Previous Posts: articles 2018

Attractive product, however the packing could have been better. I had to glue one section back together. One curtain needed to be shortened to fit one of the doors. This was easy using small split rings. No more birds sneaking in!

The card my father bought for me in 1974 when we visited Versailles. I still have it. As a child I was mesmerized by the painting by J.L.David. In 2002 I found the puppet, also in France. I had to buy it. He and the horse look stupid in 3 dimensions and not very menacing…

How many men of the early to mid 19th Cent had the Order of the Garter and the Order of the Golden Fleece?

What would these great artists say to one another? What would they say to you? You can be a playwright, an actor and director, and you can put on countless productions. Each set comes in a box that easily converts to a puppet theatre. The Great Artist set includes Monet, Dali, Van Gogh and Frida Kahlo. They're magnetic, so when you're done, you can stick them to the fridge!

Looks like Richard Gere with a wig.

I'm not sure that unreporting vandalism is possible, ethically or practically, but nothing the youtube generation has done to art has so far matched the hammer attack on Michelangelo's Pieta or the shotgunning of The Madonna of the Rocks.

Maybe a return to the pillory is the answer?

Surprised to see YOU make a mistake in your blog today.  

The Sotheby's/publisher bumph may be claiming the biography of Lord Clark is the first, but actually Meryle Secrest published 'Kenneth Clark: A Biography' in September 1983 in hardback.

An example of how Clark remains under appreciated: last week I attended the Warburg Institute's very important conference on Aby Warburg and Walter Benjamin, which was a great success, but where Clark's name was not mentioned once in spite of the fact that he was one of the first English art historians to popularize Warburg's methods in this country (notably in the book on the nude).

Federico Barocci (1535–1612) is celebrated as one of the most talented artists of late 16th-century Italy. Fascinated by the human form, he fused charm and compositional harmony with an unparalleled sensitivity to colour.

Thanks to the cooperation of the Soprintendenze delle Marche, the exhibition will showcase Barocci’s most spectacular Marchigian altarpieces, including his famous Entombment from Senigallia and Last Supper from Urbino Cathedral – never before seen outside Italy. In total, 16 of his most important altarpieces and devotional paintings and five of his finest portraits will be on display alongside their preparatory drawings and oil sketches.

Barocci was an incessant and even obsessive draughtsman, preparing every composition with prolific studies in every conceivable medium. Drawing from life and inspired by the people and animals that surrounded him, his works are characterised by a warmth and humanity that transform his religious subjects into themes with which all can identify.

This exhibition explores the concept of music as a pastime of the elite in the northern Netherlands during the 17th century. Vermeer and Music: Love and Leisure in the Dutch Golden Age will bring together for the first time the National Gallery’s two paintings by Vermeer, Young Woman Standing at a Virginal and Young Woman Seated at a Virginal, and Vermeer’s Guitar Player, on exceptional loan from the Iveagh Bequest, Kenwood House. The exhibition aims to enhance viewers’ appreciation of these beautiful and evocative paintings by Vermeer and his contemporaries by juxtaposing them with musical instruments and songbooks of the period. Visitors will be able to compare 17th-century virginals, guitars, lutes and other instruments with their painted representations to judge the accuracy of representation and what liberties the painter might have taken to enhance the visual or symbolic appeal of his work. In 17th century Dutch paintings, music often figured as a metaphor for harmony, a symbol of transience or, depending on the type of music being performed, an indicator of one’s education and position in society. Musical instruments and songbooks were also included as attributes in elegant portraits to suggest that the sitter was accomplished in this area.

The Portrait in Vienna 1867–1918 is the first exhibition to explore Viennese portraiture during the Austro-Hungarian Empire, showing both the continuity and the rupture between the Biedermeier and imperial traditions of the 19th century and the innovations of avantgarde artists such as Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Richard Gerstl and Oskar Kokoschka in the years around 1900. The period is widely regarded as the time when the avant-garde overthrew the academy.

The exhibition explores how portraiture came to be closely identified with the distinctive flourishing of modern art in Vienna during its famed fin-de-siècle years. It is divided into six sections: Biedermeier-Modern (the rediscovery around 1900 of early 19thcentury portraits of the Alt-Wien bourgeoisie); Modern Family/Modern Child; The Artist; Modern Men/Modern Women; Love and Loss (the use of the portrait to declare love and commemorate the dead); and Finish and Failure (unfinished works abandoned by frustrated artists, or rejected by outraged sitters).

In 1992 my wife and I saw Caravaggio's (un-restored) 'Raising of Lazarus' in the Messina museum.  We were entirely alone, as far as we could see in the whole place, except for very welcoming guardians.  The 'Raising of Lazarus' made a tremendous impact: my reaction then that this was the single greatest oil painting I had ever seen, and I am not sure I would think differently today.  Thanks for flagging the restoration -- I can only heartily recommend anyone see it in Rome or back home in Messina.