‘It is desirable for a Painter, at least once in his life, to witness the Eruption of a volcano.’ – Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes (1799). Join exhibition contributor Clive Oppenheimer, Professor of Volcanology at the Department of Geography at the University of Cambridge, and explore the ‘Volcanoes’ section of True to Nature. #TrueToNature is open at the Fitzwilliam Museum until 29 August 2022 https://fitz.ms/ttn
Category Archives: Exhibitions
Getty Art + Ideas Podcast: “Imagining The Afterlife”
“The underworld, the afterlife, is fairly dank, dark, shadowy; quite frankly, it’s a bit boring. Somewhat like waiting at a bus depot.”
Homer’s Odyssey depicts an afterlife that is relatively dull, with heroic actions and glory reserved for the living. Nonetheless, people in Southern Italy in the fourth century BCE were captivated by the underworld and decorated large funerary vases with scenes of the afterlife—the domain of Hades and Persephone, where sinners like Sisyphus are tortured for eternity and heroes like Herakles and Orpheus performed daring feats.
Little is known about precisely how these vases were used and seen in death rituals. A new book by Getty Publications, Underworld: Imagining the Afterlife in Ancient South Italian Vase Painting, brings together 40 such vases and explores new research on them.
In this episode, Getty Museum curator of antiquities David Saunders discusses these enormous and often elaborate vases, explaining the myths they depict and what is known about the ways in which they were used. Saunders is editor of Underworld.
For images, transcripts, and more, visit https://blogs.getty.edu/iris/podcast-imagining-the-afterlife-through-ancient-vases/ or http://www.getty.edu/podcasts
To buy the book Underworld: Imagining the Afterlife in Ancient South Italian Vase Painting, visit https://shop.getty.edu/products/underworld-imagining-the-afterlife-in-ancient-south-italian-vase-painting-978-1606067345
To learn more about the exhibition, visit
Reviews: ‘The Week In Art’
On 29 June, Frieze announced the details of the first edition of its art fair in Seoul, South Korea. So for this last episode of the current season, we’re exploring the art scene and market in the Korean capital.
Ben Luke talks to the art historian and curator Jiyoon Lee about contemporary art in Seoul and beyond, and the origins of the current art scene in 1990s globalisation. The Art Newspaper’s associate editor, Kabir Jhala, speaks to two gallerists—Joorhee Kwon, deputy director at the Kukje Gallery and Emma Son, senior director at Lehmann Maupin, about the growing market and collector base, and the effect Frieze may have on the existing scene.
And this episode’s Work of the Week is Dahye Jeong’s A Time of Sincerity, a basket made with horsehair that this week won the Loewe Foundation Craft Prize. Kabir talks to the creative director at the fashion brand Loewe, Jonathan Anderson, about Jeong’s piece.
Frieze Seoul, COEX, Seoul, 2-5 September.
The Space Between: The Modern in Korean Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 11 September-19 February 2023.
The 2022 Loewe Foundation Craft Prize, Seoul Museum of Craft Art, until 31 July.
Views: Galerie d’Apollon In The Louvre Museum, Paris
King Louis XIV famously identified himself with the sun god Apollo and this splendid gallery was the first tangible representation of that image. To create this masterpiece of architectural decoration, he summoned the greatest painters, gilders and sculptors of the day, who later worked on the Hall of Mirrors at the Château de Versailles. Today, the Galerie d’Apollon is home to the royal collection of hardstone vessels and the French Crown Jewels.
The French Crown Jewels
The royal collection also includes the Crown Jewels. The so-called ‘Côte de Bretagne’ spinel, which once belonged to Anne de Bretagne, is the oldest of the gems to have survived a tumultuous history involving theft, dispersal and sale. Three historical diamonds – the Regent, the Sancy and the Hortensia – formerly adorned royal crowns or garments. The spectacular 19th-century jewellery sets in the collection include emerald and diamond pieces that once belonged to Empress Marie Louise.
The 60-meter-long Apollo Gallery contains 105 extraordinary pieces, the most famous being the Crown Jewels of France. “This generic term covers not just the jewels that belonged to the kings of France but all the regalia as well: the precious stones and glyptic pieces,” says Pierre Rainero, director of style and heritage with the jeweler Cartier, which has sponsored the renovation work.
