Category: Exhibitions

Forbidden Fruit: Female Still Life at Colnaghi

March 1 2022

Image of Forbidden Fruit: Female Still Life at Colnaghi

Picture: Colnaghi

Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:

The dealers Colnaghi will be opening their latest old masters selling exhibition in April. This year's theme looks to be a very interesting one indeed, as it is dedicated to still lifes by female artists.

According to the company's press release:

COLNAGHI London presents a tantalising new exhibition devoted to female still life, the highlight of which is a spatially complex painting by the mannerist artist, Fede Galizia (pictured). An important rediscovery by Colnaghi, the work contributes to the reconstruction of Galizia’s corpus in her enigmatic final years. Forbidden Fruit: Female Still Life will include other rare works by Giovanna Garzoni, painter to the Medicis and one of the first women to practice the art of still life, as well as the only known painting by Caterina Angela Pierozzi, protégée of Grand Duchess Vittoria della Rovere. The exhibition will also feature the last painting by the hand of acclaimed Dutch botanical artist, Rachel Ruysch.

Open at Colnaghi London from April 27 through June 24, 2022, Forbidden Fruit builds upon Colnaghi's mission to spearhead new trends in art collecting, bringing the finest works in often overlooked categories to a new audience. This presentation includes work from the Renaissance to Baroque periods by: Giovanna Garzoni, Fede Galizia, Judith Leyster, Clara Peeters, Caterina Angela Pierozzi, Elisabetta Marchioni, Rachel Ruysch and others.

Superbarocco set to open in Rome!

March 1 2022

Image of Superbarocco set to open in Rome!

Picture: ansa.it

Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:

The Rome leg of the previously cancelled Genoese baroque exhibition is set to open this month. Superbarocco. Arte a Genova da Rubens a Magnasco will feature no fewer than 120 works produced in Genoa between the years 1600 and 1750.

The exhibition will be held in Rome's Scuderie del Quirinale between 26th March 2022 until 3rd July 2022.

The English exhibition catalogue can already be purchased here.

Painted Femininity in the Museo Campano di Capua

February 28 2022

Image of Painted Femininity in the Museo Campano di Capua

Picture: ansa.it

Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:

Italy's latest exhibition focusing on female inspired subjects has just opened in the recently renovated Museo Campano di Capua, situated just north of Naples. La femminilità dipinta features 30 works from the seventeenth to twenty-first centuries which focuses on various themes of feminine representations. Artists featured within the show include the likes of Luca Giordano, Filippo Vitale, Antiveduto Gramatica, Marco Pino da Siena, Polidoro da Lanciano, Pedro Nunez del Valle, Francesco Guarini, Francesco Solimena, Modigliani, Mimmo Rotella, Fernando Botero, Andy Warhol and Pablo Picasso. The show will run until 1st May 2022.

'Renoir: Rococo Revival' in Frankfurt

February 28 2022

Image of 'Renoir: Rococo Revival' in Frankfurt

Picture: Städel Museum

Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:

The Städel Museum in Frankfurt will be opening their latest exhibition on Wednesday. Renoir Rococo Revival explores the connections between French impressionism and eighteenth-century rococo art and will feature no fewer than 120 paintings (!)

According to the museum's website:

Whereas Rococo painting was considered frivolous and immoral after the French Revolution, it underwent a revival in the nineteenth century and was widely visible in Renoir’s lifetime. Having trained as a porcelain painter, he was also intimately acquainted with the imagery of artists such as Antoine Watteau, Baptiste Siméon Chardin, François Boucher and Jean-Honoré Fragonard. He shared the Rococo’s predilection for certain subjects, among them promenaders in the park and on the riverbank, moments of repose in the outdoors, and the garden party. Renoir also frequently devoted himself to the depiction of domestic scenes and family life as well as intimate moments such as bathing, reading or making music. Yet he not only took orientation from the motifs of the Rococo, but also particularly admired its loose and sketchy manner of painting as well as its brilliant palette, aspects that would have a formative influence on him and many other artists in the Impressionist circle. 

