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Showing posts from May, 2022

Gone but No Longer Forgotten -- the Women of Ghent

How was it that all but a few women artists became excised from art history? It wasn't as if there weren't plenty of them around, making stunning paintings, and lots of money, particularly in the Low Countries in the 17th and 18th century. Art history is of course now being rewritten, to rescue the forgotten from oblivion. To find out what happened and how the record is being put right, you should go to Ghent to see Unforgettable: Women Artists from Antwerp to Amsterdam, 1600-1750 at the Museum of Fine Arts.  Michaelina Wautier is a case in point: a woman who could compete on her own terms with the Baroque masters of the southern Netherlands, but whose work was disregarded or attributed to men until the last couple of decades. Wautier may well be the biggest rediscovery among forgotten women painters in recent years -- she's got an exhibition of her own on now at the Royal Academy in London -- and one of her pictures is among the stand-out works at this show in the heart ...
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Opening and Closing in June

Summer's almost here, and it's perhaps the time for outdoor pleasures; there certainly aren't that many big exhibitions to tell you about in June. So let's start with a small one, a free display at London's National Gallery. Picasso Ingres: Face to Face , running from June 3 to October 9, brings together for the first time Pablo Picasso's 1932 painting Woman with a Book , from the Norton Simon Museum in California, and the work that inspired it, the National's own Madame Moitessier by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Picasso saw the Ingres portrait in 1921 and was enthralled by it. "Lesser artists borrow," Picasso said. "Great artists steal."  Summer means the seaside, so what better destination to see an exhibition than the Towner in Eastbourne. Following 2021's superb John Nash retrospective, this year's big event puts the spotlight on the pioneering female collector who opened the Wertheim Gallery in London in 1930 and the arti...
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Breaking News: It's a Winner

The intro to the lead story in Britain's oldest surviving newspaper, the Corante of September 24, 1621, was a little wordy: "There is advice from Naples, that certaine Ambassadours of Messina are arrived there and from thence are to go into Spaine, to congratulate the king and to give him a present of 150000 crownes...."   By 1944, the sub-editors had tightened things up considerably. For the midday BBC bulletin on June 6, John Snagge needed only four syllables to get the news across: "D-Day has come."  Breaking the News at the British Library in London takes us back through centuries of reporting the news, making, faking and manipulating it, in an absolutely fascinating exhibition. Hundreds of exhibits -- old newspapers, photographs, film and video -- demonstrate how the technology has improved, and the writing is sometimes a lot slicker, but also that dubious and unethical practices have been going on just as long. For those of us who started our journalism c...
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Not Every Picture Tells a Good Story

It's a great idea for an exhibition:  Inspired!  at the Guildhall Art Gallery in the City of London brings together paintings and sculpture for which artists found their inspiration in literature, music and the theatre.  It's a great idea, but the execution is underwhelming. Two of the four sections in this show, drawn entirely from the Guildhall's own collection, are absorbing. The other two are pretty dull. It's a bit like when you've gone to see a poor production of a favourite play; you come away feeling somewhat dissatisfied.  There are some fine artists on show: You've got Jan Steen, Thomas Lawrence, Duncan Grant, John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt and Lawrence Alma-Tadema. But the painter with most work on display here is John Gilbert . We think you may need to look him up. And he's certainly not very inspiring. He's one of those 19th-century artists whose work is largely forgotten; so are some others here, but at least a few of them have s...
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Raphael: A Real Renaissance Man

Raphael was only 37 when he died in Rome in 1520; "Here no one is speaking of anything other than the death of this good man," a Mantuan envoy reported back home in a letter the following day. "But his second life, that of his Fame, which is not subject to time or death, will be eternal."  Pandolfo Pico's prediction to Isabella d'Este was not wrong. Five centuries on, the National Gallery in London has put together a varied and impressive collection of works, reproductions and video to illustrate that  Raphael  was not just a great painter of oils and frescoes, but a multi-talented architect, archaeologist, draughtsman, designer of tapestries, prints and mosaics as well. A real Renaissance man, in fact, up there with Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci .  This is not quite a blockbuster exhibition; not surprisingly, you won't be seeing The Sistine Madonna from Dresden, for example, with possibly the two most commercialised cherubs in art history. But it ...
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