Category: Exhibitions
Pier Francesco Foschi given first monograph exhibition in Florence
November 28 2023
Video: Italia7
Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:
News from Florence that the Galleria dell’Accademia have opened the first ever monograph exhibition in Europe dedicated to Pier Francesco Foschi (1502-1567) today. Known primarily as a student of Andrea del Sarto, and a collaborator with Pontormo, the exhibition brings together 40 works or so by the artist alongside paintings by contemporaries.
The exhibition opens today and will run until 10th March 2024.
Johannes Stradanus Conference in Florence
November 28 2023
Picture: niki-florence.org
Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:
It's not too late to sign up to join the upcoming international conference on Johannes Stradanus (1523-1605): A Flemish Artist in Florence in the Age of Exploration being held in Florence in two days time. The conference is free and is also being held online for those not able to travel to the city. The event is being held to coincide with the Museo di Palazzo Vecchio's exhibition on the artist which runs until 18th February 2024.
Dürer Woodcuts at Strawberry Hill House
November 27 2023
Video: Strawberry Hill House & Garden
Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:
Strawberry Hill House & Garden in Twickenham, London, have created the following video to celebrate their current exhibition The Devil is in the Detail: Dürer’s Great Passion and Early Woodcuts from the Schroder Collection. The video follows the artist Elena Greggio in producing a woodcut print from scratch. A very time consuming process indeed, just imagine creating something far more complex!
The show will run until 10th April 2024.
Lorenzo Lotto and Pellegrino Tibaldi in Cuneo
November 27 2023
Video: grp.it
Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:
A new exhibition has opened in Cuneo, Italy, celebrating the nuanced influences between the sixteenth century painters Lorenzo Lotto and Pellegrino Tibaldi, a subject which has only recently been investigated. The highlight appears to be the display of the seven canvases which form the so-called 'Lauretan cycle', which were completed for Chapel of the Choir of the church of Santa Maria di Loreto.
This show at the city's Complesso Monumentale di San Francesco will run until 17th March 2024.
Alexandre-Jean Dubois-Drahonet (1790-1834), a newfound talent
November 21 2023
Picture: Musée Lambinet
Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:
The Musée Lambinet in Versailles will be opening a new exhibition this week dedicated to the little-known portrait painter Alexandre-Jean Dubois-Drahonet (1790-1834). The exhibition, the first ever dedicated to the artist, will feature a wide range of his portraits including military figures and members of the Royal family.
The show will run from 25th November 2023 until 25th February 2024.
Compare Liotard's Pastel and Oils at the National Gallery
November 17 2023
Picture: The National Gallery, London
Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:
The National Gallery in London have just opened a small exhibition dedicated to reuniting two versions Liotard's The Lavergne Family Breakfast. Regular readers will remember that the gallery acquired the artist's pastel version back in 2020, and have borrowed his version in oil to allow visitors to compare the two.
According to the blurb from the website:
Long regarded as his masterpiece, The Lavergne Family Breakfast is one of Liotard’s largest and most ambitious works in pastel. Despite the medium’s notorious delicacy, he skilfully reproduces complex textures: the sheen on the metal coffee pot, the shiny ceramic jug, the silky fabrics and reflections, in the black lacquer tray. Liotard was extremely versatile, producing works in pastel, oil, enamel, chalk and even on glass. Highly unusually, he returned to ‘The Lavergne Family Breakfast’ 20 years after he had painted it and made an exact replica in oil.
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Last exhibited in 1754, when Liotard brought the pastel from Lyon to London, and hardly been seen in public since, this exhibition seeks to put Liotard and ‘The Lavergne Family Breakfast’ back in the spotlight.
Six Wives of Henry VIII Exhibition for the NPG in 2024
November 16 2023
Picture: NPG
Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:
The National Portrait Gallery in London has recently announced that it will be putting on an exhibition next year entitled Six Lives: The Stories of Henry VIII’s Queens. Considering the never-ending contemporary interest in this subject, I can imagine it will be a hit.
According to the press release:
Tudor paintings by Hans Holbein the Younger and contemporary photography by Hiroshi Sugimoto meet in the National Portrait Gallery’s first exhibition of historic portraiture since reopening, presenting a study of the lives and afterlives of the six women who married Henry VIII.
