Skip to main content

A Meagre Serving of Derby's Finest

If you're thinking about seeing  Wright of Derby: From the Shadows  at the National Gallery in London, be warned: There's not a huge amount to this show. The gallery describes it as "the first major exhibition dedicated to the British artist’s 'candlelight' paintings". Major? There are actually only 10 of Joseph Wright's oil paintings in this smallish display, and while they certainly include some of his finest, it's not a lot for your money.   Especially as the star attraction is  An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump , Wright's masterpiece of 1768, which you can usually see for free just yards away in another room in the gallery, in rather less cramped circumstances. Without a shadow of a doubt, it's an astonishing painting, somehow encapsulating the 18th-century Enlightenment -- the advance of reason and science -- in one image. Whenever we're in the National Gallery we almost always stop by to look at it for a minute or two.  There is...
1 comment

Subscribe to updates

Opening and Closing in November

German women Expressionists at the Royal Academy in London: This may be the exhibition you've long been waiting for, or the one to make you run a mile. Making Modernism focuses on the often very vibrant work of Gabriele Münter and Marianne von Werefkin, the intense portraits and self-portraits of Paula Modersohn-Becker and the frequently harrowing prints and sculptures of Käthe Kollwitz. Most of the 65 works have never been shown in the UK before. It's on from November 12 to February 12.
A free display at the National Gallery features two JMW Turner paintings on loan from the Frick Collection in New York of the harbours at Dieppe and Cologne that the artist made on his frequent travels round Europe. Turner on Tour runs from November 3 to February 19. 

Back at Tate Britain from November 24 to February 26 is Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Fly in League with the Night, a show whose run in 2020 was curtailed by lockdown. Around 70 works are on show in a retrospective of a contemporary painter whose portraits are not of real people but fictitious characters drawn from found images or her imagination.

The Philip Mould gallery in Pall Mall will be telling the story of Sarah Biffin, born disabled in 1784 but who taught herself to draw and paint using her mouth and shoulder and established herself as a professional artist, taking commissions from royalty and the nobility. 'Without Hands': The Art of Sarah Biffin includes portraits, landscapes and still lifes and is on from November 1 to December 21. 

Sussex has played a not inconsiderable role in the development of art in Britain, and its Downs and coastline have been the inspiration for innumerable artists. Sussex Landscape: Chalk, Wood and Water at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester from November 12 until April 23 includes work by Turner, Eric Ravilious, Edward Bawden, Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell, among others. 
The touring retrospective of the sculpture of Barbara Hepworth finally makes it to Tate St Ives on November 26. Barbara Hepworth: Art & Life, which was previously to be seen in Wakefield and Edinburgh, will have a focus on Hepworth's decades in Cornwall on this leg; her home and studio are not far away. On until May 1, if you don't fancy Cornwall in winter. 

To Frankfurt now, where the Schirn Kunsthalle is staging a show on the period when the colourful fantasy world of Marc Chagall turned a shade darker. Chagall: World in Turmoil from November 4 to February 19 covers the 1930s and 40s, when the Jewish artist became increasingly concerned by the rise of the Nazis in Germany before going into exile in the US. 
As the days shorten in the northern hemisphere, there's one thing we long for: the Sun. But you can still admire a beautiful sunset, and the Kunsthalle in Bremen has collected more than a hundred of them for Sunset: A Celebration of the Sinking Sun from November 26 to April 2. Caspar David Friedrich, Claude Monet, Anna Ancher and Félix Vallotton are among the artists featured. 

We've longed to go to Samarkand, the Central Asian city on the Silk Road famed for its magnificence and the glories of its architecture. The Splendours of Uzbekistan's Oases at the Louvre in Paris will take visitors on a journey in space and time to see gold, silver, ceramics, silks and paintings, many of which are leaving Uzbekistan for the first time. November 23 to March 6. 

Last chance to see....

The exhibition at the Lighthouse in Woking highlighting the perils faced by Venice and featuring the spectacular if very different art of Canaletto & Melissa McGill ends on November 13. 

Images

Erma Bossi, Portrait of Marianne Werefkin, c. 1910, Gabriele Munter- und Johannes Eichner-Stiftung, Munich. © The Estate of Erma Bossi
William Nicholson, Whiteways Rottingdean, 1909, Private collection. © Pallant House Gallery. Photo: Barney Hindle
Marc Chagall, Bonjour Paris, 1939-42, Private collection. © VG Bild Kunst, Bonn 2022. Photo: Archives Marc et Ida Chagall
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What's On in 2025

What will be the exhibition highlights of 2025 around Britain and Europe? At the end of the year, Tate Britain will be marking 250 years since the birth of JMW Turner and John Constable with a potential blockbuster. Meanwhile, the Swiss are  making a big thing  of the 100th anniversary of the death of Félix Vallotton  (a real favourite of ours). Among women artists in the spotlight will be Anna Ancher, Ithell Colquhoun, Artemisia Gentileschi and Suzanne Valadon. Here's a selection of what's coming up, in more or less chronological order; as ever, we make no claim to comprehensiveness, and our choice very much reflects our personal taste. And in our search for the most interesting shows, we're visiting Ascona, Baden-Baden, Chemnitz and Winterthur, among other places.  January  We start off in Paris, at the Pompidou Centre; the 1970s inside-out building is showing its age and it'll be shut in the summer for a renovation programme scheduled to last until 2030. Bef...
Post a Comment
Read more

Carrington: You've Met Leonora, Now Discover Dora

Carrington: She only wanted to be known by her surname, unwittingly posing a conundrum for art historians, curators and the wider world a century later.  Because it's another somewhat later Carrington, the long-lived Surrealist and totally unrelated, who's recently become Britain's most expensive woman artist. But today we're at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester to see an exhibition not about Leonora but about Dora Carrington. She hated that name Dora -- so Victorian -- but with Leonora so much in the limelight (and the subject of a  recent show at Newlands House in Petworth, just a few miles up the road), the curators at the Pallant didn't have much option, so they've had to call their retrospective  Dora Carrington: Beyond Bloomsbury .  Leonora was a bit of a rebel, as we found out in Petworth. Dora too. But we ought to respect her wish. Carrington, then, has been a bit neglected recently; this is the first show of her works in three decades. And while ther...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Highs and Lows of the Nahmad Collection

It's widely referred to as the world's most valuable private art collection : the one assembled over decades by the Nahmad brothers, dealers Ezra and David . Worth an estimated $3 billion or more, it's said to include hundreds of Picassos. Some 60 works from it are now on display at the Musée des impressionnismes in Giverny as  The Nahmad Collection: From Monet to Picasso . Intended, apparently, to demonstrate how art developed from the early 19th century through Impressionism and on to the start of the modern era, towards the liberation of colour and form, this is an exhibition that ends up coming across as somewhat incoherent. We're not really told much about the Nahmads or their collecting choices -- and as you search the Internet, things become slightly mysterious: Is Ezra alive or dead? The art, presumably, is supposed to speak for itself, but it's a rather eclectic, if not confusing, selection; some of the works are fantastic, some are distinctly ho-hum.  Let...
Post a Comment
Read more