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Showing posts from November, 2024

Tales of the Unexpected in Southampton

There are some familiar names and familiar paintings in  Art Then! British Painting, Sculpture and Drawing, 1910-1960 at Southampton City Art Gallery, but it's the unfamiliar that makes it especially worth the trip to a venue you might not normally consider for an exhibition. This show provides an excellent overview of art trends in this country in the first half of the 20th century. And it's free!  Southampton has a very good collection, but we often get the feeling that a lot of interesting works are in store behind closed doors. Pleasant surprises await when they finally see the light of the day, in this case in combination with a selection from the extensive Ingram Collection of modern British art. In all, there are more than 100 works by over 100 artists, demonstrating how the British reacted to the latest developments in art on the Continent. So let's start with a couple of hidden gems from the Southampton treasure trove, first of all a Landscape that really stoppe...
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Opening and Closing in December

The 17th- and 18th-century Palace of Versailles wasn't just wealth, pomp and opulence; it was also a place where France's kings encouraged and promoted scientific research and innovation. The story will be revealed in Versailles: Science & Splendour at the Science Museum in London from December 12 to April 21, featuring historic objects and art from Versailles and other French collections.  A new free display at the National Gallery focuses on a painting that's going back on show after 10 years of conservation. Parmigianino: The Vision of Saint Jerome  explores a work created by an artist seen by the Pope as another Raphael. December 5 to March 9.  Can you deduce what a pronkstilleven is? It's a Dutch word, and the painting below is the perfect illustration. One of the Golden Age artists who specialised in the genre of sumptuous still lives was Jan Davidsz de Heem; he painted four enormous such scenes that are now being displayed together for the first time ever at...
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Harriet Backer's Northern Light

Near the top of our list of exhibitions we want to go and see: retrospectives of relatively neglected women artists. Also right up there: Nordic painters we would like to learn more about. So it's no surprise we were keen to explore  Harriet Backer (1845-1932): The Music of Colours  at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris.  Backer was Norway's most renowned female painter of the 19th century, if little known outside her homeland. We must have seen her work in the past in the old National Museum in Oslo, but she'll have been one of many unfamiliar names. Now, though, she's getting the full retrospective treatment with a show that's already been seen in the Norwegian capital and in Stockholm.  Backer's paintings are mostly intimate depictions of interiors, both domestic and church. There's a calmness to them, and often a very interesting treatment of light, with Impressionism showing an influence from time she spent in France. One or two of the pictures on show are ...
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Carrington: You've Met Leonora, Now Discover Dora

Carrington: She only wanted to be known by her surname, unwittingly posing a conundrum for art historians, curators and the wider world a century later.  Because it's another somewhat later Carrington, the long-lived Surrealist and totally unrelated, who's recently become Britain's most expensive woman artist. But today we're at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester to see an exhibition not about Leonora but about Dora Carrington. She hated that name Dora -- so Victorian -- but with Leonora so much in the limelight (and the subject of a  recent show at Newlands House in Petworth, just a few miles up the road), the curators at the Pallant didn't have much option, so they've had to call their retrospective  Dora Carrington: Beyond Bloomsbury .  Leonora was a bit of a rebel, as we found out in Petworth. Dora too. But we ought to respect her wish. Carrington, then, has been a bit neglected recently; this is the first show of her works in three decades. And while ther...
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Surreally Real

There's so much Surrealist art in the sprawling  Surrealism  show at the Centre Pompidou in Paris that you're unable to take it all in. When you reel back out into the daylight of the tubular walkway on level 6, high above the square below, you'll struggle to recall everything you've seen. Like a half-remembered dream....  Yes, dreams, forests, monsters, alchemy, the occult, genesis, Alice in Wonderland, all those stimuli on which the Surrealists drew are examined in detail, in a show marking the 100th anniversary of the Surrealist Manifesto. It's overwhelming, an assault on the senses, right from the start. And it's crowded, even more so than the Caillebotte exhibition just across the Seine at the Musée d'Orsay, and that's saying something. We really can't pretend that we took in more than a fraction of the explanations as to why the Surrealists were moved to produce what they did, but what we do recollect are some astonishing works of art. Because...
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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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Caillebotte: This Is Modern Paris

You won't find a single work of art by Gustave Caillebotte in a British public collection. And yet he's one of the key figures in the Impressionist movement, whose 150th anniversary we're celebrating this year. But over in Paris, he's the subject of a big, big exhibition at the Musée d'Orsay; we jumped on the Eurostar to see it, and, even though  Caillebotte: Painting Men   was the most crowded show we'd been to in quite some time, we absolutely adored it.  And let's start with perhaps the pièce de résistance. Even if you don't know Caillebotte at all, you may have seen this image before; there's something about it that encapsulates late 19th-century Paris, with its view of an intersection between the broad new streets pushed through by that radical city-planner, Baron Haussmann, lined by elegant new buildings. This was the modern city, the modern world. Paris Street; Rainy Day : a painting in which there's nothing really happening, and there...
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