveries, we've made quite a few at the Dulwich Picture Gallery down the years. The latest arrival there is a completely unknown name to us, from the Baltic:  Konrad Mägi  (1878-1925), described as a pioneer of Estonian modernism. More than 60 of his works are being shown in the UK for the first time in an exhibition that runs from March 24 to July 12.  No introduction is needed for David Hockney, and he's taking over the Serpentine Gallery on March ...
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Opening and Closing in May

It's a motif that recurs in art down the centuries, going back to ancient times: a woman at a window. A new show at Dulwich Picture Gallery in south-east London builds an exhibition on the theme around its own Girl at a Window by Rembrandt with more than 40 works going right up to the present day, though don't expect Vermeer  or Caspar David Friedrich . Reframed: The Woman in the Window runs from May 4 to September 4.  We've seen Edvard Munch in Oslo at the old Munch Museum and the old National Gallery, but we've never been to the significant Munch collection at KODE in Bergen, collected during the painter's lifetime by the industrialist Rasmus Meyer. Eighteen works from the collection, dating from the 1880s and 1890s, will be on show at the Courtauld Gallery from May 27 to September 4 in Edvard Munch: Masterpieces from Bergen . Will this be as popular as the Van Gogh Self-Portraits show at the Courtauld, which finishes on May 8 but is completely sold out? A fre...
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Glimmers from the Mists of Prehistory

There's stone, bone, bronze and, extraordinarily given that these objects are thousands of years old, a surprising amount of wood. But it's the gold that steals the show in  The World of Stonehenge at the British Museum in London.  Between 1900 and 1600 BC -- yes, almost 4000 years ago, and that's quite a concept to get your head round -- craftsmen were able to create this remarkable gold cape , which was uncovered by workmen in North Wales in 1833.  It's a stunning object in its own right, beautiful and mysterious. Imagine the sunlight glinting on it as the person who wore it -- and they must have been someone of great rank or status -- displayed it to.... whom? Worshippers, subjects? On some great day of celebration, presumably. On the other hand, the wearer would have been unable to move his or her upper arms....  Enormous skill and hard work went into its making, those patterns beaten out with only the most basic of tools. And consider the wealth it must have ta...
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