Six Lives will chronicle the representation of Katherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves, Katherine Howard and Katherine Parr throughout history and popular culture in the centuries since they lived. As a frequent source of fascination, the stories of the six women has repeatedly inspired writers and artists of all kinds to attempt to uncover the ‘truth’ of their lives: their characters, their appearance and their relationships. From historic paintings, drawings and ephemera, to contemporary photography, costume and film, the exhibition draws upon a wealth of factual and fictional materials to present the life, legacy and portrayal of six women who forever changed the landscape of English history.
The exhibition will open in June 2024.
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As it happens, I find the photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto's portrait series used on the NPG website one of the most cynical forms of 'contemporary art' I've ever seen. I wonder how many people who view these 'artworks' know that the photographer quite simply took some snaps of Madame Tussaud's waxworks of the wives and King on display somewhere, edited out the background, and Voilà printed them out and now they are on display in the NPG? I happen to know this because as a set of them used to be on display at Warwick Castle (where I worked long long ago), a site owned by the same owners of Tussauds who were often handed old unwanted waxworks from the Baker Street museum. I find this sort of art, which anyone could have done with some holiday snaps, entirely hollow.
Rubens and Sculpture in Rome
November 14 2023
Picture: galleriaborghese.beniculturali.it
Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:
The Galleria Borghese in Rome have today opened their last exhibition entitled The touch of Pygmalion. Rubens and sculpture in Rome.
According to the museum's rather winding blurb:
During the seventeenth century Pieter Paul Rubens was considered by his contemporaries, including the French scholar Claude Fabri de Peiresc and some other leading thinkers of the République de Lettres, to be one of the greatest connoisseurs of Roman antiquities.
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Nothing seems to escape his powers of observation and his desire to learn from and interpret the old masters: his drawings make the works he studies vibrant, adding movement and feeling to the gestures and expressions of the characters. Rubens enacts the same process of enlivening the subject in stories that he uses in portraiture: the members of the Gonzaga family emerge enlivened from his brush as their gazes are directed toward the viewer, but the same thing happens with marbles and reliefs and celebrated examples of Renaissance painting. In Rome, with the vestiges of the ancient world, the same thing happens: Rubens draws, in sanguine, then with a red charcoal that returns his color, the famous statue of the Spinario. The drawing, which takes the pose from two different points of view, really seems to be executed by a living model, rather than a statue, so much so that some scholars imagine that the painter used a boy posed in the same way as the statue.
This process of animating the antique, although performed in the first decade of the century, seems to anticipate the moves of the artists who, in the decades following its Roman passage, would come to be called Baroque.
How Rubens’ formal and iconographic insights filter into the rich and varied Roman world of the 1920s is an issue that has not yet been addressed systematically by studies. The presence in the city of painters and sculptors who had had the opportunity to train with him in Antwerp (such as Van Dyck and Georg Petel) or who had already come into contact with his works in the course of their training (such as Duquesnoy and Sandrart) certainly guaranteed the accessibility of his models to a generation of Italian artists, who, no less than the Flemish, had by then become accustomed to confronting the Antique in the light of contemporary pictorial examples and on the basis of a renewed study of Nature. Among them all was Bernini: his Borghese group, made in the 1920s, reread famous ancient statues (the Apollo of Belvedere) to give them movement and translated marble into flesh, as happens in the Rape of Proserpine.
The exhibition will thus measure how much these masterpieces are indebted to Rubensian naturalism, as were certainly other youthful sculptures by the artist, such as the Vatican Charity in the Tomb of Urban VIII, already judged by European travelers of the late eighteenth century to be ‘a Flemish Governess.’
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The exhibition planned for the Galleria Borghese, recovering some of these lines of research, aims to highlight the extraordinary contribution made by Rubens to a new conception of the antique, of the concepts of natural and imitation, on the threshold of the Baroque, focusing on what the disruptive novelty of his style in the first decade in Rome consisted of and how the study of models could be understood as a further possibility of momentum toward a new world of images.
The show will run until 18th February 2024.
Artemisia Exhibition in Genoa
November 13 2023
Picture: palazzoducale.genova.it
Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:
The Palazzo Ducale in Genoa will be opening their latest exhibition this week. Artemisia Coraggio e Passione will examine the painter's life, artistic relationships, and female triumphs. In all, the exhibition will contain 50 works by the master, sourced from collections across Europe.
The show will run until 1st April 2024.
