Category: Exhibitions
Claude at the Ashmolean
October 6 2011
Picture: Ashmolean
A major new exhibition of Claude Lorrain's landscapes opens today at the Ashmolean (until 8th January). Is this ambitious show - of no less than 140 works - further proof that the Ashmolean is now the pre-eminent art gallery in England outside London?
Renovation at the Musee d'Orsay
October 3 2011
There's warm approval in most quarters for the Musée d'Orsay's renovation programme, now nearing completion. Bravely, they're moving away from the tediousness of hanging everything on white walls. From The Guardian:
Since 2008 the Musée d'Orsay has been gradually abandoning the concept, popularised by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, of hanging paintings on white walls. "Outside 20th-century and contemporary art, white kills all paintings," said Cogéval. "When you place an academic or impressionist painting on a white background, the light from the white creates an indeterminate halo around the work, preventing the sometimes subtle contrasts and details being revealed."
Pioneers of Russian Painting in Stockholm
September 30 2011
Picture: Ryska Museet, Ilya Repin, 'Barge-haulers on the Volga'
If you're in Stockholm, this is worth a trip, an exhibition of the Peredvizhniki, pioneers of Russian art in the late 19th Century. From the National Museum of Sweden's site:
The Peredvizhniki were a group of artists who came together in 1870 in protest at the conservative attitudes of Russia’s Imperial Academy of Art. The group aimed to portray contemporary Russian society, and to use art to highlight social and political issues. They organized travelling exhibitions to take art to the people and beyond the cities of St Petersburg and Moscow. Works by the Peredvizhniki have enjoyed huge popularity in Russia since the late 19th century but are little known in the rest of the world.
The exhibition runs until 22nd January 2012.
Vermeer's 'Lacemaker' coming to UK
September 29 2011
Picture: Louvre
Vermeer's Lacemaker will go on display in the UK for the first time for a new exhibition at the Fitzwilliam. Vermeer's Women opens on 5th October and runs until 15th January. Betsy Wieseman, the curator of the exhibition, says:
The Louvre very rarely lend this painting because it's almost as important in their collection as the Mona Lisa. It is a painting that people make a trip especially to the Louvre to see.
Meanwhile, over at The Guardian, Jonathan Jones asks:
Did the 17th-century Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer use a camera obscura – an early photographic instrument in which light is concentrated through a tiny aperture to cast a bright image on a surface in a darkened room – to help him create his mesmerising paintings of life in the tranquil city of Delft?
Undoubtedly. You can see microscopic highlights, lifelike perspectives and shadows in his paintings that strikingly resemble camera images and have no other reason to be there. It's more likely that he used a camera obscura than that he somehow "thought like a camera". Does this precocious photographic technique explain the power of Vermeer's paintings? Not really.
Caravaggio as diplomatic tool
September 27 2011
Caravaggio's Narcissus has gone on display in Cuba for the first time, at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes. The picture belongs to the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica in Rome. So far so normal, but there's an interesting political dimension to the loan. From the Independent:
Italy's deputy minister of culture, Ricardo Villardi, said the show was Rome's way of relating to Cuba during a time of change.
"I asked myself how as a government we could accompany the changes, these transformations, that are under way, with respect for (Cuba's) autonomy... and the answer is this exhibition," he said.
His Cuban counterpart, Fernando Rojas, said it was "very appropriate" to show in Cuba the work of "a rebel, an innovator" who reflected the common people in his work "as we Cubans can appreciate that."
Should the British Government raid the National Gallery for a similar exhibition? Send The Haywain to Pyongyang?
Bob Dylan - Artist; Copyist?
September 27 2011
Picture: left Gagosian Gallery, right, Magnum Photos
The new exhibition of Bob Dylan's paintings at the Gagosian Gallery in New York, The Asia Series, was meant to be a 'visual journal' of Bob's travels in 'Japan, China, Vietnam and Korea', with 'firsthand depictions of people, street scenes, architecture and landscape'.
