Skip to main content

New Exhibitions in February

Georges Seurat devised the Neo-Impressionist painting technique popularly known as Pointillism. He didn't live long and left only a small body of work, of which seascapes were a recurring motif; a couple of dozen paintings and drawings from summers spent on the northern coast of France will be brought together for  Seurat and the Sea   at the Courtauld Gallery in London from February 13 to May 17. Lucian Freud gained recognition as one of the greatest of British portrait painters for his intensely observed works, often of nudes. From February 12 to May 4, the National Portrait Gallery is putting on  Lucian Freud: Drawing into Painting , which will be the first exhibition in Britain to focus on his creations on paper, some of which have never been on public display before.   Ramses and the Pharaoh's Gold  is a travelling exhibition of treasures from Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities: 180 of them, with the coffin of the long-lived Ramses II among highlig...
Post a Comment

Subscribe to updates

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 of unknown names for a western audience, but the biggest is Ilya Repin, perhaps the most renowned of 19th-century Russian artists, who was born in the region round Kharkiv. 
The show in Geneva, on from December 8 to April 23, is called From Dusk to Dawn, and it reprises an exhibition that the National Gallery put on in Kyiv in 2021, with 19th- and 20th-century paintings and graphic works that reveal blazing sunsets, hopeful dawns and the contrast between darkness and light. Repin is represented here too, as are Mikhail Vrubel and Mariupol-born Arkhip Kuindzhi; you can expect to see the names spelt differently, using a transliteration from Ukrainian instead of Russian. 
 
More recent art is on view at Madrid's Thyssen-Bornemisza museum, with In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900-1930s. On until April 30, this show is made up of about 70 works, many of them from the National Art Museum of Ukraine and the State Museum of Theatre, Music and Cinema of Ukraine. It shows the rapid development of figurative and abstract art against the backdrop of World War I, the collapse of the Russian Empire, the creation of the Soviet Union, a Ukrainian war of independence and the horrors of famine and repression under Stalin. 
Among the artists featured are Kiev-born Kazemir Malevich, El Lissitzky and Odessa-born Sonia Delaunay. The exhibition moves on to the Museum Ludwig in Cologne from June 3 to September 24. 

Images

Kliment Redko, Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra, 1914, Kyiv National Art Gallery
Oleksandr Bohomazov, Sharpening the Saws, 1927, National Art Museum of Ukraine, Kyiv

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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

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

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