International Art: Apollo Magazine – July/Aug 2022
• The Russian artists making a stand against the war
• An interview with Gabriele Finaldi, director of the National Gallery
• The miniature marvels of Charles Paget Wade
• A Yoruba masterpiece in focus
Plus: London’s art market after Brexit, the Huntington Library comes up to speed, the beauty of banality, and reviews of Maillol’s sculptures, gilded manuscripts and Van Leo’s photographs of Cairo
Online Exhibitions: ‘Made In Chicago Museum’ (2022)
This short film by Martin Mulcahy was created for the launch of the 2022-23 exhibition of the Made In Chicago Museum, currently running at Klairmont Kollections, 3117 N. Knox Ave., Chicago, IL.
The film, the museum exhibit, and the corresponding online museum, highlight the many “everyday objects” manufactured by Chicago companies between 1900-1970, bringing to life the stories behind them and the legacy of items we might otherwise view as obsolete (or at best, “vintage”).
The Made In Chicago Museum was founded and curated by Andrew Clayman, and design elements of the exhibit, including this short film, are the work of Chicago designer and filmmaker Martin Mulcahy. For more, visit https://www.madeinchicagomuseum.com/
Art Exhibits: ‘The Red Studio’ By Henri Matisse
Henri Matisse’s landmark painting “The Red Studio” documented the artworks displayed in his workspace just outside Paris as it existed in 1911. For the first time since then, almost all the individual pieces depicted in his painting have been reunited for an installation at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Correspondent Rita Braver reports.
Reviews: The Week In Art
This week: our associate editor, Kabir Jhala, and editor-at-large, Jane Morris, have been in Kassel, Germany, to see Documenta, the quinquennial international art exhibition.
They review the show and respond to the escalation of a long-running row over antisemitism and broader racism, which has resulted in a work being removed from the exhibition. Virginia Rutledge, an art historian and lawyer, discusses the dispute over Andy Warhol’s appropriation of a photograph by Lynn Goldsmith of the pop icon Prince. The case will be heard in the US Supreme Court this autumn and has potentially huge implications for artistic freedom. And this episode’s Work of the Week is An Outpost of Progress (1992), a drawing by the late Spanish artist Juan Muñoz, inspired by Joseph Conrad’s short story of the same name.
Documenta 15, Kassel, Germany, until 25 September.
Juan Muñoz: Drawings 1982-2000, Centro Botín, Santander, Spain, 25 June-16 October.
Views: The New National Museum Of Norway, Oslo
The Norwegian capital Oslo is getting a new national museum for classical and modern art, architecture and design. The museum’s collection includes around 100,000 objects, ranging from medieval tapestries to modern design classics and contemporary artworks.
There will be rooms dedicated to, among others, the works of Edvard Munch , including “The Scream,” 19th-century landscape painting, royal robes worn by the Norwegian queens, as well as works by prominent artists, such as Gustav Vigeland, Hannah Ryggen, Claude Monet, Vincent Van Gogh and Ida Ekblad.
Reviews: ‘The Week In Art’
This week: why is Tate rejecting an archive of material relating to Francis Bacon, 18 years after acquiring it?
Our London correspondent Martin Bailey tells us about his recent scoop that Tate is returning a thousand documents and sketches said to have come from the studio of Francis Bacon to Barry Joule, a close friend of the artist, who donated them to Tate in 2004. We then discuss the material with Martin Harrison, the pre-eminent Bacon scholar and editor of the catalogue raisonné of Francis Bacon’s work published in 2016, and to Sophie Pretorius, the archivist at the Estate of Francis Bacon, who went through the Barry Joule archive item by item. Victoria Munro, the director of the Alice Austen House Museum in New York, discusses this still too-little-known photographer, and her documentation of immigration to the United States and the lives of queer women in the 19th and early 20th centuries. And this episode’s Work of the Week is Weißes Bild (1994), a painting by the late Luxembourg-born artist Michel Majerus, now on view at Art Basel—Aimee Dawson, acting digital editor, is at the fair and talks to Giovanni Carmine, curator of the Unlimited section, in which the painting appears.
Sophie Pretorius’s essay Work on the Barry Joule Archive is in the book Francis Bacon: Shadows published by the Estate of Francis Bacon and Thames and Hudson.
For more on the Alice Austen House Museum, visit aliceausten.org. The podcast My Dear Alice is out in the autumn.
Art Basel, until 19 June.
Boomers Daily 