The Art Exhibitions Blog

So, here's a weird thing:  Hockney's Eye at Teylers Museum in Haarlem isn't an easy exhibition. In fact, you have to think quite hard and look closely to get your head round David Hockney's exploration of different perspectives in art, alternative ways of seeing. But it is an extremely enjoyable and rewarding experience.  We didn't get to visit this show when it was on at the Fitzwilliam Museum and the Heong Gallery in Cambridge earlier this year, but we jumped at the chance during an autumn visit to the Netherlands to explore what looks to be a rather smaller version. It was worth the wait.  If you're hoping for classic 1960s and 70s Hockney like A Bigger Splash or Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy , you've come to the wrong exhibition. To be sure, there's a very jolly Self-Portrait from last year of the artist in flat cap and garish check suit, poised with his brush, as you come in, but seeing becomes far less straightforward quite quickly.  Take  Viewers ...

Painters are such liars. Well, some of them, anyway. Take Jean-Léon Gérôme, a French 19th-century artist who travelled extensively to Egypt and rendered on canvas the exoticism of the Orient for a western audience.  Snake Charmer is so lovingly detailed, so meticulously painted, it must be true. Except it's complete tosh, an utter fabrication. In a Muslim society, a small boy was never going to be performing naked in public. Why does he look like an antique statue, anyway? How has this motley audience come together in this rather splendid interior? And hang on, these turquoise tile panels are from Turkey, not Egypt.... from the Topkapi Palace in Constantinople, except that Gérôme has reassembled them in a completely different way. The picture is from Oriental Visions: From Dreams into Light , a fascinating exhibition at the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris that looks at how European (mostly French) painters were stimulated, initially by fantasies of the East, and then later b...