Trenchant juxtapositions of Renoir’s art with works of the eighteenth century as well as his own contemporaries – Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, Claude Monet and Berthe Morisot – will provide an overview of Impressionism’s intense artistic examination of the Rococo. 

The exhibition will show a total of some 120 outstanding paintings, works on paper and handcrafted objects from international museums such as the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the National Gallery in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, as well as private collections.

The show will run from 2nd March 2022 until 19th June 2022.

Le décor impressionniste at the Musée de l'Orangerie

February 28 2022

Video: Musée de l'Orangerie

Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:

Another exhibition that is opening on Wednesday is the Musée de l'Orangerie's show entitled Le décor impressionniste: Aux sources des Nymphéas. As the name of the exhibition suggests, it aims to show the relationship the Impressionists had with notions of the 'decorative' in art.

The exhibition will run from 2nd March 2022 until 11th July 2022.

The Tudors at the MET in October

February 27 2022

Image of The Tudors at the MET in October

Picture: MET

Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:

Here is some news that is bound to stir the excitement of Tudor fans worldwide.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York have revealed that they will be putting on a significant sixteenth-century English art exhibition in the autumn. The Tudors: Art and Majesty in Renaissance England is scheduled to run from 10th October 2022 until 8th January 2023. 

According to the museum's website:

England under the volatile Tudor dynasty was a thriving home for the arts. An international community of artists and merchants, many of them religious refugees, navigated the high-stakes demands of royal patrons, including England’s first two reigning queens. Against the backdrop of shifting political relationships with mainland Europe, Tudor artistic patronage legitimized, promoted, and stabilized a series of tumultuous reigns, from Henry VII’s seizure of the throne in 1485 to the death of his granddaughter Elizabeth I in 1603. The Tudor courts were truly cosmopolitan, boasting the work of Florentine sculptors, German painters, Flemish weavers, and Europe’s best armorers, goldsmiths, and printers, while also contributing to the emergence of a distinctly English style. This exhibition will trace the transformation of the arts in Tudor England through more than 100 objects—including iconic portraits, spectacular tapestries, manuscripts, sculpture, and armor—from both The Met collection and international lenders.

The exhibition is organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Cleveland Museum of Art, in collaboration with the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

A Private Tour of Musée des Beaux-Arts de Tours's Coypel Exhibition

February 27 2022

Video: Scribe Accroupi

Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:

Here's a very interesting video tour (in French) of the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Tours's ongoing exhibition entitled Le Théâtre de Troie. Antoine Coypel, d'Homère à Virgile. The show will run until 18th April 2022.

The Port of Cork Collection on display in Cork

February 25 2022

Image of The Port of Cork Collection on display in Cork

Picture: @crawfordartgall

Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:

The Crawford Art Gallery in Cork, Ireland, will be opening a new display tomorrow dedicated to a collection of 17 maritime painting the gallery was gifted in November 2021. It seems that the collection had been amassed by the company in charge of the city's Port, a site which has a long and rich history.

According to the gallery's website:

This significant collection consists of 17 maritime paintings, a ship’s register (1912) from The Cork Harbour Commissioners referencing both the Titanic and Lusitania, an illuminated address to Charles Stewart Parnell (1846-1891), and a silver Admiralty Oar from 1686. 

Now visitors will have the opportunity to encounter a selection of paintings from the Port of Cork collection, including works by George Mounsey Wheatley Atkinson (1806-1884), Henry Albert Hartland (1840-1893), Robert Lowe Stopford (1813-1898), and Seán Keating (1889-1977).  Although not attending to certain social or political realities of late nineteenth-century Ireland, these artworks do act as a visual reminder of that time.

They also underscore Cork Harbour's links with empire, its international significance for commerce and trade, and ever-present story of migration. Glimpses of half-remembered histories are framed within these heritage views of Cork Harbour. Each artist provides an insight into the Port of Cork's operations, from Atkinson's extraordinary rendering of naval vessels to Hartland and Stopford's depictions of commercial shipping and leisure craft. Perhaps unexpectedly, Keating's elevated View of the Port of Cork draws us into Cork City itself and remembers the busy working quays of recent memory.

