Category: Exhibitions

The exhibition celebrates the fifty years since the acquisition by the Italian State and the seventies since the discovery of the famous painting by Caravaggio Giuditta beheading Holofernes. 

The painting, created in Rome at the beginning of the Seventeenth Century, is kept in Palazzo Barberini. 

A series of masterpieces from all over the world,  including the beautiful Judith and Holofernes by Artemisia Gentileschi,  document the overwhelming novelty triggered by Caravaggio’s work in contemporary painting.

The ‘Creating Constable’ exhibition, explores the work of one of Suffolk’s most famous artists – John Constable and opens at Christchurch Mansion’s Wolsey Art Gallery from 27 November 2021 to 24 April 2022.  The exhibition coincides with the 200th anniversary of The Hay Wain, one of Constable’s most famous works. It is also 200 years since the death of Suffolk artist George Frost, who was Constable’s early mentor.

To mark this significant bicentenary, the ‘Creating Constable’ exhibition explores Constable’s artistic roots, revealing stories about Suffolk artists, family, friends, and early supporters who provided him with the foundations on which his career was built. 

Four early Constable works recently acquired by Ipswich Museums, with support from the Friends of the Ipswich Museums, the Art Fund, and the V&A Purchase Fund, will also be on public display for the first time. The recently discovered artworks were found in a scrapbook compiled by Constable’s relations, the Masons in Colchester, and include a portrait of his brother Abram and early landscapes.

Something unique, indeed in some ways incredible, took place in the mid-16th century in Vicenza. Among the most dynamic areas in Europe for the production and trading of silk, the city, thanks to its increasing wealth, took a gamble on the transformation of its image from a “provincial location”, through avant-garde art and architecture, into a true capital of culture. Cultured and cosmopolitan clients, Vicenza’s nobility believed in the visions of a group of talented, ambitious young artists, who would become famous all over the world. What bound them together was their passion for new art nourished by that of Antiquity, born in the Rome of Michelangelo and Raphael, the art that Vasari was to define as the “modern manner”. It was very clear to the young artists that the resounding strength of this new language would enable them to challenge and undermine the venerated and celebrated masters and their traditional models, which were dominant in Venice at the time. 

It was the genius of the architecture of Andrea Palladio, of the painters Paolo Veronese and Jacopo Bassano and the great sculptor Alessandro Vittoria. 

It is from these premises that this unique exhibition takes its cue, which, by interweaving absolute masterpieces of painting, sculpture and architecture, combined with books, fabrics, precious objects and tapestries, will transport visitors back in time, inside the amazing “factory” of the Renaissance, telling of thirty years of the exceptional artistic life of Vicenza, from 1550 to the inauguration of the Olympic Theatre in 1585.

In a large special exhibition, the Kunstmuseum illuminates the encounter of Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) with the old master El Greco (1541– 1614), born Doménikos Theotokópoulos in Crete. Masterworks by both artists are juxtaposed in some forty pairings, tracing the course of one of the most fascinating dialogues in the history of art. Prestigious loans from across the globe are assembled around a core of Picasso masterworks from the museum’s own collection.

El Greco’s unmistakable painting style won him considerable fame in his day. Soon after his death, however, his work was largely forgotten. It was only around 1900 that an El Greco revival was launched, with Picasso serving on the front lines. His engagement with the Greek-Spanish master not only went far deeper than has previously been assumed but also lasted much longer. El Greco’s influence is just as palpable in Picasso’s works from the 1930s and 1940s as it is in the earlier Cubist paintings. Even at the end of his life, Picasso continued to reference El Greco. Not only does the show open up new perspectives on two towering artists of their times. It also offers fresh insight into their importance as a constellation for the development of avant-garde art in the twentieth century.

The European Old Master Painting Collection at the Bob Jones University Museum & Gallery is one of the largest and most comprehensive of its kind in the United States. This exhibition of more than 60 works of art from the 14th through the 19th centuries reflects the dramatic course of religious, artistic, and cultural history in Western Europe during these formative centuries. While the collection’s greatest strength is Italian Baroque painting, major artists working in Holland, Flanders, France, and Germany are represented by large-scale works of exceptional quality. Highlights include masterpieces by Botticelli, Rubens, Tintoretto, Veronese, Cranach, Murillo, Ribera, van Dyck, and Doré. The exhibition will give visitors a deeper understanding of the mainstream developments in European painting over the course of almost five centuries. Additionally, the exhibition will focus on guiding visitors through the fascinating narrative subjects of these works and their rich symbolism, some of which are now obscure and mysterious.

