Category: Exhibitions
Happiness
May 12 2011
...is three Van Dycks arriving in one day (for our forthcoming loan exhibition, 'Finding Van Dyck'). The catalogue is finished, the pictures are arriving... touch wood, everything is on plan for our opening on 15th June.
'Book early to avoid disappointment'
May 9 2011
Picture: National Gallery, London
The National Gallery released further details of their forthcoming exhibition, Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan. It will bring together the largest number ever of Leonardo's surviving paintings. The press' attention has been caught by the warning to 'BOOK EARLY', because of the anticipated crowds. The warning is written in capital letters in the press release, just in case anyone misses it. The exhibition will be open on New Year's day - an excellent idea.
Full details from the announcement below the jump:
Royal Collection Diamond Jubilee exhibitions
May 6 2011
Picture: The Royal Collection
The Royal Collection has announced a series of exhibitions for 2012 to celebrate the Queen's Diamond Jubilee. They've put on a fantastically ambitious programme, and it looks like we're in for some real treats, including:
- the largest ever exhibition of Leonardo da Vinci's studies of the human body (Queen's Gallery, 4th May - 7th October);
- a 'highlights' exhibition at Holyroodhouse (16th March - 16th September), with Rapahels Rembrandts, Holbeins etc.;
- an exhibition of diamonds at Buckingham Palace (August & September)
- and a touring exhibition of ten of Leonardo's finest drawings, which will go to Birmingham, Bristol, Belfast, Dundee and Hull.
The director of the Royal Collection, Jonathan Marsden, said:
‘Our exhibitions celebrate The Queen’s Diamond Jubilee through many of the finest works of art in the Royal Collection, and we are particularly delighted to be sharing, on behalf of The Queen, some of these great treasures with museums and galleries across the UK. This is a fitting tribute to Her Majesty’s commitment over the past 60 years to the care and conservation of the Collection and to increasing public access.’
Weiwei's New York sculpture finally unveiled
May 5 2011
Picture: Ben Davis
Ai Weiwei's Circle of Animals: Zodiac Heads were unveiled yesterday by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. The artist was of course absent. The delay, it seems, was due to the killing of Osama Bin Laden.
"I'll pay for that"
May 5 2011
The Guardian has a good interview with the artist Michael Craig-Martin, the 'godfather of the YBAs'. As a tutor at Goldsmith's College, he had a significant influence on Young British Artists such as Damien Hirst. The Guardian asks him:
Didn't you feel jealous of their success? "Of course! I remember Damien showing Charles Saatchi his idea for a shark in his notebook, and Saatchi saying, 'I'll pay for that.'
Craig-Martin also (gasp) says that artists should actually make their art:
"People call me a conceptual artist, as if the idea was all, but actually what interests me is what happens when the idea becomes a thing. Ideas are by their nature generalisations, something that can be applied to lots of things. But making art is about making particulars, and that particular something can be the generator of a generalisation."
A new exhibition of Craig-Martin's drawings is at the Alan Cristea Gallery in London.
Henry Moore goes to Russia
May 5 2011
As part of the commemorations for the 70th anniversary of the Siege of Leningrad, the Hermitage Museum is putting on an exhibition of Henry Moore's 'shelter drawings', done in London during the Blitz. It will run from May 7th to August 28th. From the Henry Moore Foundation's press release:
The use of the Hermitage basements as shelters during the Siege adds an unusual poignancy to the display. As well as five galleries of Moore drawings, one room will be dedicated to the drawings of Soviet architect Alexander Nikolsky. They record images of people sheltering in the basement during the bombardment.
During the Blitz, Henry Moore made numerous sketches and a series of worked-up drawings of people sheltering from the German bombing in the London Underground. As evocations of suffering and endurance, these have atteined an almost mythic status in the artist's work, and were widely exhibited during and after World War Two.
Turner Prize shortlist
May 5 2011
The Turner Prize 2011 shortlist has been announced. The four artists are Karla Black, Martin Boyce, George Shaw, and Hilary Lloyd (above).
The latter, according Tate's notice:
'combines still and moving images, sound and the three dimensional forms of AV playback equipment [translation: a telly] to portray the urban environment.'
Royal Society of Portrait Painters
May 5 2011
Picture: RSPP
The Royal Society of Portrait Painters' annual exhibition opens tomorrow. Famous faces include the Queen (above, by James Lloyd), Boris Johnson, and David Starkey. See highlights here.
Fantin-Latour and the Impressionists
May 4 2011
Picture: Bowes Museum
Richard Dorment gives a thumbs up to the Bowes Museum's new exhibition. Closes 9th October.
Zoom in on Claude
May 3 2011
The new Claude Lorrain exhibition at the Louvre (closes July 18th) has a very good website, where you can zoom in on some of Claude's best works in great detail. Well worth a click.
