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Showing posts from July, 2023

New Exhibitions in November

Jan van Eyck -- one of the greatest names in art history. Six centuries ago, he was at the forefront of a revolution in Flanders that saw the adoption of oil paint to create meticulously detailed, lifelike pictures. Now the National Gallery in London is offering you a once-in-a-lifetime chance to see all nine of his known surviving portraits together in one exhibition.  Van Eyck: The Portraits   runs from November 21 to April 11. The Portrait of a Man with a Blue Chaperon  will travel from the Brukenthal Museum in Romania to be there. We last saw it in Ghent in 2020, in a blockbuster van Eyck show that had to close early because of Covid . Tate Britain explores a creative partnership that lasted more than 50 years and its legacy in  Vanessa Bell & Duncan Grant: Inside Bloomsbury . In excess of 300 works, including paintings, textiles and furniture, will be in the show that runs from November 12 to April 11. And the studio that Bell and Grant shared until 1939 wi...

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Gwen John: Paris Salon Favourite

When she was alive, Gwen John was a big name in the art world, a really big name. As we learn at the start of  Gwen John: Art and Life in London and Paris  at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, her pictures were so admired in France in the 1920s that "everyone knows of Miss John.... and the Salon takes all she will send them."  But after her death at the start of World War II, John gained a reputation as something of a recluse, an artist who'd worked in isolation, and she was outshone by her flamboyant brother Augustus. This show in Chichester restores Gwen to her rightful position in art history, placing her squarely among a group of groundbreaking turn-of-the-century artists including Edouard Vuillard , Pierre Bonnard and her lover Auguste Rodin, for whom she posed.   This is a captivating exhibition. John's paintings -- largely portraits and interiors -- are not loud or showy; they're incredibly restrained, with their muted tones and soft brushwork conveyi...