mon 02/12/2024

Post-Impressionism

Vanessa Bell, MK Gallery review - diving into and out of abstraction

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....

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After Impressionism: Inventing Modern Art, National Gallery review - an impressive tour de force

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-...

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Camille Laurens: Little Dancer Aged Fourteen review - the story of a sculpture

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...

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Gauguin Portraits, National Gallery review - me, myself and I

“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...

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Van Gogh and Britain, Tate Britain review - tenuous but still persuasive

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...

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Roderic O’Conor and the Moderns, National Gallery of Ireland review - experiments in Pont-Aven

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...

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Cézanne Portraits, National Portrait Gallery review - eye-opening and heart-breaking

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...

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Delacroix and the Rise of Modern Art, National Gallery

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...

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Painting the Modern Garden, Royal Academy

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...

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Emily Carr, Dulwich Picture Gallery

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...

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The Fall of the House of Usher, Welsh National Opera

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...

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Collecting Gauguin, Courtauld Gallery

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...

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