Where's Weiwei?
May 2 2011
Picture: WNYC
With the artist absent having been detained by authorities in China, the unveiling of Ai Weiwei's first exhibition of public sculpture in New York, scheduled for Wednesday 3rd May, has been postponed. More here.
Caravaggio in Kentucky
April 27 2011
Caravaggio's 1595 'The Fortune Teller' is to be loaned to the Speed Art Museum in Kentucky, from 18th May to 5th June. The painting is being lent by the Capitoline Museums in Rome. More here.
The Leonardo loan...
April 21 2011
...is definitely on. After months of indecision, Poland's ministry of culture has agreed that the picture can travel to London, Berlin and Madrid. Some conservationists had argued against the loan, but the picture's owner, Count Czartoryski, had appealed for it to go ahead. The picture has been in the possession of the Czartoryski family since the late 18th Century.
Pastel exhibition at the Met
April 21 2011
Picture: Metropolitan Museum. Viscount Boyle by Rosalba
Here's a rarity - an exhibition of 18th Century pastels at the Metropolitan Museum, New York. The Met says:
Pastel Portraits: Images of 18th-Century Europe—on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art beginning May 17, 2011—will feature about 40 pastels from the collections of the Metropolitan Museum and other museums, and from private collections in Boston and New York. At the core of the exhibition will be a group of French works, and the Italian, Swiss, German, and English schools will also represented.
Closes August 14th.
Does this painting 'accost' you?
April 20 2011
Picture: Robert Tong
Last week, Sylvia Goodman's nude painting, above, was removed from display in a civic centre in California, over fears that it 'created a hostile work environment'. One employee had complained 'about being accosted by the painting every day in the work environment'.
After the predictable row, the picture is now back on display.
'Miro's Turds'
April 20 2011
Picture: Fundacio Joan Miro
If you thought my earlier post on Miro's Pubes was in bad taste, try Martin Gayford's entertaining review of Tate's new Miro exhibition, titled, 'Miro Tate Show Has Fanciful Blobs, Squiggles, Earthy Turds'. It begins:
There’s a certain amount of crap in the new exhibition, “Joan Miro: The Ladder of Escape,” at Tate Modern in London.
That doesn’t prevent it from being a fine show, which not only contains many of the artist’s most celebrated works, but transforms your ideas about him.
Indeed, the crap is part of the point. It appears unforgettably in the title of the 1935 painting “Man and Woman in Front of a Pile of Excrement” [above]. As the critic Robert Hughes pointed out in his book “Barcelona,” that’s an extremely Catalan subject. Miro (1893-1983) was a most Catalan artist -- industrious and anarchic, mystical and earthy.
Finding Van Dyck
April 20 2011
Picture: Philip Mould Ltd
I try to avoid plugs on this website, but here's a shameless one; at Philip Mould Ltd this summer we'll be having a loan exhibition called 'Finding Van Dyck: newly discovered and rarely seen works by Van Dyck and his followers.' It runs from 15th June - 13th July.
In a nutshell, the exhibition will look at why paintings lose their attributions and identities, becoming in the process art history's orphans. We'll explain the steps involved in finding these lost pictures, and demonstrate how, for example, you can tell the difference between a Van Dyck and a copy. Above are four portraits of Van Dyck. Pat yourself on the back if you can guess which one is by him.
I'll post more details nearer the time. A catalogue will be available.
'He painted and painted and painted'
April 18 2011
Picture: Mercer Gallery, Harrogate
The first exhibition on John Atkinson Grimshaw for over thirty years has opened at the Mercer Gallery in Harrogate. Says The Guardian:
Lionised by Victorian society for his delicate studies of twilit landscapes, and portrayed in studio photographs as an aesthetic dandy, the artist was in fact dogged by debt, an opulent lifestyle beyond his means, and the premature deaths of 10 of his 16 children.
"He painted, painted and painted," said Jane Sellars, curator of the Mercer gallery in Harrogate, where the exhibition has opened. "He painted to pay bills, painted keep his family together, and painted in lieu of rent on his palatial homes."
The exhibition closes 4th September 2011. More at the museum website here.
Don't worry, it's only a replica
April 18 2011
British Museum director Neil MacGregor has handed over a replica of the Museum's Cyrus Cylinder to the National Museum of Iran. MacGregor was in Tehran at the closing ceremony of an exhibition devoted to the Cylinder, a 6th century BC Persian declaration praising the Achaemenid King, Cyrus the Great.
The loan had been the subject of some controversy, and was extended by three months. There had even been rumblings in Iran that the Cylinder should not be returned to the Britain. So it's a relief to read:
“Today, it is sad to see the Cyrus Cylinder departing from its homeland, but it should travel around the world, providing the opportunity for all nations to see it,” Presidential Office Chief of Staff Rahim-Mashaii said during the ceremony.
More here.