'Rembrandt' in Mexico

February 25 2022

Image of 'Rembrandt' in Mexico

Picture: eldiario.es

Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:

Here's an interesting story. The Museo Nacional De Arte MUNAL in Mexico City have just opened a small exhibition partly dedicated to the following Rembrandt. The picture, which is said to depict Hendrickje Stoffels as Pallas Athene, has been loaned from a private European Collection. It of course shows a correspondence with the Pallas Athene now in the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon (formerly in the collection of Catherine the Great of Russia, as it happens).

Alas, I can't find out much about the picture and its history from a casual search of the RKD etc. However, the work was recently exhibited in Augsburg in a show called (from the German translation) Rembrandt: The Teacher, where the work was described as "recently attributed to him." If any readers might have a reference for the picture, I'd be glad to hear of it.

Update - A few readers have kindly been in touch to share details of the catalogue notes from the Augsburg and Aalen exhibitions. It seems the picture was noted in Werner Sumowski's publications on Rembrandt and his school. The catalogue notes also suggest that the picture might well be the Pallas Athene recorded in 1678 inventory of Rembrandt's creditor Herman Becker. Details about the condition of the picture are also revealed, including the fact that the painting seems to have significantly cut down on all sides. Do find yourself a copy of the exhibition catalogues if you'd like to read more.

Modern Pre Raphaelite Visionaries in Leamington Spa

February 24 2022

Image of Modern Pre Raphaelite Visionaries in Leamington Spa

Picture: Leamington Spa Art Gallery & Museum

Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:

The Leamington Spa Art Gallery & Museum have won a significant grant from the Weston Loan Programme (with the Art Fund) for their upcoming exhibition Modern Pre Raphaelite Visionaries.

According to the exhibition's blurb:

Our summer blockbuster exhibition offers you the chance to rediscover a host of 'forgotten' British artists working at the turn of the twentieth century, including Frederick Cayley Robinson (pictured), Evelyn Pickering de Morgan and Charles Ricketts. These artists sought to understand their place in the changing modern world by re-examining the nostalgic and romantic art of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The exhibition is a rare opportunity to see the Gallery's important collection of Modern Pre-Raphaelite artwork in the context of significant loans from around the country including works from Tate, the British Museum, the Fitzwilliam Museum, Manchester Art Gallery and many more.

The show is scheduled to run between 13th May 2022 until 18th September 2022.

Art of the Celebrations of the Valois Court

February 24 2022

Image of Art of the Celebrations of the Valois Court

Picture: chateaudefontainebleau.fr

Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:

The Château de Fontainebleau will be opening their rescheduled exhibition L’art de la fête à la cour des Valois on 10th April 2022. Featuring a vast set of loans from the likes of the Uffizi Gallery, the Pitti Place and the MET in New York, the exhibition will focus on court festivities held during the reigns of Francis I until Henry III. Objects on display will include paintings, drawings, tapestries, parade weapons, costume and set designs and commemorative booklets.

The show will run from 10th April 2022 until 4th July 2022.

Murillo: Picturing the Prodigal Son

February 22 2022

Image of Murillo: Picturing the Prodigal Son

Picture: The National Gallery of Ireland

Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:

The Meadows Museum in Dallas, Texas, have just opened a new exhibition reuniting Murillo's six canvases representing scenes from the parable of the Prodigal Son. Murillo: Picturing the Prodigal Son, which had previously been on display at the Prado last year, will be at the Meadows Museum of Art between 20th February 2022 and 12th June 2022.

According to the museum's website:

Murillo skillfully embellished the narrative, conveying the story’s themes of virtue and vice, regret and forgiveness, through the figures’ dramatic gestures and facial expressions. Each composition is at once singular and dynamic despite its preservation of narrative continuity. It is therefore all the more remarkable that the series has remained intact, the only by Murillo to be so, despite changing hands many times since its creation during one of the artist’s more prolific decades. Since 1987, the paintings have been in the collection of the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin. 

