Post-Impressionism
Sarah Kent
The Bloomsbury group’s habit of non-binary bed-hopping has frequently attracted more attention than the artworks they produced. But in their Vanessa Bell retrospective, the MK Gallery has steered blissfully clear of salacious tittle tattle. Thankfully, this allows one to focus on Bell’s paintings and designs rather than her complicated domestic life.The first picture you encounter was painted during a family holiday in Cornwall and dates back to 1900, the year before Bell became a student at the Royal Academy. Two thatched cottages cling to a steep slope by the sea. Punctuated only by the Read more ...
Sarah Kent
What a feast! Congratulations are due to the National Gallery for its latest blockbuster After Impressionism: Inventing Modern Art. Such a superb collection of modern masters is unlikely to be assembled again under one roof, so this is a once-in-a-lifetime, must-see exhibition.Room after fabulous room is hung with a hundred artworks, mostly paintings, on walls painted navy blue. This daring decision works well for most artists, the exception being Van Gogh whose landscapes die against the dark background. Luckily the dark blue offsets the cream wallpaper and pale pink blouse of Van Gogh’s Read more ...
Charlie Stone
Edgar Degas is famous for his depictions of ballet dancers. His drawings, paintings and sculptures of young girls clad in the uniform of the dance are signs of an artistic obsession that spanned a remarkable artistic career. One work in particular – a sculpture of a young ballet dancer in a rest position – cemented his reputation as a pioneering spirit, unafraid of provoking controversy in the pursuit of perfection. It is this sculpture and the story behind it that Camille Laurens explores in Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, whose immersive translation by Willard Wood conveys a deeply Read more ...
Florence Hallett
“Gauguin was undoubtedly self-obsessed” begins the National Gallery’s latest dead cert blockbuster, as it cheerfully hijacks a de facto series begun next door at the National Portrait Gallery. Unlike Picasso and Cézanne, Gauguin is not known for his portraiture – all those young Polynesian girls are empty vessels, awaiting the thoughts and fantasies of the artist, the viewer, men, anyone but themselves.Still, only two female nudes are included in this exhibition, though the absence of clothes can hardly have been grounds for exclusion. Instead we have less familiar, but no less sensual works Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Soon after his death, Van Gogh’s reputation as a tragic genius was secured. Little has changed in the meantime, and he has continued to be understood as fatally unbalanced, ruled by instinct not intellect. Van Gogh’s characterisation of himself as a blue-collar artist-worker has only compounded this, so that the real revelation of Tate Britain’s new show is not Van Gogh’s affection for this country, or the influence he would himself have on British art, but the sophistication of his inner life, which acquired breadth and depth through his lifelong interest in British art and literature.Van Read more ...
Katherine Waters
In the autumn of 1892 Émile Bernard wrote home to his mother that, following the summer decampment to Pont-Aven of artists visiting from Paris and further afield, there remained "some artists here, two of them talented and copying each other. One mainly copies the other." Most likely he was writing about Irish painter Roderic O’Conor and the younger Swiss artist Cuno Amiet who stayed on in the Breton village long after the summer’s artistic cavalcade had left.There are indeed striking similarities and borrowings between O’Conor’s and Amiet’s canvases, but what the National Gallery of Ireland’ Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Some 50 portraits by Paul Cézanne – almost a third of all those the artist painted that have survived – are on view in this quietly sensational exhibition. Eye-opening and heart-breaking, it examines his art exclusively in the context of his portrayal of people for the first time.It is that proverbial once-in-a-lifetime show: half a dozen or so works have not been seen in public for decades, and several have never been shown in the UK. In microcosm, too, this selection shows us essential Cézanne: exactly what made him different from his peers as he took what, say, the Impressionists were Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Art exhibitions hardly seem comparable with battery farming, and yet just as our insatiable appetite for cheap meat gives rise to some troubling consequences, so too does the demand for definitive exhibitions that require vulnerable works of art to be shipped around the world. And so it really is a cause for celebration that an exhibition exploring Eugène Delacroix’s influence in the 50 years following his death maintains its focus, argues its case and thoroughly immerses us in his work, without actually showing us any of his best known paintings.We are left to guess at the sheer scale of The Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Painting the Modern Garden explores the interstices between nature and ourselves as revealed in the cultivation of gardens, that most delightful and frustrating of occupations, and an almost obsessive subject for many artists. About 150 paintings from the 1860s to the 1920s, gathered together from private and public collections in North America and Europe are on view, amplified by letters, plans, documents, photographs and illustrated books on horticulture.The exhibition embraces not only artists’ responses to gardens from the late 19th century to the early 20th century, but obliquely the new Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Walking into this exhibition is a bit like walking into a great forest. The dark green walls are hung all around with paintings of trees; we look up through branches that spiral dizzyingly skyward, while the upwards sweep of vast trunks seem relentlessly, tangibly full of life. Some of these paintings verge on abstraction, the forms of tree trunks simplified and reduced to an arrangement of planes, with spatial recession represented entirely through colour. In others, a flurry of brushstrokes captures the energy of the forest, the wind in the leaves, the light breaking through to the velvety Read more ...
stephen.walsh
The Fall of the House of Usher is one of Edgar Allan Poe’s mistier tales, and although it has been turned into opera a few times, there are obvious difficulties. Debussy struggled for a decade to materialise a drama out of its haunting, neurotic atmosphere, and in the end failed, I would argue, because he was unable to distance himself enough from the central characters to construct a stage action about them. He sketched, though, a good deal of fascinating music, and out of this material the musicologist Robert Orledge has put together a performable work that, if not entirely convincing as Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
A one-room display at the Courtauld of seven paintings, a wall of woodcuts, some drawings and a sculpture by the passionate and volatile Gauguin: for all its modesty, this is a staggeringly powerful show, replete with exotic dreams and embodying the power of the artist’s lasting influence.Exotic landscapes and primitive interiors are infiltrated by scenes of languorous naked women, the colour of milk chocolate, cross-legged on the floor, stretched on a couch, bathing in a pool, awkward odalisques, impassive goddesses or acquiescent mistresses. Gauguin was one of the ultimate escape artists, Read more ...