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Ways of Seeing

It's bright, it's bold and it's big; everyday items in garish colours and impossible proportions. It's unmistakably a Michael Craig-Martin.   There's plenty of this in  Michael Craig-Martin  at the Royal Academy in London, the images you're possibly accustomed to. But there's more as well, some of it very intriguing, some of it a bit over the top.   And if you don't know much about the history of this Irish-born artist, it's the very first room that you'll find most surprising. We did. Because before Craig-Martin started on all this, he was a conceptual artist. Or should that be a Conceptual Artist? Either way, no need to shudder in horror. This early work is thought-provoking. And quite humorous.   The first exhibit is Craig-Martin's most famous from his conceptual period. Or perhaps most notorious.  An Oak Tree from 1973 is a glass of water on a shelf, accompanied by a Q&A. Craig-Martin tells his questioner that "I've changed
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Opening and Closing in November

We're starting in London this month with a double helping of Renaissance Italy: From November 9, the Royal Academy has Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael: Florence, c. 1504, when the three briefly crossed paths in the Tuscan city. While sculpture and painting feature in this display of more than 40 works, the emphasis appears to be very much on creations on paper, as it is in Drawing the Italian Renaissance at the King's Gallery, which opens on November 1. This show, which also includes Titian, promises the widest range of drawings dating from around 1450 to 1600 ever to be displayed in the UK, with about 160 by more than 80 artists. The RA exhibition closes February 16, that in the King's Gallery on March 9. 
As the Renaissance in southern Europe was coming to an end, a new Golden Age was starting in India, that of the Mughal Emperors. The Great Mughals: Art, Architecture and Opulence at the Victoria and Albert Museum will display paintings, jewellery, clothing and more from the period between 1560 and 1660 under the most famous Mughal rulers -- Akbar, Jahangir and Shah Jahan, who commissioned the Taj Mahal. On from November 9 to May 5. 

At the William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow, they'll be exploring how some of Morris's best-known designs were directly inspired by the intricate ornamentation of Islamic art. With more than 60 works, William Morris & Art from the Islamic World will run from November 9 to March 9. Admission free. 

Back in 2019, we went to the Fry Gallery in Saffron Walden to see a small but delightful show about Tirzah Garwood and her husband Eric, better known as Mr and Mrs Ravilious. Tirzah is now, for the first time, getting the full retrospective treatment at Dulwich Picture Gallery from November 19 to May 26. Tirzah Garwood: Beyond Ravilious will feature more than 80 of her works, including almost all her extant sometimes fantastical oil paintings, as well as her witty and intriguing early engravings. 
Pallant House Gallery in Chichester is staging the first major exhibition in almost three decades of the work of Dora Carrington, who was associated with the Bloomsbury Group but neglected in her lifetime and who committed suicide at the age of only 38. Bringing together more than 100 works by the artist and her contemporaries and looking at her relationships with Mark Gertler and Lytton Strachey, among others, Dora Carrington: Beyond Bloomsbury is on from November 9 to April 27. 

And in that most Bloomsbury of locations, Charleston Farmhouse in East Sussex, November 16 sees the opening of Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines: A Radical Art School. Running until February 23, the exhibition of over 80 pieces reflects the careers of the couple who set up the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing in 1937 and of their star pupils Lucian Freud and Maggi Hambling. We've written about Morris, perhaps best known for his flower paintings, previously on the blog.  

If you were looking for an exhibition to mark Surrealism's centenary, you might not be expecting to head to Yorkshire, but the Hepworth in Wakefield has a big show on. From November 23 to April 21, Forbidden Territories: 100 Years of Surreal Landscapes will bring together over 100 works by many big names: Salvador Dalí, Eileen Agar, Max Ernst, Leonora Carrington and Ithell Colquhoun. And, of course, René Magritte (yes, a Magritte from Norwich; how surreal is that?).
Off to Frankfurt now, and back to the Dutch Golden Age. Or was it really? Rembrandt's Amsterdam: Golden Times? at the Städel Museum tries to dig below the surface sheen to examine the inequality in what was then the world's most flourishing economy. Some 100 works of art by Rembrandt, of course, as well as his contemporaries including Ferdinand Bol, Govert Flinck and Bartholomeus van der Helst can be seen from November 27 to March 23. 

More Dutch art, this time taking us from the end of the Golden Age into the 18th century, but in this case it's a female painter to the fore, and one of the most renowned creators of floral still lifes. Rachel Ruysch: Nature into Art at the Alte Pinakothek in Munich is the first exhibition devoted to an artist who was in great demand in her lifetime. On from November 26 to March 16, and then moving on to the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio in April and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in August. 

A more recent female artist -- this time a German -- comes under the spotlight at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid. Gabriele Münter: The Great Expressionist Woman Painter has more than 100 exhibits to explore the career of one of the founding members of the Blue Rider group. The show runs from November 12 to February 9, and then in April what appears to be an expanded version of the exhibition opens at the Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris.

Last chance to see....

November 3 is the last day at Dulwich Picture Gallery for Yoshida: Three Generations of Japanese Printmaking, notable for the early 20th-century prints that fused Western and Japanese influences by the founder of the dynasty, Hiroshi Yoshida, and for the later, more abstract designs of his elder son Tōshi. 
And also ending November 3 at the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin is Frans Hals: Master of the Fleeting Moment. We love Hals, but when we saw the first iteration of this exhibition at London's National Gallery last year, we found the presentation dull. We've heard that the Germans did it better....

Images

Raphael (1483-1520), The Three Graces, c. 1517-18. © Royal Collection Enterprises Limited 2024/Royal Collection Trust
Tirzah Garwood (1908-1951), Train Journey, 1929, Private collection
René Magritte (1898-1967), La Condition Humaine, 1935, Norwich Museum and Art Gallery (Norfolk Museum Service). © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 
Gabriele Münter (1877-1962), Still Life on the Tram (After Shopping), 1909-12, The Gabriele Münter and Johannes Eichner Foundation, Munich. © Gabriele Münter, VEGAP, Madrid 2024
Tōshi Yoshida (1911-1995), Bruges, 1955, Fukuoka Art Museum

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