Category: Exhibitions
Louvre overwhelmed by Vermeer demand
March 1 2017
Picture: Tribune Du Lard
Art Market Monitor reports that the Louvre's ticket system has crashed, such is the demand for its new Vermeer show. I'm told it's quite crowded in the exhibition too. Seeing how closely hung the (mainly small) paintings are, I can't imagine it's an ideal picture-viewing experience.
'Michelangelo & Sebastiano'
February 22 2017
Video: National Gallery
A trailer for the National Gallery's latest exhibition.
Old Master portrait drawings at the NPG
February 20 2017
Picture: Royal Collection Trust/Her Majesty the Queen, drawing by Hans Holbein the Younger.
This looks like fun; an exhibition of Old Master portrait drawings at the National Portrait Gallery in London. 'The Encounter: Drawings from Leonardo to Rembrandt' opens 13th July till 22nd October. More here.
Del Piombo chapel recreated in London
February 1 2017
Picture: Sunday Times
The National Gallery's next major exhibition is called Michelangelo and Sebastiano, and opens on 15th March. The PR machine is already in full swing, and the most interesting story so far is that the National has commissioned a 90% scale reproduction of a fresco by Sebastiano for the Borgherini Chapel in Rome. The paintings are based on designs by Michelangelo.
I'd love to be able to point you to more information on this story, but so far it's only appeared in the Sunday Times (here, but paywall), and is only available as 'exclusive content' for National Gallery members. (I am a member, but seem to have forgotten my password for the site, if indeed I ever had one.)
Russian Revolution at RA
February 1 2017
Picture: Guardian
A new exhibition on Russian revolutionary art will soon open at the Royal Academy (11th February - 17th April). In The Guardian, Jonathan Jones says this is a Bad Thing:
The way we glibly admire Russian art from the age of Lenin sentimentalises one of the most murderous chapters in human history. If the Royal Academy put on a huge exhibition of art from Hitler’s Germany there would rightly be an outcry. Yet the art of the Russian revolution is just as mired in the mass slaughters of the 20th century.
I'm very much looking forward to seeing the exhibition. I'm fascinated by socialist realism (now there's an oxymoron), and regular readers will know that AHN is also partial to a bit of 'dictator art'. But that doesn't mean we approve of the people who promoted such art, or their motives. I think most of us are grown up to make the objective judgements about this kind of art that Jones thinks he needs to warn us about.
'Once in a lifetime' Picasso show at Tate
January 31 2017
Picture: Guardian
Tate Modern is planning a new Picasso blockbuster, for 2018.
"Picasso 1932 – Love, Fame, Tragedy" will start at the Musée National-Picasso in Paris, 10 October 2017 to 11 February 2018 and then come to Tate Modern, London, 8 March to 9 September 2018.
More here.
Selfies galore
January 6 2017
Picture: BG
I was in London yesterday, and visited the excellent mini exhibition on British 17th Century self-portraiture at the National Portrait Gallery. There, Van Dyck and Dobson's self-portraits have been re-united for the first time since the Tate's Van Dyck in Britain show in 2009. It closes after this weekend.
Of course, I couldn't resist taking a selfie. If you go, send me yours.
Leiden Collection goes to Paris
January 6 2017
Picture: Louvre/Leiden Collection
I'm looking forward to seeing this - the Leiden Collection (of Dutch Golden Age works put together over the last decade or so by the US financier, Tom Kaplan) is sending many of its treasures to the Louvre. Above is a portrait of a boy by Jan Lievens. The collection (numbering some 200 works) also includes pictures by the likes of Dou and Vermeer, and is the world's largest private collection of works by Rembrandt. Remember that when people grumble about the 'lack of supply' in the Old Master market these days.
The show opens on February 22nd and runs until May 22nd. After that it goes to the Long Museum in Shanghai, then the National Museum in Beijing, and then finally to the Louvre Abu Dhabi. How wonderful that such important Old Masters are being shown to new audiences in China. We need more of this. It's telling that it's taken a private collector to do it first.
Waldemar in Conversation (ctd.)
January 4 2017
Video: National Gallery
Here's the Great Waldemar on fine form discussing the National Gallery's 'Beyond Caravaggio' exhibition. Well worth a click.
During the talk we learn that Waldemar is making a film on the Mary Magdelene myth in art, to be on the BBC early this year.
'Drawings for Paintings in the Age of Rembrandt'
December 15 2016
Audio: NGA
A new exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, Drawings for Paintings in the Age of Rembrandt, has been drawing praise. There's a good podcast, above. More here.
First Cezanne portraits show
December 10 2016
Picture: Guardian
The first exhibition to look at Cezanne's portraits will be held in Paris, London, Washington. Paris goes first, at the Musée d’Orsay from 13 June-24 September 2017, then the NPG in London form 26 October-11 February 2018, and finally the National Gallery of Art in Washington from 25 March-1 July 2018. More here.
New Rubens drawing after Raphael on display
December 10 2016
Picture: Pheobus Foundation
A previously unknown drawing by Rubens after Raphael has gone on display for the first time in Belgium. The drawing (above) surfaced in a small auction house in Belgium earlier this year, and sold for €670,000 to the Phoebus foundation. I'm told the underbidder was the Metropolitan Museum in New York.
Here's the Phoebus press release:
The pen-and-ink drawing with horsemen is a double-sided drawing. It is a study of Arab horsemen, which came under the management of The Phoebus Foundation in May of this year. Katharina Van Cauteren, curator of the exhibition and Chief of Staff of The Phoebus Foundation, explains why the work is so important. “This sketch is based on a scene by the Italian painter Raphael (1483-1520). However, Rubens isn’t making a copy. He breathes life into Raphael’s composition. Horses snort. Muscles are taut. A clever perspective draws the viewer into the story. This makes the drawing the first example of a brand new style: it is a forerunner of northern Baroque. With his entrepreneurial mind, Peter Paul Rubens was playing a new market here. His refreshing aesthetic was particularly to the taste of the public of his day. Rubens created an innovative visual language that conquered the world in no time”.
