The Art Exhibitions Blog

Self-portraits; now, we've seen quite a lot of exhibitions of those over the years. You know how Rembrandt or Vincent van Gogh saw themselves. But how do artists depict other artists? What happens when Peter Blake meets David Hockney, when Eric Ravilious takes on Edward Bawden? Answers can be found at the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester in a very interesting and illuminating exhibition entitled  Seeing Each Other: Portraits of Artists .  And sometimes the artist you see is a different artist from the one you might be expecting. When Mary McCartney photographed Tracey Emin in 2000, what came out was Frida Kahlo. McCartney felt a close affinity with the Mexican artist, and so did Emin, whose controversial My Bed had just been shortlisted for the Turner Prize. McCartney said she'd had a daydream of Emin as Kahlo, who spent a lot of time in bed herself as a result of her disabling injuries.  Emin was made up and dressed for the shoot, and then, according to McCartney , "...

When the Louvre put on a huge retrospective of the genre of still life in 2022-23, there were only five works by British artists on show out of a total of nearly 170. Brits don't do still life? Wrong, as shown in  The Shape of Things: Still Life in Britain at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, with some 140 artworks. Some are beautiful, some are arresting, some are utterly surprising; one or two are downright weird. Boring? Not these still lifes.  The show starts off traditionally enough, with paintings from the 17th and 18th centuries, some the work of immigrant artists from the Low Countries, but some home-grown: Right here in Chichester, the three Smith Brothers were among the earliest English artists to specialise in still lifes, and here you can see the work of the eldest, William, with a choice array of fruit , and of George, with as English a theme as you could get, a joint of beef .  The second room takes us into the start of the 20th century, where the e...

Portraits of Dogs: From Gainsborough to Hockney  -- now that's a very good notion for an exhibition in dog-loving Britain. In reality, however.... The Wallace Collection in London has borrowed more than 50 works to put its idea into practice. Unfortunately, a good quarter of those are by Sir Edwin Landseer. So, if you really like twee, gooey, unsubtle 19th-century paintings of dogs pretending to be people or populating Queen Victoria's sitting room, you'll love it. Now, it's not as if Landseer -- creator of The Monarch of the Glen -- wasn't a highly skilled artist with a deep understanding of animal anatomy and behaviour. It's just that he produced loads of mawkish kitsch , presumably because that was what his sentimental Victorian patrons wanted. And there are a dozen of those Landseers here, coming at you round every corner .  But then there's also this Landseer:  A Saluki Dog .  The Saluki , prized by the hunters of the Middle East, with a long history (...

Summer's almost here, and it's perhaps the time for outdoor pleasures; there certainly aren't that many big exhibitions to tell you about in June. So let's start with a small one, a free display at London's National Gallery. Picasso Ingres: Face to Face , running from June 3 to October 9, brings together for the first time Pablo Picasso's 1932 painting Woman with a Book , from the Norton Simon Museum in California, and the work that inspired it, the National's own Madame Moitessier by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Picasso saw the Ingres portrait in 1921 and was enthralled by it. "Lesser artists borrow," Picasso said. "Great artists steal."  Summer means the seaside, so what better destination to see an exhibition than the Towner in Eastbourne. Following 2021's superb John Nash retrospective, this year's big event puts the spotlight on the pioneering female collector who opened the Wertheim Gallery in London in 1930 and the arti...

Work, work, work, of course. It was Thomas Edison who said genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration, and for every artist's light-bulb moment, there'll be a lot of hours sitting in the studio.     A Century of the Artist's Studio: 1920-2020  at the Whitechapel Gallery in east London takes us to a hundred of those studios to witness the hard labour of the creative process in an ambitious and often fun exhibition.  "Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday...." intone the voices in the video From March to April.... 2020 by the Dubai-based Ramin and Rokni Haerizadeh and Hesam Rahmanian. Tehching Hsieh took it further.  One-Year Performance saw him clocking on daily. In Darren Almond's A Real Time Piece nothing disturbs the eerie quiet of the artist's empty studio apart from the loud thwock once a minute of the changing display of the mechanical digital clock on the wall. In this other piece by Almond there's not a sound to be heard, but if the...

There are an awful lot of new shows to talk about this month, particularly in London, and one that looks set to be a crowd-puller is Gauguin Portraits at the National Gallery. It's the first ever exhibition devoted to the portraits of Paul Gauguin and aims to demonstrate how he revolutionised the genre. There are more than 50 works, including high-profile loans from around Europe and North America, but ticket prices (£24 on the door at weekends) are £6 higher than for the recent Sorolla show and £2 up on last year's Monet blockbuster. October 7 to January 26. Dulwich Picture Gallery is marking the 350th anniversary of Rembrandt's death with Rembrandt's Light , an exhibition designed to showcase the artist's mastery of light and shadow and focusing on his middle period. It will have around 35 works, including some never seen in the UK before, and runs from October 4 to February 2. The recent show at the Foundling Museum showed just how much meaning William ...

As you might expect, there's a fair bit of both Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon in All Too Human: Bacon, Freud and a Century of Painting Life at Tate Britain in London. But we've had quite a lot of both these big names on show recently, so you might get more out of it discovering something different from other artists in this exhibition. The premise, according to the Tate, is that the show "celebrates the painters in Britain who strove to represent human figures, their relationships and surroundings in the most intimate of ways." There's a certain feeling, though, that this show is made up of a number of disparate bits that don't quite hang together. And you wonder how David Hockney doesn't get a look-in in a survey of the last century of British figurative painting. The period before 1945 gets fairly short shrift as well, knocked off quickly in the first of 11 rooms. There are two Stanley Spencers on each side of the entrance door, both of his second ...