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Showing posts from September, 2022

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 and Closing in October

There are a tremendous number of exhibitions opening this month, starting in London with Paul Cezanne at Tate Modern. Cezanne's painting revolutionised art at the end of the 19th century, and the Tate is promising us a "once-in-a-generation" show, the first big retrospective in the UK for more than 25 years, with around 80 works, more than 20 of them never before seen in Britain. They include The Basket of Apples from the Chicago Institute of Art, where the previous version of this show earned rave reviews. Cezanne is on in London from October 5 to March 12.  It's certainly not once in a generation for an exhibition about Lucian Freud, but it is the 100th anniversary of his birth this year, and his seven-decade career is surveyed at the National Gallery. Lucian Freud: New Perspectives will have more than 60 paintings, from early, intimate works to his late monumental fleshy nudes. It runs from October 1 to January 22, before heading to the Thyssen-Bornemisza muse...

Venice in Peril, Part 2

You've just been to one exhibition about Canaletto and Venice, and then a second one comes along straight away, a bit like delayed vaporettos on the Grand Canal.  Canaletto's Venice Revisited at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich contrasted the painter's classic views of the lagoon city with the threat it faces today from rising sea levels and mass tourism, and  Canaletto and Melissa McGill: Performance and Panorama  at the Lightbox in Woking takes a similar tack. But if Greenwich's display of statistics about population decline and increasing flooding and an array of disposable plastic boots for tourists left us rather depressed, we found something surprisingly soothing and uplifting about the American artist Melissa McGill's attempt to alert us to the same problems.  Back in 2019, McGill created the Red Regatta project, which saw dozens of traditional Venetian sailing boats hoisted with sails she had hand-painted in varying shades of red traversing the ci...