The latest blockbuster exhibition at the RA is Byzantium 330-1453. It’s a big show, but then it does survey a millennium’s worth of art from a big empire.
It’s odd; I think most people who have even a general interest in history and culture have some knowledge, however sketchy or inaccurate, of classical Greece, Rome, the Middle Ages, and [...]
Posts tagged with ‘exhibitions’
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‘Byzantium 330-1453’ at the Royal Academy
27 November 2008 – 1:33 pm
Renaissance Faces at the National Gallery
10 November 2008 – 5:02 pm
Renaissance Faces: Van Eyck to Titian is an exhibition that does exactly what the title the suggests: it’s a selection of portraits by van Eyck, Titian, Raphael, Holbein, Botticelli, Dürer, Cranach and their contemporaries. Room after room of rather solemn looking people — no smiling for portraits back then — wearing their most expensive-looking velvets [...]
Flemish paintings at the Queen’s Gallery
1 November 2008 – 5:48 pm
I went yesterday to see Bruegel to Rubens — Masters of Flemish Painting at the Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace. I wasn’t really sure what to expect; you have to love Bruegel, but I’ve always found Rubens easier to admire than to enjoy.
It turned out to be just the one Bruegel on show, with seven or [...]
Francis Bacon at Tate Britain
14 October 2008 – 7:55 am
I went to see the Bacon exhibition at Tate Britain today. And I enjoyed it, if enjoyed is the right word for work which is quite so bleak. He was an atheist who made a habit of painting crucifixions; and without the theology, a crucifixion is just a man being tortured to death.
So there were lots of trapped, screaming, [...]
Rothko at Tate Modern
7 October 2008 – 3:35 pm
I went to the Rothko exhibition at Tate Modern today. The show is of his ‘late series’: the centrepiece is the Seagram Murals (i.e. the group of dark Rothkos which have been in the Tate for years, plus some related works that normally live in Japan), but there are also some other groups of works [...]
Hadrian at the British Museum
11 September 2008 – 9:26 pm
Today I went to the BM’s exhibition about famous wall-builder Hadrian. Its not just the wall, though; he also built the Pantheon, as well as a staggering villa complex at Tivoli. He inherited the Roman Empire from Trajan when it was at its biggest and actually reduced its size slightly, abandoning some of the less manageable extremities and [...]
Divisionist Painters at the National Gallery
25 July 2008 – 10:47 am
Radical Light: Italy’s Divisionist Painters 1891-1910, to give the exhibition its full title. Divisionism is a style of painting where the image is built up of lots of individual brushstrokes of pure colour which, ideally, merge together for the viewer but create a more luminous effect than if the colours were blended on the palette.
If [...]
British Orientalist Painting at Tate Britain
16 July 2008 – 11:52 am
The Lure of the East: British Orientalist Painting is an exhibition of ‘the responses of British artists to the cultures and landscapes of the Near and Middle East between 1780 and 1930’. So the East here is Cairo, Jerusalem and Constantinople, and not Bombay, Singapore or Nagasaki.
You can hardly touch on the subject without a name-check for one [...]
Cy Twombly at Tate Modern
3 July 2008 – 9:42 pm
I went to the Twombly exhibition at Tate Modern today. What a fabulous name, btw: I tried climbing the Eiffel Tower but the height made me go all twombly.
He’s not someone I knew much about beforehand, and I don’t know how excited I would have been if I had known; he does what you might describe as [...]
Cranach at the Royal Academy
23 April 2008 – 11:27 am
Now this is my kind of exhibition. I don’t what it is I find so appealing about the Northern Renaissance; obviously, artists like Dürer, Van Eyck and Breugel are among the all-time greats of European art, but I love it all: van der Weyden, Memling, Bosch, Holbein, and indeed the star of this show, Lucas Cranach the [...]
Peter Doig & the Camden Town Group at the Tate
21 April 2008 – 2:13 pm
I went to Tate Britain today, mainly to see the Peter Doig, but while I was there I also had a quick look round the Camden Town Group exhibition.
Doig is a contemporary painter, born in Edinburgh in 1959 but brought up in Trinidad and Canada, who went to art school in London and now lives [...]
Coming of Age: American Art 1850-1950
18 April 2008 – 11:03 am
This is a touring exhibition of paintings from the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, Massachusetts that is currently at Dulwich Picture Gallery. Though it will be going to Venice and then Fort Lauderdale later in the year, if that’s more convenient for anyone.
I didn’t have hugely high expectations, because the DPG exhibition space [...]
‘Breaking the Rules’ at the British Library
28 March 2008 – 4:50 pm
I realised that Breaking the Rules: The Printed Face of the European Avant Garde 1900 - 1937 was about to close, so I popped in today for a quick gander. As ever at the BL, the range of material was impressive: they really do own a lot of stuff. Eliot, Bretton, Man Ray, Lorca, Mayakovsky, [...]
‘From Russia’ at the Royal Academy
26 March 2008 – 5:18 pm
This is a seriously impressive exhibition. The full title is ‘From Russia: French and Russian Master Paintings 1870-1925 from Moscow and St Petersburg‘. It starts with a little room of Russian paintings from the start of that period; then you get a whole load of French paintings that were collected by two Russian art collectors, [...]
‘Duchamp Man Ray Picabia’ at Tate Modern
7 March 2008 – 7:44 pm
The exhibition is subtitled ‘The Moment Art Changed Forever’ and the poster is illustrated with Duchamp’s Fountain, the famous work that just consists of a urinal signed with the name ‘R. Mutt’. In 2004 Fountain was voted the most influential artwork of the C20th, presumably for having sharply and clearly established the principle that art [...]
‘Alexander Rodchenko’ & ‘Laughing in a Foreign Language’ at the Hayward
18 February 2008 – 10:01 pm
I went to the Hayward today to see an exhibition of the photography of Alexander Rodchenko; the price of the ticket included entry to a show called ‘Laughing in a Foreign Language’, a exhibition which “investigates the whole spectrum of humour, from jokes, gags and slapstick to irony, wit and satire.”
It was a pleasure to [...]
Medieval ivory at the Courtauld
30 January 2008 – 12:20 pm
The Courtauld Gallery currently has a small but perfectly formed exhibition of medieval ivories.
I do love me some medieval art. And I can really see why someone would collect ivories: they are small but full of character, and I imagine they are beautifully tactile although obviously I didn’t get my hands on the ones in [...]
Terracotta warriors at the BM
17 January 2008 – 4:12 pm
I went to see the terracotta warriors at the British Museum. It’s unusual for them to be on show outside China, so it’s a big event; they have about a dozen terracotta figures and lots of associated material.
It’s certainly worth going to, but the warriors themselves didn’t have the wow factor you might hope for. [...]
Millais at the Tate
13 January 2008 – 12:15 am
I went to see the Millais at the Tate today. After my scathing comments about the Pre-Raphs last year, it may not surprise you that I was a bit half-hearted about visiting this. But I’ve got a Tate membership, so I didn’t have to pay, and the exhibition is about to close; so I thought [...]
Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition
1 December 2007 – 11:23 am
I went to the Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition at the Natural History Museum yesterday, which is always worth a look.
Apart from the fact that there are loads of great photos, there’s the fun of deciding whether the judges have made the right decisions. I’m always a bit disappointed when they choose a portrait [...]