In 2022, all six canvases will travel to the United States for the first time to be featured at the Meadows Museum, their only venue in this country. Marking the Meadows’s first collaboration with the National Gallery of Ireland, Picturing the Prodigal Son was inspired by the recent conservation work and the extensive technical analysis of the canvases carried out in Dublin, which has highlighted the beauty of Murillo’s technique and revealed new insights into his working method at a critical point in his career. The exhibition therefore marks a rare opportunity for American audiences to view an important painting series by Murillo in its entirety, just as it was created to be seen. As the largest repository of paintings by Murillo in the United States, the Meadows Museum is the ideal venue to exclusively present Murillo: Picturing the Prodigal Son.

Large Hugo van der Goes Exhibition in Berlin for 2023

February 22 2022

Image of Large Hugo van der Goes Exhibition in Berlin for 2023

Picture: Berlin Gemäldegalerie

Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:

The Berlin Gemäldegalerie is planning a significant exhibition on Hugo van der Goes (ca. 1440–1482) for next year. The show will contain major loans from across the world alongside their own two monumental altarpieces by the artist.

According to the gallery's website:

While recent decades have seen exhibitions showcasing the work of almost all the major Netherlandish painters of the 15th and 16th centuries, Hugo van der Goes has been largely neglected. This is mainly due to the rarity of his works and their often impressive dimensions. Two of these large-format paintings are housed by the Gemäldegalerie, which is why this museum’s collection lends itself to a monographic show like no other. The two monumental Berlin panels, the Monforte Altarpiece (ca. 1470) and The Nativity (ca. 1480), will play a central role in the exhibition. Over the course of the past 12 years, both works have undergone extensive restoration work. Today, they exhibit a vibrancy that was previously unimaginable. 

These two paintings will be joined by numerous important loans from European and American collections. The exhibition will provide viewers with the opportunity to compare the majority of this master’s preserved oeuvre for the very first time. Next to paintings on wood and canvas, a number of drawings offer a deeper insight into the production of this artist.

The exhibition has been scheduled to run from 31st March 2023 until 16th July 2023.

Face to Face: Picasso and the Old Masters in Málaga

February 22 2022

Image of Face to Face: Picasso and the Old Masters in Málaga

Picture: Picasso Museum Málaga

Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:

The Picasso Museum Málaga have opened their latest exhibition today entitled Face to Face: Picasso and the Old Masters.

According to the museum's website:

From 22nd February until 26th June 2022, visitors to the Museo Picasso Málaga will have a unique opportunity to discover the links between Pablo Picasso and leading artists of the past. The MPM will be hosting Face to Face. Picasso and the Old Masters, an exhibition, jointly organized with Museo de Bellas Artes de Sevilla, in which paintings by El Greco, Francisco Pacheco, Giovanni Battista Caracciolo, Francisco de Zurbarán, Cornelius Norbertus Gijsbretchs, Bernardo Lorente Germán and Diego Bejarano will be hung alongside major works by Pablo Picasso. 

Face to Face. Picasso and the Old Masters presents paintings from the Museo de Bellas Artes de Sevilla’s remarkable collection of Spanish and other European Masters opposite nine important works by Picasso belonging to the Fundación Almine y Bernard Picasso para el Arte (FABA).

...

These pairings not only enable viewers to make specific comparisons between the work of Picasso and the Masters in order to understand how deeply Picasso’s art was rooted in Spanish traditions. The juxtapositions also allow us to discern how he transformed these traditions into the revolutionary art of the 20th century. 

18 Officers on Display

February 21 2022

Image of 18 Officers on Display

Picture: Facebook via. Jeroen Punt

Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:

The Museum de Tiid in Bolsward, the Netherlands, have just opened a special exhibition focusing on 18 portraits of officers who served in a Frisian regiment against the Spanish during the Eighty Years' War. It is believed that the set may have been commissioned by Hendrik Casimir I of Nassau or the Frisian States, with artist Wybrand de Geest having produced a number of them.