The drawing is on display in an exhibition organised by the Phoebus foundation in Ghent, called 'For God and Money: the Birth of Capitalism'. I went to see the show recently, and can highly recommend both it and Ghent. As regular readers will know, Belgium is my new favourite country. More on the show, which runs until 22nd January, here.
New Breughel the Younger discovered in Bath
November 7 2016
Picture: Guardian/Holburne Museum
A newly discovered work by Peter Breughel the Younger will go on display next year at the Holburne Museum in Bath. The Wedding Dance was found by the new director there, Jennifer Scott, whilst having a rummage around the museum's stores. It was thought to be a later copy. The Guardian reports:
A rollicking painting of peasants dancing in the open air at a boozy wedding immediately caught the eye of the new director of the Holburne Museum in Bath when she first toured the stores of her new kingdom. Her eye was keen: from under layers of grime and discoloured varnish, a previously unrecognised work by the 17th-century Flemish painter Pieter Brueghel the Younger has emerged.
Wedding Dance in the Open Air had previously been catalogued not even as a studio work but as a lowly later copy. It has now been accepted by experts as a genuine work by the master, and will form the centrepiece of an exhibition next year at the museum on the Brueghel dynasty of artists, the first in the UK.
“The more I looked at the panel, the better it seemed,” said Jennifer Scott, who was curator of the Royal Collection before taking over in Bath two years ago. “Even under the grime the detail and the colour seemed fantastic, far too good for a mere copy.
“It helped that I had so recently been working on the Dutch and Flemish paintings in the Royal Collection. He is a wonderful painter, whose reputation has steadily been on the rise – even a few years ago people would have said: ‘Oh, bad luck, the Younger not the Elder,’ but now everyone is genuinely excited to hear of a new discovery of his work.”
The attribution means the museum now has three paintings by the artist, more than in any other UK collection.
The picture will be featured in an exhibition on the Brueghel dynasty, which opens February 11th, until June 4th. I'll be giving a talk at some point during the exhibition, date to be confirmed.
'Portrait of the Artist' at the Queen's Gallery
November 7 2016
Picture: BG
I went to the opening of the new 'Portrait of the Artist' exhibition at the Queen's Gallery in London. It's a wonderful show and well worth visiting. I'll be reviewing it in the Financial Times. Above is a self-portrait drawing by Rubens. Tickets and details here.
The £1.4m doorstop
September 27 2016
Picture: BBC
A £1.4m marble bust which until recently was being used as a doorstop is to go on display at the Louvre. The bust is by the French sculptor Edme Bouchardon, and shows a Scottish MP, Sir John Gordon. It was made in 1728, and belongs to a Scottish local authority, Highland Council. They were bequeathed in the 1920s, but it became lost for decades, before being found on an industrial estate in 1998, propping open a door. Inevitably, the council tried to sell it. But hopefully its inclusion in a new Louvre exhibition dedicated to Bouchardon will help persuade them to keep this important piece of local heritage.
Update - Colin Harrison, Senior Curator of European Art at the Ashmolean museum, writes:
Good to read that the bust of Gordon of Invergordon will be included in the forthcoming Bouchardon exhibition. It was published in:
Malcolm Baker, Colin Harrison, Alastair Laing, 'Bouchardon's British Sitters: Sculptural Portraiture in Rome and the Classicising Bust around 1730', The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 142, No. 1173 (Dec., 2000), pp. 752-762,
which you can read on JSTOR, if you have it.
Unfortunately, we found no evidence as to who owns the bust. Certainly, the local authority cannot claim title until it produces proper proof - ' found in a municipal store' might very well mean that, as often happened, it was merely lent by the owner for safe-keeping, perhaps in the First World War or at some other point of crisis. That particular branch of the Gordon family died out in the eighteenth century, but they married into the Mackenzie Earls of Cromartie, whose descendants may well be the legitimate owners. In the absence of any documentation, the only sensible solution would be for the bust to be displayed in Inverness Museum, where it has been in storage for nearly twenty years.
Fascinating. Might any claimants now come forward?
'The mysterious landscapes of Hercules Segers'
September 19 2016
Picture: Rijksmuseum/New York Times
The Rijksmuseum has spent two years re-examining the oeuvre of the 17th Century Dutch landscape artist Hercules Segers, and has added a number of newly attributed works, reports the New York Times. The research has been done ahead of a new exhibition on Segers' life, which opens at the Rijksmuseum on October 7th till January 8th, when it will then travel to the Met in New York, where it opens on February 13th.
More on the Rijksmuseum's research and exhibition here.
Raphael goes to Moscow
September 19 2016
Picture: Uffizi
Eight paintings by Raphael from Italian museums, including the artist's self-portrait, have gone on display in Moscow's Pushkin museum. “Raphael. Image Poetry: Works from the Uffizi and Other Italian Museums” runs until December 11th. More here on Artinfo, and here (in Russian) on the Pushkin site. Quite a coup for the Pushkin museum.
Rembrandt pair at the Rijksmuseum
July 13 2016
Video: Rijksmuseum
The Rijksmuseum has made a nice video about their new Rembrandt acquisition (made jointly with the Louvre) of the portraits of Marten and Oopjen Coppit. Meanwhile, in the New York Times, their former owner Eric de Rothschild has spoken of the process of selling them.
