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Showing posts from August, 2023

Stand Well Back and Join the Dots

Georges Seurat was on to something when he moved on from Impressionism to develop the radically different painting technique popularly known as Pointillism. He and his followers applied unmixed dots of pure colour to their canvases, separate little spots of paint that, the theory went, would come together in the eye of the viewer to create glowing, luminous pictures.  Seurat died young, and Pointillism didn't really hang around for very long either. But it produced some gorgeous art, and 50 or so of its finest creations are gathered at the National Gallery in London in  Radical Harmony: Helene Kröller-Müller's Neo-Impressionists . It's a glorious, light-filled, uplifting exhibition, and the most enjoyable show we've been to all year. "Art is harmony," Seurat said, and it's hard to argue with that in this show. These pictures are Helene Kröller-Müller's Neo-Impressionists, by the way, because more than half of them come from the Kröller-Müller Museum i...

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Opening and Closing in September

Which exhibition are we most looking forward to this month? It has to be Frans Hals at the National Gallery in London, which starts on September 30. It's the first major retrospective of the great portraitist of the Dutch Golden Age in three decades, and it will assemble around 50 of his works, including a couple of his large-scale group portraits of militiamen from the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. A must-see, particularly if you missed the fantastic show focusing on Hals's male portraits at the Wallace Collection a couple of years back. All that swaggering loose -- or even louche -- brushwork is on display at the National Gallery until January 21, before transferring to the Rijksmuseum in February and then the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin in July.  Hals was originally from Antwerp, and it was in the Flemish port city that his close contemporary Peter Paul Rubens spent much of his life and career. The new exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery i...

Opening and Closing in August

With the summer holidays in full swing, August is almost inevitably the quietest month of the year for new art shows, but we do have to highlight one absolutely superb exhibition that's opening, as well as another stunning show that's coming to an end. It's the 250th anniversary in 2024 of the birth of the great German Romantic landscape painter Caspar David Friedrich, and the next in a series of commemorative retrospectives gets under way at the Kunst Museum in the Swiss city of Winterthur on August 26. Caspar David Friedrich and the Harbingers of Romance  features some of the artist's most iconic pictures, including the Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog and Chalk Cliffs on Rügen , as well as taking a look at the landscape painters who went before him, such as Jacob van Ruisdael and Claude Lorrain. We got to see this show in Schweinfurt in northern Bavaria in the spring and absolutely lapped it up. It's on in Winterthur until November 19.   You only have until August...