(British Museum, 8 September 2016-29 January 2017)
I’ve been debating whether to write about this exhibition here. In the act of doing so, I’m banishing mystique and bringing the blog and the real world together for the first time; but my desire to write about this show was too strong to resist. It’s my exhibition, you see. I’ve been working on it ever since I joined the British Museum in late 2014 and now, to my mingled delight and terror, it’s on the brink of opening to the public.
(Tate Modern, until 30 October 2016)
I had great intentions to see masses of exhibitions during my summer break, but didn’t make it to quite as many as planned. I did, however, head over to Tate Modern (not a place I go often enough), where I explored their new wing, admired the panorama of London from its viewing deck and, most importantly, visited their current exhibition on Georgia O’Keeffe. As I’ve said before, my knowledge of modern artists is sketchy to say the least – I generally deal with artists who’ve been dead for at least a hundred years – and I knew very little about O’Keeffe, but the exhibition did a great job of introducing me to her innovative, colourful and elegant paintings.
(British Museum, 19 May – 27 November 2016)
It’s rather shameful that I haven’t written anything about this exhibition yet, because it’s been open for more than a month and really is worth seeing. My excuse is that I have to squeeze in sightseeing during my lunch breaks and things haven’t been as quiet as they could have been. However, with deadlines out of the way and notebook in hand, I pottered off yesterday lunchtime to explore the underwater delights of ancient Thonis-Heracleion and Canopus.
(The Saatchi Gallery, London, 5 April-4 September 2016)
There’s plenty of satisfaction to be got at the Saatchi Gallery’s latest show on the Rolling Stones.* When my parents came to stay for a long weekend, I decided it was the ideal way for us to spend a morning and all three of us were blown away. The tickets aren’t cheap at £22 a head – Exhibitionism is an international touring show and very much a commercial venture – but it’s worth it if you have even the slightest interest in the Stones. Filling almost the whole Gallery, the show displays costumes, set designs, album covers, ephemera and the band’s own instruments, alongside video footage from the 1960s to the present day. This is less of an exhibition than an experience, not just for long-time fans but also for those (like me) who are only just beginning to discover their music.
(Royal Academy, London, until 31 January 2016)
This is the first exhibition devoted to Liotard in the UK and it’s long overdue. He’s an artist I’ve always particularly liked, for he seems to represent the most appealing aspects of the 18th century: its increasing informality and its new interest in the individual as a worthy object of study. Born in Geneva, he had an unusually peripatetic life which took him not only to the usual artistic centres of Paris, Rome and London, but also to more exotic regions: after joining the entourage of a couple of British Grand Tourists whom he met in Rome, he spent four years in the Ottoman capital in Constantinople. For the rest of his life his art would be flavoured by the textures and patterns of the Turkish world.
(National Gallery, London, until 10 January 2016)
As someone who focuses on drawings and prints, I’m most familiar with Goya as a dark satirist, haunted by nightmarish images of witches and tumbling figures, like those in the recent show at the Courtauld. It’s easy to forget that his contemporaries knew him best for another very different aspect of his art, which forms the focus of this brand new exhibition at the National Gallery: his portraits.
Artists and the Classical Ideal
(Sir John Soane’s Museum, London, until 26 September 2015)
It’s 1531. A group of men have gathered in a low-ceilinged room in the Belvedere wing of the Vatican. All natural light has been banished. Clustered around a table, they are drawing from a classical statuette, lit only by candlelight to emphasise the curves and shadows of its graceful form. At the back, holding the statuette, is a bearded man in a cap. He is Baccio Bandinelli: sculptor, draughtsman and master of this little group of students. This engraving is the first depiction of artists drawing from classical models, and also the first depiction of a gathering which regarded itself as an art ‘academy’.
(British Museum, until 15 November 2015)
When you think of Louis XIV, chances are that you think of Versailles. The Hall of Mirrors; the fountains and festivals; the gold, glass and glitter of the Ancien Régime. But medals? Maybe not. And yet Louis was responsible for one of the most ambitious and innovative of all medal series, the Histoire medallique. Published in 1702, towards the end of his reign, it aimed to celebrate and promote his victories, both as a military commander and an administrator, and to gloss over his defeats and failures.
(Dulwich Picture Gallery, until 15 November 2015)
This year there are many exhibitions designed to capitalise on the sudden flourish of enthusiasm for all things Waterloo and Napoleon. This small show at Dulwich shrewdly uses the Bonaparte connection as an excuse for bringing a little-known artist back into the limelight, and bravo to that. I say ‘little-known’ with some caution. Having spent far too long in the art world, I sometimes find it hard to judge how familiar an artist would be to the average passer-by on Oxford Street; but I think I’m safe in assuming that Prud’hon isn’t exactly a household name.
(British Museum, London, until 5 July 2015)
I’ve been terribly lax at writing about exhibitions recently, and this post is actually far too late because the show has just closed. Nevertheless there were such beautiful things on display that I still wanted to write a little about it; and I hope some of you had the chance to see it. The theme was, very simply, the body in Greek art; but it went beyond the predictable athletic male nude, which for the Greeks, and for so many cultures since, has been the pinnacle of physical perfection. The show also looked at sculptures of the female body, whether divine or mortal; at representations of the body throughout the life cycle; and at sculpture on different scales and in different modes, from heroic to comic.
The Idle Woman 