Tiepolo Drawings at The Morgan Library & Museum
November 8 2023
Picture: The Morgan Library & Museum
Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:
The Morgan Library & Museum in New York have just opened their latest Old Master Drawings exhibition. Spirit and Invention: Drawings by Giambattista and Domenico Tiepolo will be an opportunity to open up one the world's largest collections of drawings by both masters, and their events schedule includes lectures, online talks and a concert.
According to the exhibition's blurb:
The Morgan is home to one of the world’s largest and most important collections of drawings by Giambattista Tiepolo (1696–1770) and his eldest son Domenico (1727–1804), with more than 300 representative examples of their lively invention and masterful techniques. Combining highlights from the Morgan’s collection with carefully selected loans, this exhibition will provide a comprehensive look at the Tiepolos’ work as draftsmen, focusing on the role of drawing in their creative process and the distinct physical and stylistic properties of their graphic work. At the core of the collection and exhibition are substantial groups of Giambattista’s drawings that relate to major ceiling fresco projects of the 1740s and 1750s. A fresh look at the style, function, and material properties of these working drawings has yielded new insights into their purposes.
The show will run until 28th January 2024.
Ingenious Women. Women Artists and their Companions
November 7 2023
Picture: buceriuskunstforum.de
Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:
A new exhibition opened in Germany last month dedicated to Ingenious Women. Women Artists and their Companions. The show, which is being housed at the Bucerius Kunst Forum in Hamburg until 28th January 2024, will then travel to the Kunstmuseum in Basel in the spring.
According to the blurb on the website:
The exhibition presents around 30 women artists and 150 works, by artists including works by Sofonisba Anguissola, Judith Leyster, Marietta Robusti (Tintoretto's daughter) and Angelika Kauffmann. Masterful portraits, still lifes and historical scenes in painting, drawing and prints from all over Europe, ranging from the Renaissance and Baroque periods to early Neoclassicism will be brought together in Hamburg. For the first time, works by women artists will be juxtaposed with those of their male colleagues in such a pointed way that both formal and stylistic similarities and differences will come to the fore.
On the Reverse: at the Prado
November 7 2023
Picture: ElPais
Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:
The Prado in Madrid have opened an exhibition today dedicated to examining the reserve of paintings. This includes deciphering the histories of various works of art, and where they may have travelled to and from, but also the interesting decorations and condition issues often hidden when a painting is hung flatly against a wall.
According to the blurb on the museum's website:
This exhibition goes beyond the simple action of turning paintings around. Rather, the Museo del Prado is undertaking a complete reassessment of the backs of works in its collections while also identifying relevant examples in other major museums which reveal how appreciation of works of art is enhanced when we do more than just look at the front. The exhibition addresses issues that have never previously been brought together and in which there is also space for imaginative interpretations: the emergence of the reverse as a pictorial motif in two sub-genres: the self-portrait of the artist behind the canvas and the depiction of the picture back in trompe l’oeil; the poetic reading of the stretcher as a cross; two-sided paintings; the back as a field for experimentation and subjective expression; aesthetic appreciation of the material nature of the works, and the issue of the viewer seen from behind, which makes us aware of the particular spatial relationships that are generated by human interaction with art.
The show will run until 3rd March 2024.
Uffizi sends 50 Venetian Masterpieces to Hong Kong
November 7 2023
Picture: hkcd.com
Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:
The Uffizi Gallery have sent 50 Venetian Masterpieces for a special loan exhibition to the Hong Kong Museum of Art. This special show, which opened last week, features important works by Titian, Giorgione, Tintoretto and Veronese, in a celebration of Venetian art of the sixteenth century.
However, one of my favourite aspects of the exhibition is a multimedia experience (or 'game') organised by the gallery called AI Titian. Using a rather fun-looking set of interactive screens and cameras, visitors are able to transform themselves into a Titian painting, which is then transferred into a screen-image amongst a small-gallery of Venetian works.
In fact, here is the Director of Leisure and Cultural Services Liu Ming-kwong's AI generated portrait:
It seems that AI is finally getting to grips with the complexities of Old Master Paintings.
The show will run until 28th February 2024.
Vallayer-Coster at the Galerie Coatalem
November 6 2023
Picture: La Tribune de l'art
Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:
La Tribune de l'art have reported on news that the Galerie Coatalem in Paris* have a temporary exhibition on at the moment dedicated to Anne Vallayer-Coster. This show, which contains twenty works by the artist, will run until 16th December 2023.
* - The dealers, who are very good at publishing their catalogues online, don't have any details about the show on their website yet alas.
