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Showing posts from October, 2023

Fire and Water, Sun and Sky

"Fire and water.... the one all heat, the other all humidity -- who will deny that they both exhibit, each in its own way, some of the highest qualities of Art?" That was the Literary Gazette 's verdict in 1831 on JMW Turner and John Constable, probably the most admired of all British landscape artists. Almost exact contemporaries whose work is being celebrated at Tate Britain in  Turner & Constable: Rivals & Originals , a thoroughly engrossing exhibition that bathes you in the drama of Turner's golden sunlight, contrasted with perhaps the more understated charms of Constable's cloud-filled skies.  "The Sun is God" are supposed to have been Turner's last words, and throughout this show you can't get away from his solar worship -- one striking watercolour records The Sun Rising over Water . And that's it, that's all there is, but to be frank, you don't really notice the water. It's the bright yellow Sun that holds your eye,...
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Opening and Closing in November

It's in the reign of King Henry VIII that English history seems to come to life, to become truly accessible. And part of that is down to the portraits of the royal family and the court by the German artist Hans Holbein the Younger, which retain an uncanny immediacy five centuries on. Holbein at the Tudor Court at the Queen's Gallery in London will display the largest group of Holbein's works from the Royal Collection in more than 30 years, including over 40 of his sublime portrait drawings, of sitters such as Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour and Thomas More. It's on from November 10 until April 14. More works on paper at the Royal Academy, but from well over 300 years later: Degas, Cezanne, Morisot , van Gogh, Monet and Toulouse-Lautrec are all represented in Impressionists on Paper , which assembles 77 exhibits to show how the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists transformed art through other media as well as painting. This one runs from November 25 to March 10. November ...
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Black and White -- But Not Much Colour

Frans Hals is one of the three greatest artists of the Dutch Golden Age, along with Rembrandt and Vermeer, and if you go along to  Frans Hals  at the National Gallery in London, you'll understand why, hopefully. He was a master portraitist, who appears to have been able to apply paint to canvas almost without effort and to dazzling effect. That loose brushwork was a huge influence on artists in late 19th-century France. There are about 50 paintings in this exhibition, the first Hals retrospective for several decades, and they're mostly terrific.  And yet.... we found this show oddly underwhelming, surprisingly flat. The pictures are glorious, but the presentation seemed curiously contextless. Nowhere do you get a feel for the society in Holland and Hals's home city of Haarlem that allowed this upsurge in artistic creativity at the start of the 17th century, the bourgeoning capitalism, expanding middle class and economic growth that permitted all these men in up-to-the-min...
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