We owe the rediscovery of Caravaggio's role and legacy to, among others, the eminent Italian art historian Roberto Longhi (1889-1970). His fascination with the Lombardy master and his followers was the staple of his research, beginning with his dissertation defended in 1911 at the University of Turin. Longhi immediately recognised the revolutionary influence of Caravaggio's painting and hailed the artist as the first painter of the modern era. In his Florentine home, the Villa Il Tasso, Roberto Longhi amassed a collection of works by masters of different eras, which were the subject of his studies. Caravaggionists' works gathered around Boy Bitten by a Lizard by Merisi are a major part of this collection. This particular painting dates from Caravaggio's early period in Rome (c. 1596-1597). Caravaggio's very naturalistic treatment of detail and astonishing handling of light convincingly capture the moment when, bitten by a lizard, the frightened youth suddenly withdraws his arm. In addition to Caravaggio's masterpiece, the exhibition includes over 40 paintings by Caravaggio's followers and artists who throughout the 17th century remained under the influence of his original style.

On view November 23, 2021, to February 20, 2022, La Surprise: Watteau in Los Angeles brings together a dozen paintings and drawings from public and private collections in celebration of a recent Getty painting acquisition, La Surprise. 

“Los Angeles is well known as a center for collections of contemporary art. Somewhat surprising, however, is the fact that the city is also home to an extraordinary group of works by Watteau,” explains Timothy Potts, Maria Hummer-Tuttle and Robert Tuttle Director of the J. Paul Getty Museum. “The three-hundredth anniversary of his death affords us an opportunity to showcase some of the artist’s most distinguished drawings and paintings from local public and private collections, including our new acquisition of La Surprise. This will be the first exhibition on the West Coast to showcase this supremely innovative and enchanting artist, who was celebrated as the preeminent master of early 18th-century French painting.”

This exhibition presents 65 great works, 46 of which are being shown in Japan for the first time, representing gems of art selected from the collection of more than 2,500 items in the possession of the Department of European Paintings, one of the Museum's 17 curatorial departments. It brings to Japan in a single group masterpieces from celebrated artists, the works of whom constitute the colorful pageant of Western painting over the 500 years from the fifteenth-century early Renaissance to the nineteenth-century Post-Impressionists. From Fra Angelico, Raphael, Cranach, Titian, and El Greco, to Caravaggio, Georges de La Tour, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Rubens, Velázquez, Poussin, Watteau, and Boucher, on to Goya, Turner, Courbet, Manet, Monet, Renoir, Degas, Gauguin, Van Gogh, and Cézanne, some of the greatest treasures that are the pride of The Metropolitan Museum of Art will be displayed for the enjoyment of visitors.

2021 is the 300th anniversary of the death of the French painter Antoine Watteau (1684-1721). The fame of the artist, who was already celebrated in his lifetime, extends down to this day, and his works are coveted collector’s items. After the Louvre in Paris, the Prussian Palaces and Gardens Foundation Berlin-Brandenburg has the most important collection of this artist’s paintings. Under the motto “Art – Market – Crafts” a special exhibition at Charlottenburg Palace will honour this outstanding 18th century painter. At the centre of the exhibition stands one of Watteau’s major works: the Shop Sign of the Art Dealer Gersaint. Purchased by Frederick the Great (1712-1786) in 1746, the painting has been considered a masterpiece since its creation. Originally designed as a means of commercial advertising and as the Parisian dealer’s “shop sign”, to this day the picture raises questions of contemporary relevance concerning the marketing, trading, and collecting of art, as well as our intellectual engagement with it.

The Rijksmuseum is keen to devote greater attention to the under-acknowledged part played by women in Dutch cultural history. As part of this process, this year we hung three works by female artists in the museum’s Gallery of Honour. The Rijksmuseum has also initiated multipronged research into the role of women in Dutch cultural history and the representativeness of the Rijksmuseum collection. As part of this research we are conducting a survey of the number of female makers and artists and tracing their life stories, while also finding more detailed information about the women depicted in the paintings. In addition, female collectors, patrons, donors and curators will be scrutinising the collection and the institutional history of the museum.

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The works on display include paintings by the female artists Rachel Ruysch (1664-1750) and Cornelia van der Mijn (1709-1782), as well as portrayals of strong women such as Salome and Maria Magdalen. A particularly interesting story lies behind the double portrait of the two close friends Josina Clara van Citters and Anna Maria Gool, who are exemplary of women in Dutch history who dared to go off the beaten path; they lived together for a large part of their lives.

Passion for the art and literature of classical antiquity inspired the dynamic Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640). Presented amid the antiquities collection at the Getty Villa, this exhibition juxtaposes the artist’s exhilarating drawings, oil sketches, and monumental paintings with rarely shown ancient objects, including exquisite gems owned by Rubens himself. Heroic nudes, fierce hunts, splendid military processions, and Bacchic revels attest to the artist’s extraordinary ability to translate an array of sources into new subjects.