Next up in my series of posts on cultural highlights for 2024 is works of art. I visited some very fine exhibitions over the year, notably a number in France, including David Hockney’s ‘Normandism’ show at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Rouen and a recreation of the first Impressionists show at the Musée d’Orsay inRead More
For the last few months of his life, the Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh lived in the French village of Auvers-sur-Oise. He had been discharged from the clinic at Saint-Rémy where he had been treated for mental disorder, moving to Auvers to be near to local doctor Paul Gachet and his brother Theo, resident inRead More
To Margate on a grey summer’s day, to the Turner Contemporary, which always has something interesting to show, occasionally exhilaratingly so. And so it was this time. The exhibition was of works by American Abstract Expressionist Ed Clark (1926-2019), of whom I knew nothing until now. Over four rooms, with a fifth devoted to aRead More
A new year and new sights needed. On a beautiful cold day I went to two commercial galleries London to see two small shows that I thought might reveal a connection. Firstly to the Michael Werner Gallery in Upper Brook Street to see Don Van Vliet, ‘One Hand Standing’. The artist’s name is one thatRead More
To Amsterdam for a few days, and at last a visit to the Rijksmuseum, one of the world’s leading art galleries, physically or online. For years now I have been familiar with the collection through its digital presences, not just the usual line-up of great works to be found on the standard web sources, butRead More
Promotional video for the Frank Auerbach exhibition An exhibition is currently running at the Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert gallery in London: Frank Auerbach: Twenty Self-Portraits. It brings together recent self-portraits – nine paintings and eleven drawings – by the ninety-two-year-old German-British painter. Although renowned for his searching portraits of others, he has seldom drawn or painted himself.Read More
Ever since Eden was lost, we have been trying to find it again. Columbus and the Spanish conquistadors that followed him identified various parts of the Americas as the Garden of Eden. Confident claims for its location have been made for Mesopotamia, Armenia, Iran, Jackson County Missouri (according to some Mormons), and Bedford (according toRead More
The build-up to a show is always a part of the show. The title, the publicity photos, the names in lights, the walk down a corridor or up flights of stairs, the taking of one’s seat, the buzz of anticipation, the drawing back of the curtains. At the Panorama Mesdag in The Hague, some ofRead More
To south London and the Dulwich Picture Gallery to see an exhibition of woodcuts by abstract expressionist Helen Frankenthaler. It really is the ideal art gallery: essentially two parallel strips, one showing its admirable core collection of greats (Rembrandt, Murillo, Gainsborough, Poussin), the other for special exhibitions. Always something new to see, always something familiar,Read More
It’s a mad world out there. For too long there has been no escape into galleries, those places where disorder should dissolve and the eye focus on things that make sense. Elusively at times, but sense nonetheless. Now, in Britain at least, and for the time being at least, Covid-19 restrictions are retreating, letting galleriesRead More