But some keen-eyed observers have noticed that some of Bob's 'depictions' are eerily similar to famous published photographs, including that (above right) taken in 1949 by Henri Cartier-Bresson of a eunuch. Full details in the New York Times.
New Fitzwilliam acquisition
September 27 2011
Picture: Tribune De L'Art
The Fitzwilliam has bought the above Lamentation of Christ supported by the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene by Marcantonio Bassetti (1586-1630). The picture is painted in oil on slate, and measures 15 x 11 3/8 inches. Apparently it was acquired from the sculpture dealer Danny Katz, who bought it at Christie's in New York in 2003 for $273,500.
It says something of the Fitzwilliam's determined introspection (check out their non existent labels next time you go) that the news comes in French via the site Tribune de L'Art, with, at the time of writing, not a whisper on the museum's own website.
The Final Freud
September 21 2011
Picture: David Dawson/Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert Gallery
Lucien Freud's final, unfinished work, will be included in the new exhibition of the artist's work at the National Portrait Gallery (9th Feb-27th May 2012). The subject is Freud's assistant, David Dawson, with Dawson's whippet, Eli.
Before and after
September 20 2011
Picture: Tate
The Tate has unveiled their newly restored painting by John Martin, The Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum. For more on the story, see here.
Museum swap-shop
September 20 2011
Picture: MFA Boston
Would you swap Monet's The Fort of Antibes (above), plus seven other works, for Gustave Caillebotte's Man at His Bath (below)? The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston plans to sell eight pictures worth up to $24 million to fund their new naked acquisition.
Alan Wirzbicki in the Boston Globe disagrees with the scheme:
Call me a philistine, but somehow this just doesn’t strike me as an astute trade. Why not? Well, let me count the ways.
This painting, “Man at His Bath,” is not an eye-catching celebration of the human form, a la Michelangelo’s "David." Rather, it’s an everyday view of… well, mostly of an everyday butt. Which is basically what George Shackelford, chairman of the museum’s Art of Europe Department, said in Monday’s Globe.
“This guy is no Arcadian bather,” he noted. “It’s perfectly mundane — and expressly so.” One would think that self-evidently accurate appraisal would lead to this equally obvious notion: It’s probably not worth selling scenes by Monet, Gauguin, Sisley, Pissarro, and Renoir to acquire that perfectly mundane scene. Look, I’m not saying I wouldn’t trade one of those Jean Baptiste Camille Corot’s more-milky-March-sky-over-the-river scenes, but that’s about as far this guy would go. And I expect most museum-goers would agree with me.
Through a lens, darkly...
September 20 2011
Picture: Daily Mirror, Jan Mikulka, 'Jakub', (detail).
Further to my harumph about paintings of photographs, such as the above from the NPG's BP Portrait Award, a reader writes:
Re photographic portraits - I have not seen the portrait in question, but on the principle I heartily concur. It does, however, give rise to an interesting question which does not go away when we look at distortions in paintings from other eras. It can be difficult to determine where masterly virtuosity, taking advantage of available technology, gives way to a technical dependence on technological competence. There’s a fascinatingly fine line somewhere down the road to The Arnolfini Wedding.
Prince Albert on display
September 15 2011
No, not that, the man, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, Queen Victoria's husband. A new exhibition dedicated to the life of the Prince Consort has opened in Germany.
The single picture exhibition
September 15 2011
In these straitened times, museums are increasingly mounting single picture exhibitions. And why not? If you're a charging museum, borrowing one blockbuster masterpiece is a good way of drawing in the crowds - and extra revenue. Judith H. Dobrzynski examines the phenomenon in The Art Newspaper:
Creative use of smaller budgets for exhibitions is one driving force behind this trend. The directors we spoke to said that loan fees, design, insurance and transport costs for a single work are minuscule compared to a big thematic or an in-depth show for a single artist. Marketing tends to be the main expense, leaving museums in control of spending as much or as little as their budget allows.