Paintings on Stone to open (finally) in St. Louis

February 18 2022

Video: Saint Louis Art Museum

Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:

The Saint Louis Art Museum will finally be opening their much-delayed exhibition Paintings on Stone: Science and the Sacred 1530-1800 over the weekend.

According to the museum's website:

In 2000 the Saint Louis Art Museum purchased Cavaliere d’Arpino’s Perseus Rescuing Andromeda, an exceptional painting on lapis lazuli. The acquisition of the small, stunning work of art spurred extensive research that culminates in Paintings on Stone: Science and the Sacred 1530–1800, the first systematic examination of the pan-European practice of this unusual and little-studied artistic tradition. 

By 1530 Italian artists had begun to paint portraits and sacred images on stone. At first artists used slate and marble. By the last decades of the 16th century, the repertoire expanded, eventually including alabaster, lapis lazuli, onyx, jasper, agate, and amethyst. In addition to demonstrating the beauty of these works, Paintings on Stone explains why artists began using stone supports and the role that stone played in the meaning of these endeavors. 

Bringing together more than 70 examples by 58 artists, Paintings on Stone represents major centers of stone painting and features 34 different stones, nearly the full range that were used.

The show will run from 20th February 2022 until 15th May 2022.

The Duke of Bedford's Canalettos head to Greenwich

February 16 2022

Image of The Duke of Bedford's Canalettos head to Greenwich

Picture: Woburn Abbey

Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:

Brilliant news for those of us who didn't get the chance to visit Bath last year. The Duke of Bedford's Canalettos will be heading to the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich later in Spring. This outstanding set of 24 Venetian views by the artist will be exhibited for the public in gallery conditions whilst the Duke's ancestral home Woburn Abbey is being refurbished.

The exhibition will run from 1st April until 25th September 2022.

Saved Art Treasures in Minsk

February 11 2022

Image of Saved Art Treasures in Minsk

Picture: artmuseum.by

Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:

Apologies for being rather late to this. A rather interesting exhibition at the Belarusian National Arts Museum in Minsk will be closing this weekend. Saved Art Treasures is a show highlighting several dozens of works (mostly icons) that have been restored by the museum since 2010. The artworks, largely dating from the seventeenth to twentieth centuries, were discovered in the abandoned attics of churches, bell towers, church cellars and other such places.

For any readers who might be in Minsk at the weekend, the exhibition closes on 13th February 2022.

Inspiring Walt Disney at the Wallace Collection

February 9 2022

Image of Inspiring Walt Disney at the Wallace Collection

Picture: The Wallace Collection / Disney

Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:

Following on from their incredibly successful collaboration with shoe-designer Manolo Blahník, The Wallace Collection in London will be launching their latest decorative arts exhibition in April. Inspiring Walt Disney: The Animation of French Decorative Arts will run from 6th April 2022 until 16th October 2022. The show has been organised in collaboration with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

According to the museum's website:

Inspiring Walt Disney: The Animation of French Decorative Arts displays American 20th-century hand-drawn animation alongside French 18th-century art to reveal the surprising and enchanting connections between these two artistic movements. 

Drawing on the outstanding artworks of the Wallace Collection and spectacular international loans, the exhibition will highlight the exceptional talent and innovation of both Walt Disney Animation Studios artists and the creative pioneers of the French 18th century. Although separated by two centuries, the artists, craftspeople and animators all had the same ambition – to breathe life, character, and charm into the inanimate.

It will be very interesting to see how successful this collaboration will be in bringing new audiences to this treasure box, which is after all only a few minutes walk from Oxford Street.

The Blue Boy is Back!

February 4 2022

Video: The National Gallery

Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:

Just in case you haven't heard, Thomas Gainsborough's The Blue Boy has returned to London 100 years after it was sold and shipped off to America. The National Gallery have made this short video with curator Christine Riding giving her own view on the significance of the painting. I've also listened to Tudor and constitutional historian Dr David Starkey's own take on the portrait, which makes a lot more of the connotations of the Van Dyke dress and English identity.

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