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Showing posts from December, 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 January

The first big exhibition of 2023 in London gets under way at the Royal Academy on January 21, and it features paintings by El Greco, Velázquez, Goya and  Joaquín Sorolla , as well as textiles, silverware and many other artworks from Spain and Latin America. There are more than 150 objects to discover from the  Hispanic Society of America  in New York, the most extensive collection of Spanish art outside its homeland. Spain and the Hispanic World: Treasures from the Hispanic Society Museum & Library  is on until April 10.  David Hockney has achieved the status of a British national treasure, and he's the opening attraction at a whizzy new venue in King's Cross, the Lightroom. From January 25 to April 23, the artist provides his own commentary for  David Hockney: Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away) . In a cycle of six chapters, Hockney takes us through his career and constant experimentation with ways of seeing. The immersi...
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What's On in 2023 -- Vermeer, Hals, Friedrich

What are the highlights of the exhibition calendar in Europe in 2023? How about the biggest Vermeer show ever? A Frans Hals blockbuster? Or a couple of exhibitions to mark the 250th birthday (in 2024) of the great German Romantic, Caspar David Friedrich? There's quite a bit of Klimt and Van Gogh, too. Here are some of our picks for the year ahead, in more or less chronological order.  January Opening the year at London's Royal Academy is the opportunity to experience some of the highlights of the most extensive collection of Spanish art outside Spain, from the Hispanic Society of America in New York. On show will be paintings by El Greco, Velázquez and Goya, as well as Joaquín Sorolla , along with much else besides.  Spain and the Hispanic World: Treasures from the Hispanic Society Museum & Library runs from January 21 to April 10.  There's a new venue opening in London on January 25: The Lightroom in King's Cross, and until April 23 it's showing David Hockney...
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Underneath the Victorian Varnish

The old adage that a picture paints a thousand words is only true if you know the language being spoken. Take the Victorians; how many of their painted images appear to us at first glance so prim and proper, even twee. But beneath those buttoned-up, straight-laced exteriors, there lurks a deep, concealed well of emotion. To break through to the real significance, you need to translate the signs, decode the symbols whose meanings are no longer obvious to us.  What are they all trying to tell us, those ladies in bonnets, those cute animals, those flowers and climbing plants that you've seen when wandering through a room of Victorian paintings in a provincial museum? You can find out in  Telling Tales: The Story of Victorian Narrative Art  at the Russell-Cotes Art Gallery & Museum in Bournemouth, an exhibition that reveals that British 19th-century art is as full of hidden meanings as those Dutch Golden Age interiors we love so much.  There are no really big names i...
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Ceci n'est pas un cocktail trolley

Surrealism: It can be so full of wit and invention, so thought-provoking. At its worst, though, it can be mind-numbingly dull and repetitive. Exhibitions about Surrealism seem to oscillate between the two extremes as well. Having been to quite a few, we're delighted to say that  Objects of Desire: Surrealism and Design 1924-Today at the Design Museum in London is one of the best. This is a big and wide-ranging show, and we happily spent more than two hours seeing some objects that were very familiar, and some that weren't. We laughed out loud quite a bit. Think of Surrealist objects, and the chances are that Salvador Dalí's Lobster Telephone and Mae West Lips Sofa will come to mind, and of course they are here, right at the start of the exhibition, as eye-catching and intriguing as ever.   What a bizarre yet beautiful piece of furniture the sofa is. Dalí created it at the suggestion of his friend and patron, Edward James, for his Monkton House residence on the West Dean...
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Ukrainian Art Heads West

As war continues to rage in Ukraine, the country's art galleries have sent some of their prized works to safety in western Europe, and they'll be on show over the winter in exhibitions in Switzerland and Spain.   More than 100 pictures from Kyiv's National Art Gallery, formerly known as the Kyiv Museum of Russian Art, will be on display at both the Kunstmuseum in Basel and the Musée Rath in Geneva. The Kyiv gallery, one of Ukraine's biggest, has been marking its centenary this year. It suffered damage in a Russian rocket attack and approached the Kunstmuseum in the spring seeking temporary homes for some of its collection of over 14,000 works.  The show in Basel, entitled Born in Ukraine , runs until April 30 and features 63 paintings by 40 Ukrainian artists from the 18th to the 20th centuries. Entry is free of charge. As the name indicates, all the artists featured were born on what is present-day Ukrainian territory, though many trained in Russia. There are a lot o...
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Eva, Elisabeth, Angelica, Laura and Gwen

It turns out that the free exhibition at the National Gallery in London offering you the chance to Discover Manet & Eva Gonzalès provides you with the opportunity to discover a whole lot more besides; there are portraits and self-portraits going back to the late 18th century in a display that puts women artists and the challenges they faced at the forefront. Eva Gonzalès was Edouard Manet's only formal pupil, and his fairly monumental portrait of her, nearly 2 metres high, is a rather strange picture at first sight. She's working on an already framed painting; she seems to be sitting, awkwardly posed, rather too far away from the canvas, the floor is carpeted, and she's wearing a most unsuitable snowy white dress; you wouldn't want to get any paint on her clothes or the carpet. It wasn't an easy painting for Manet to get right; there were apparently numerous sittings and a lot of reworking. You might assume that the elegantly clad young woman dabbing at a pictu...
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