Category: Exhibitions

Fantasy and Invention (2013)

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Vasari: Lorenzo de' Medici

Rosso Fiorentino and Sixteenth-Century Florentine Drawing

(The Morgan Library, New York, until 3 February 2013)

Current service has been temporarily interrupted by a business trip to New York, but even there I did my best to keep up the ‘idle’ spirit. On the afternoon of my arrival, I hotfooted it down Madison Avenue to the Morgan, hoping to keep the jetlag at bay by looking at some wonderful drawings. This January’s crop of exhibitions in New York aren’t as focused on the Old Masters as they were last year, and so the show at the Morgan was the one that bore the brunt of my expectations. I was a little disappointed to find that it took up only one room and there was no catalogue; but, nevertheless, that one room contained some beautiful things, many of which I hadn’t seen before. The purpose of the exhibition was to trace the development of Florentine drawing as it grew out of the Renaissance tradition into the full, eccentric bloom of Mannerism.

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Late Raphael (2012-13)

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Raphael: Self Portrait with a friend

(Musée du Louvre, Paris, until 14 January 2013)

The things I do for art! Yesterday I got up horrendously early and went to Paris for the day, to visit the Louvre’s Late Raphael exhibition before it closed (yes, I took the Eurostar from London, went to the Louvre, saw the exhibition and took the train right back home again: there’s something faintly surreal about it). Previously at the Prado, this is the natural successor of the National Gallery’s 2004-5 show Raphael: From Urbino to Rome.

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Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde (2012-13)

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Burne-Jones: The Rock of Doom

(Tate Britain, London, until 13 January 2013)

The Pre-Raphaelites were responsible for getting me into art history in the first place. As a teenager I fell in love with their dreamy evocations of Shakespearean and historical subjects, captivated first by the stories rather than the pictures themselves. Although I know many of their paintings extremely well, I haven’t really thought about them in context before and so this highly-acclaimed exhibition offered a chance to look more closely at the principles, motives and aims of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. It’s a tough job: many of these images are so famous, so seared onto our national consciousness, that it’s virtually impossible to judge them from the necessary distance.

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Hollywood Costume (2012-13)

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Hollywood Costume

(Victoria & Albert Museum, until 27 January 2013)

The V&A have assembled more than 100 of the most famous costumes in film history for their winter exhibition, which is unsurprisingly very popular and consequently very crowded. The selection seems to have been guided by no real principle, beyond the admirable one of trying to include examples from as many different genres and periods as possible. The purpose of the exhibition is to use these outfits as a framework, to educate the general public about the process of designing costumes for the movies.

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The Lost Prince: The Life & Death of Henry Stuart (2012-13)

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Oliver: Henry Stuart, Prince of Wales

(National Portrait Gallery, London, until 13 January 2013)

No expense was spared to educate Henry Stuart, the eldest son of James I and the future Henry IX of England. Thanks to the efforts of his tutors, friends and courtiers he showed every sign of growing up to be a perfect example of the Renaissance prince.  He was tutored in history and the classics, and his adoring father wrote a manual for him, the Basilikon Doron, which offered advice on good governance (the original manuscript is in this exhibition).

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The Northern Renaissance: Dürer to Holbein (2012-13)

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Holbein: William Reskimer

(Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, until 14 April 2013)

Back in 2008, the Queen’s Gallery put on the splendid exhibition The Art of Italy, in which the Royal Collection showed off its wealth of Renaissance and Baroque Italian paintings and drawings, assembled over four hundred years by an Italophile monarchy. It was the first exhibition I saw at the Gallery and I remember being amazed by the richness of the Collection’s holdings. The Northern Renaissance is the natural successor to that 2008 show and, while it includes some glorious objects, it is of necessity a more modest exhibition than its predecessor. It comprises 110 exhibits (compared to The Art of Italy‘s 153), of which 22 are prints rather than unique works and seven are arguably Italian rather than Northern.

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Metamorphosis: Titian 2012

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Metamorphosis: Titian

(National Gallery, London, until today)

Sometimes I get it wrong. Sometimes I jump to conclusions about what I will or won’t like and almost do myself out of the chance to see something interesting. This exhibition has been on since July, as an Olympic-related arts collaboration, and yet I hadn’t troubled to take a short bus journey to Trafalgar Square to see it. This is largely because I thought the point of the show was to reinterpret Titian’s paintings and, to be honest, I like Titian just as he is. In fact, having done my MA on Titian, I was rather annoyed at the implication that contemporary artists were somehow making him more relevant by transforming his works. However, I hold up my hands: I misunderstood.

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Bronze (2012)

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Chimera of Arezzo

(Royal Academy, London, until 9 December 2012)

Fate has a sense of humour. One of the things I would have loved to see in Sicily was the Dancing Satyr in Mazara del Vallo: the beautiful bronze which was pulled out of the Mediterranean by a fishing boat in 1998. Of course, with only five days on hand, we couldn’t trek across country simply for the sake of seeing one bronze statue, so I quietly added it to my list for my next visit. So imagine my surprise and delight this afternoon, when I stepped into the first room of the Royal Academy’s new exhibition, Bronze.

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From Paris: A Taste for Impressionism (2012)

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Renoir: Girl with a Fan

(Royal Academy, London, until 23 September 2012)

The current exhibition at the RA presents a selection of 19th-century French paintings from the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, MA. The marketing department clearly chose the title to focus on the most popular aspect of the show, but there are also works from the Barbizon School and a handful of Orientalist paintings at the end. The show’s main purpose is to give us a glimpse of the collecting taste of the Institute’s founders.

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Another London (2012)

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Davidson: Girl with Kitten

International Photographers Capture City Life 1930-1980

(Tate Britain, until 16 September 2012)

The haunting image stares out from posters all over London at the moment. Even though she isn’t looking at the camera, but somewhere off over the viewer’s right shoulder, there’s something captivating about her eyes. Large, wary and so, so vulnerable. Standing alone by the side of a road, with a rolled sleeping bag on her shoulder, she cradles a tiny kitten in skinny hands. It has a collar made from a rough piece of twine. Two strays, you might say, bound together by a little piece of string.

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