Directors cite other virtues of single-work shows: they encourage people to really look, rather than move on after a few seconds to the next thing on the gallery walls. “We use them to teach how to experience a great work of art and see why it is a masterpiece,” said Brian Ferriso, the director of the Portland Art Museum. In 2009, when Ferriso arranged to bring Raphael’s La Velata, 1514-15, to Oregon from the Palatine Gallery, “people sat for ten to 20 minutes looking, and often they’d come back after going through our Renaissance galleries,” he said. Last year Portland borrowed Thomas Moran’s vast canvas Shoshone Falls on the Snake River, 1990, from the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
de Kooning retrospective in New York
September 14 2011
A major new exhibition on the career of Willem de Kooning opens at the Museum of Modern Art in New York on 18th Sept. The New York Times has interviewed the curator of the show, John Elderfield (above), who has made wide use of photographs of de Kooning at work. Discussing his later career, when de Kooning was suffering from the onset of dementia, he says:
“People later talked about how de Kooning was not in control of what he was doing, but it was clear from these photographs that he was,” Mr. Elderfield said. “The kind of continuous revision that happened to these pictures has very much de Kooning’s signature to it.”
These late, often haunting canvases — sparer than the sensual and colorfully theatrical work he created when he was at the height of his powers — have often been debated, because it is hard to know how much he painted himself and how much was done by studio assistants.
“When you think of artists today like Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons, who have armies of assistants virtually creating their work, does it really matter?” Mr. Elderfield said. “I don’t think it does. In de Kooning’s case, we know his hand is in all his work.”
Atkinson Grimshaw exhibition comes to London
September 14 2011
Picture: Ferens Art Gallery, 'Princes Dock, Hull', 1887.
John Atkinson Grimshaw: Painter of Moonlight opens at the Guildhall Art Gallery in London on 19th September, and closes on 15th January. See a slideshow of selected works here.
Museums & Economic Impact
September 14 2011
UK museums take note - the Met Museum in New York has issued a zippy press release detailing how much revenue they help generate for the City.
For example, their four most recent exhibitions, including the Alexander McQueen show:
'...generated $908 million in spending by regional, national, and international tourists to New York, according to a visitor survey the Museum released today. Using the industry standard for calculating tax revenue impact, the study found that the direct tax benefit to the City and State from out-of-town visitors to the Museum totaled some $90.8 million.'
A similar set of figures after the National Gallery's forthcoming Leonardo exhibition would help make the case for arts funding in the UK.
New Gainsborough landscape exhibition in Bath
September 14 2011
Picture: National Gallery of Scotland, Thomas Gainsborough, 'Landscape with a Distant Village'.
Here's something to look forward to - an exhibition of Gainsborough's landscapes. The exhibition opens at the Holborne Museum in Bath on 24th September and closes on 22nd January. It will be, says the Holburne, 'the first exhibition in fifty years devoted solely to his landscape paintings and drawings'.
The exhibition will then move to Compton Verney from 11th February to 10th June 2012. It has been sponsored by the British art dealer Lowell Libson.
'One of the best American painters ever, period.'
September 13 2011
Picture: jsonline
The Milwaukee Art Museum has acquired the above portrait, Alice Hooper, c.1763, by John Singleton Copley for $3.5m. Full details here.
New Rembrandt exhibition in US
September 13 2011
Picture: Rembrandt and workshop (?), 'Portrait of a Man reading', oil on canvas, The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown
An exhibition of Rembrandts in American public and private collections will open on 30th October at the North Carolina Museum of Art (closes 22nd Jan). The show will then move to the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.
Rembrandt in America will be the largest collection of Rembrandt paintings ever presented in a US exhibition. Full details here.
'Degas and the Ballet'
September 13 2011
Picture: Royal Academy
The Royal Academy's new Degas exhibition, Degas and the Ballet: Picturing Movement, opens on 17th September. You can see an audio slideshow preview here (it's well worth a click).
Ahead of the exhibition, The Telegraph has a nice selection of Degas' quotes on dance, including:
"They call me the painter of dancers.They don't understand that the dancer has been for me a pretext for painting pretty fabrics and for rendering movement."
"My women are simple, honest creatures who are concerned with nothing beyond their physical occupations ... it is as if you were looking through a keyhole."
