Tag: art

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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The Land of the Leopard (Sicily)

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 Trinacria, Sicily

This is going to be a long one, because I’m bubbling over with enthusiasm. I’ve just returned from a marvellous week in Sicily with my parents, who had very kindly taken pity on me and invited me to join them on Voyages Jules Verne’s ‘Treasures of Sicily’ tour. This post therefore has two parts: the first focuses on Sicily itself and the places we visited, while the second part focuses on my experience of travelling with an organised group.

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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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BP Portrait Award 2012

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Cumberland: Self Portrait

(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.

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Master Drawings from the Courtauld Gallery (2012)

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Michelangelo: Il Sogno

(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).

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The Wild, the Beautiful and the Damned (2012)

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Lely: Frances Stuart

(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?

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Leonardo da Vinci: Anatomist (2012)

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Leonardo: Study of a skull

(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.

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Lucian Freud: Portraits (2012)

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Freud Caroline Blackwood

(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.

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