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Showing posts from October, 2023

Opening and Closing in May

Which Japanese artist had the greatest influence on the West at the end of the 19th century? Perhaps not so much Katsushika Hokusai , despite The Great Wave ; maybe more Utagawa Hiroshige, four decades younger and the last great exponent of the ukiyo-e tradition, with his stunningly framed landscapes. From May 1, you have the chance at the British Museum in London to experience Horoshige's world, which ended just as Japan started to open up to the outside. Featuring a large body of work from a major US collection,  Hiroshige: Artist of the Open Road  is on until September 7. And also at the British Museum, a second new exhibition explores the origins of Hindu, Jain and Buddhist sacred art, going back at least 2,000 years. More than 180 objects from the museum's collection as well as items on loan will be on display.  Ancient India: Living Traditions  runs from May 22 to October 19.  If you enjoyed the colour and swagger of the John Singer Sargent show at Tate ...
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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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