(British Museum, until 25 November)
Even though I’m a bit of a Bardophile, I make the mistake of looking at Shakespeare’s plays as texts, rather than as expressions of a living, vivid, turbulent world. When I watch Romeo and Juliet, or As You Like It, or The Merchant of Venice, I focus on the world that Shakespeare is creating, rather than the world that created him. And that’s where this exhibition provides a really interesting counter-balance.
(National Portrait Gallery, London, until 23 September 2012)
Once again it’s time for the annual BP Portrait Award exhibition. These shows are always popular, partly because they’re free and partly because it’s part of human nature to be fascinated by images of other people. You find yourself trying to tease out the stories behind the portraits, to judge the character of the person represented, or the relationship between artist and sitter.
(Goldsmiths’ Hall, London, until 28 July 2012)
Publicity for this exhibition has been rather limited – I only found out about it because I spotted a poster while going up a Tube escalator one day – which is a shame, because it really is something not to be missed. It’s an unprecedented show of almost 500 gold objects, the vast majority of which were made in Britain, showing the versatility and skill of the goldsmith’s craft over the last 4,500 years.
(Courtauld Gallery, London, until 9 September 2012)
Over the last few years the Courtauld has become renowned for small-scale exhibitions, which often use works from its enviable collection as springboards to explore particular themes. Recent personal favourites include Love and Marriage in Renaissance Florence, which focused on 15th-century cassone paintings, and the wonderful Michelangelo’s Dream, which used Il Sogno as the basis of a discussion of Michelangelo’s presentation drawings made for friends. Both shows included loans from other collections alongside items from the Courtauld’s holdings, but the new exhibition is dedicated to the Courtauld’s own drawings (as was the recent show Spanish Drawings at the Courtauld Gallery).
(Hampton Court Palace, until 30 September 2012)
First things first. What a great title. Who could resist that? And then there is the poster, plastered across the Underground, which has been cleverly designed to show bare skin, unbound hair and rumpled sheets, without outraging the modesty of Tube bosses (who banned the comparatively inoffensive nudity of the Royal Academy’s Cranach poster back in 2008). Beauty, lust, power, debauchery and a day out; what could be better?
(Wallace Collection, London, until 16 September 2012)
Precisely focused both in historical period and subject, this exhibition gives a glimpse of the social culture of swordsmanship that existed in Europe between about 1550 and 1610. It traces the development of the rapier from the broader, shorter swords of the early Renaissance and late medieval period. This wasn’t just a stylistic development: it heralded a completely different approach to the handling of the sword.
(The Queen’s Gallery, London, until 7 October 2012)
We’ve been well and truly spoiled for Leonardo this year and it’s only six months in. There has been the blockbuster exhibition at the National Gallery, the exhibition in Turin at the same time, the Louvre’s show based around The Virgin and Child with St Anne, the touring exhibition of Leonardo’s drawings around Britain in celebration of Prince Charles’s 60th birthday, and now this show of his anatomical drawings at the Queen’s Gallery.
(National Portrait Gallery, until 28 May)
I haven’t seen many exhibitions recently, so I was grateful when a more efficient friend invited me along to see the Lucian Freud: Portraits exhibition at the NPG. I must find an opportunity next week to see Hockney at the Royal Academy before that closes, because we’re lucky to have retrospectives of Britain’s two great modern artists barely a ten minute walk from each other. The two artists were friends, as well as contemporaries, so it should throw an extra interesting light on both.
(Embankment Galleries, Somerset House, until 11 December)
I’ve already mentioned this exhibition in the context of the wonderful portraits of Pierre Gonnord, who is one of the photographers who’s donated his work to be sold in aid of Venice in Peril. When I wrote about Pierre Gonnord, I hadn’t actually been to see the show and had fallen in love with his photographs via the rather less imposing medium of the internet. However, last Saturday, after visiting the Leonardo exhibition and then managing to get caught up in the Lord Mayor’s Show (which was great!), I finally made it to Somerset House.
Yesterday morning, at 8:30am, a full hour and a half before the gallery opened, I joined the queue which was already snaking around the National Gallery’s Sainsbury Wing. The hype in the press about this exhibition has been cranked up to fever-pitch and all advance tickets have now been sold. The only way to get in to see it is to queue on a morning in the hope of getting one of 500 tickets released every day. The anticipation and excitement in the queue were electric, and it was wonderful to be there with people who had gone to such great extremes to get tickets. One woman had come down from Nottingham and had got up at 3:30am in order to get to London on time to queue.
The Idle Woman 