Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from February, 2025

Opening and Closing in August

Jean-François Millet -- one of the most influential artists of the 19th century with his depictions of toiling country folk -- is the subject of a free exhibition in just one room at London's National Gallery that opens on August 7. Millet: Life on the Land  mainly features work from British museums, but has a star attraction in the shape of  L’Angélus from the Musée d'Orsay. On until October 19.  In eastern Germany, Chemnitz is one of this year's European capitals of culture, and one of the major exhibitions on their programme starts on August 10. Edvard Munch -- Angst  in the Kunstsammlungen am Theaterplatz will recall, in part, a visit by Munch to Chemnitz 120 years ago. And, of course, there'll be a version of The Scream . Until November 2.  On the other side of the country, a rather different offering at the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn: an exhibition devoted to the German filmmaker Wim Wenders, creator of Wings of Desire and Paris, Texas , and marking his 8...

Subscribe to updates

Opening in March

We'll start off this month by going back to Tuscany in the early 14th century, to the beginnings of modern western European painting. Duccio and Simone Martini were among those in the city of Siena reinventing art. There are more than 100 exhibits in  Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300-1350 , which runs from March 8 to June 22 at the National Gallery in London. The show was previously on at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and reviews were generally very good. There's a second show opening later in the month at the National, and it's quite an exotic one, devoted to a 19th-century Mexican artist whose work has not been shown in Britain before.  José María Velasco: A View of Mexico , running from March 29 to August 17, features sweeping landscapes by a painter who was interested not only in the natural world but in the rapid modernisation of his country.  Just around the corner at the National Portrait Gallery, there's a rather more conventional draw:  Edvard Munch ...

Toy Trains and Crocodiles

We went along to  Tirzah Garwood: Beyond Ravilious at Dulwich Picture Gallery expecting to gain most enjoyment from the artist's witty, whimsical early woodcuts and drawings. In fact, rather to our surprise, it was her late paintings and 3-D collages that stole the show: strange, sometimes childlike, sometimes quite sophisticated art, with a touch of the surreal and a great deal of fantasy. And often very joyful, when you consider how the last decade of Garwood's short life was marked by war, death and fatal illness.  That's the decade beyond Ravilious; her first husband, Eric, died in a plane crash while working as a war artist in 1942. It's only in recent years that Tirzah's own art has started to draw attention; we first came across her in a small show at the Fry Art Gallery in Saffron Walden back in 2019. This exhibition in south-east London is a much bigger, more comprehensive affair. And one that's been drawing crowds; we arrived at 1200 on a Tuesday and...