Canaletto in Hull
November 6 2023
Picture: Ferens Art Gallery
Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:
The Ferens Art Gallery in Hull have recently opened a small show dedicated to two Canalettos, one from the gallery's collection and another on loan from the Royal Collection Trust. Canaletto: Two paintings, one perspective invites visitors to compare the works.
According to the gallery's blurb:
From the Royal Collection and the Ferens’ own collection, these works show Venice’s Grand Canal in all its splendour. Created 10 years apart, when seen together they show the development of an artist’s technique and reveal much about Venetian life in the 1700s.
A newly commissioned work by the Ferens’ latest artist in residence will be shown alongside the paintings, connecting the past to the present through the theme of climate change. Canaletto’s A Regatta on the Grand Canal marks the fifth and final loan of exceptional works of art from the Royal Collection to go on display at Ferens Art Gallery as part of the Masterpieces in Focus from the Royal Collection series.
The free show will run until 28th January 2023.
Upcoming in 2024: Rembrandt – Hoogstraten Color and Illusion
November 3 2023
Picture: KHM
Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:
I simply cannot wait for the Kunsthistoriches Museum in Vienna's upcoming autumn 2024 exhibition. Rembrandt – Hoogstraten: Color and Illusion looks to be a very interesting examination of the relationship between these two artists. Any fan of this period will know that several paintings have been flip-flopping between the two artists over the past decades, including examples such as Chicago's Young Woman at an Open Half-Door, which is now called 'Workshop of Rembrandt' on the museum's website.
According to the KHM's blurb:
For the first time, the Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna is presenting an exhibition on the important Baroque painter Rembrandt. Never before has it been possible to admire such a wealth of international loans by the master in Austria. His powerful art left a lasting impression on his gifted pupil Samuel van Hoogstraten. The fascinating interplay between Rembrandt and Hoogstraten is on display in a unique way – you have never seen Rembrandt like this before. Discover around 60 paintings and drawings, and immerse yourself in Dutch Baroque painting. This will be the cultural highlight of 2024.
The show will run from 8th October 2024 until 12th January 2025.
Carlotta Gargalli Exhibition in Bologna
November 2 2023
Picture: ansa.it
Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:
Interesting news from Italy that an exhibition has just opened dedicated to the female artist Carlotta Gargalli (1788-1840). Carlotta was the first lady to be admitted to the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna and painted portraits, mythological and religious works. The exhibition at the Museo Ottocento Bologna, which contains around twenty works or so, will be running until 7th January 2024.
Venezia500 at the Alte Pinakothek
October 27 2023
Picture: Alte Pinakothek
Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:
Munich's Alte Pinakothek latest exhibition opens today. VENEZIA 500:
THE GENTLE REVOLUTION OF VENETIAN PAINTING is a celebration of Venetian painting of the sixteenth century and will feature works by all the big names including Giovanni Bellini, Giorgione, Palma Vecchio, Lorenzo Lotto, Titian and Tintoretto.
According to the museum's website:
The exhibition is devoted to the groundbreaking innovations in Venetian Renaissance painting, with lasting effects that continued to resonate far into European modernism. It presents 15 masterpieces from the Munich collection and around 70 international loans, focusing on portraits and landscapes from the first half of the sixteenth century as the most eloquent examples of the characteristics and achievements of the flourishing Venetian school. The leading masters brought a previously unprecedented intensity to their explorations of the essence of humanity and nature and their interrelations. This explains the attraction and the relevance of these portraits and landscapes, which will be presented in themed groups and in juxtapositions of drawings and sculptures that address the contexts of their creative origins and contemporary readings.
This free (!) show will run until 4th February 2024.
In anticipation of the upcoming Holbein exhibition...
October 26 2023
Picture: Royal Collection Trust
Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:
The Guardian have published its art critic Jonathan Jones's thoughts on a private tour of the Royal Library at Windsor Castle in anticipation of the upcoming Holbein Exhibition at the Queen's Gallery. It seems that he was impressed by the mastery of these artworks and it will be exciting to see how they are presented when the show opens in November!
THE RÉGENCE IN PARIS (1715-1723) at the Musée Carnavalet
October 24 2023
Video: Musée Carnavalet
Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:
The Musée Carnavalet in Paris have just opened an exhibition on the Régence (1715-1723), a period when the cultural life of the capital was flourishing. Judging from photographs it appears to be full of paintings and portraits of the period, including those loaned by major French museums and private collections.
The show will run until 25th February 2024.
