Once a hunting lodge for the Bourbon monarchs, the Museo di Capodimonte in Naples is now home to one of the world’s most significant collections of Italian painting. This exhibition at the Musée Louvre in Paris (7 June–8 January 2024) brings more than 60 masterpieces from the museum to France. Highlights of the paintings on view include Parmigianino’s Portrait of a Young Girl (or Antea) (1524–27) and Guido Reni’s Atalanta and Hippomenes (1620–25).
The Burlington Magazine – May 2023: Anxiety about the future of the two great photographic libraries housed in the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, can be traced back at least thirty years. In October 1992 we published an Editorial, ‘The Witt and Conway libraries under threat’, which was prompted by a demand from the University of London that the Courtauld – not yet a self-governing and self-financing entity – produce a business plan that would show how the libraries could develop commercial opportunities to offset a threatened reduction in university funding.
Mey Rahola: Desire for Horizons
Although Mey Rahola (1897–1959) was one of the first women to become renowned for art photography in Spain, she remains a little-known figure today. Two linked exhibitions with a single catalogue dedicated to the Catalan photographer set out to rectify this and liberate an overlooked artist from the shadow of anonymity. Working with Rahola’s family, the curators, Lluís Bertran Xirau and Roser Martínez Garcia, have assembled 550 items from her collection, including 250 negatives and a number of photograph albums. That this material had been handed down and divided between the artist’s friends and family is testimony to her interest in her posterity. The fact that, nonetheless, Rahola has remained largely unknown, one is reminded in the exhibition catalogue, is a result partly of her status as a female photographer operating in the early twentieth century and partly of the events of the Spanish Civil War, which ruptured her burgeoning career.
The Bayeux Tapestry photographed
Enrolment in the humanities is tumbling across the United States, but the numbers for fine art are still holding up
The hunt is on for an epic mural depicting ‘Country Life in Britain’ – but chances are it’s a wild goose chase
Finland’s most important art museum has been completely rehung just as questions of culture and national identity are on everyone’s mind
The Burlington Magazine – April 2023: Few paintings capture the exhilaration of the arrival of spring as powerfully as Vincent van Gogh’s ‘Orchard in blossom, bordered by cypresses’, a detail of which is on the cover of our newly published April issue.
The manifold collections of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, include rich holdings of the decorative arts, international in scope, with a natural bias towards the Netherlands. But unlike the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, the Museum für angewandte Kunst, Vienna, and the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, products of the nineteenth-century campaign to improve design, the Rijksmuseum, a national museum of art and history, had no strong motive to collect design drawings (although the Rijksprentenkabinet, housed in the museum, contains one of the world’s great assemblages of engraved ornament).
An air of anticipation has greeted the fourth anniversary of the fire that broke out on 15th April 2019 and destroyed the medieval roof of Notre-Dame, Paris, together with its flèche, designed by Eugène Viollet-le-Duc in 1859. The main controversies surrounding the restoration having been settled – as reported in this Magazine, in July 2020 the French government announced that the roof and flèche will be rebuilt as they were, using the same materials as the original – attention has turned to the discoveries being made and to the restoration process.
Aesthetica Magazine (April/May 2023) – Inside this issue, we consider identity, relationships and the impact of technology. We discuss the persistence of images and their ability to embed themselves in collective memory in Thomas Demand’s retrospective,
The Stutter of History. Refik Anadol speaks to us about the relationship between humans and machines, exploring the influence of art and creativity, as we rely more and more on AI to guide us through our lives. What does the future look like in this new world? Should we embrace it or fear it? Also, I am pleased to bring you an overview of this year’s shortlisted artists for the Aesthetica Art Prize 2023.
Thomas Demand highlights the fiction beneath attempts to document the truth, questioning the power and responsibility behind art and its maker.
Gareth Iwan Jones’ fascination with woodland ecocystems inspired enchanting scenes that document the beauty and mystery of forests.
A show of paintings belonging to his most important patron reflects the artist’s quietly spirited side
The Burlington Magazine – March 2023:
The sketchbooks Delacroix kept on his travels to Morocco and Andalusia in 1832.
If asked to name the most successful exhibition of contemporary German art, few people would intuitively think of an exhibition presenting vivid reconstructions of the polychromy of ancient Greek and Roman sculpture.
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 5th July 2022–26th March 2023
ART IN AMERICA MAGAZINE – MARCH 2023 – The artwork on the cover of this issue looks pretty simple: an elegant arrangement of colorful, cartoon-like flowers. Pretty it is; simple it most certainly is not. Artist Jill Magid scoured the digital worlds of hundreds of video games—from Super Mario to Minecraft—and selected pixelated plants and photo-realistic flowers from virtual landscapes that she then assembled into bouquets worthy of the fanciest dinner party.
After that, she took the resulting images and crafted her first series of NFT-backed artworks, which dropped on Valentine’s Day. The collection comprises 165 animated bouquets, including one that you can view online at artwrld.com and on Art in America’s Instagram, where Magid has generously collaborated with us on our first animated cover.
An exhibition in Rome recounts the complicated tale of efforts to safeguard masterpieces across the country during the Second World War
Our hand-picked selection of ancient Egyptian treasures includes a breastplate once worn by an actual pharaoh and a glittering golden crocodile
It is now forty years since Melina Mercouri, the Greek Minister for Culture from 1981 to 1989, famous also as a film star and singer, addressed UNESCO’s World Conference on Cultural Policies to draw international attention to the campaign with which she would be identified until her death in 1994, the repatriation to Athens of the Parthenon sculptures in the British Museum. ‘We are not asking for the return of a painting or a statue’, she said: ‘We are asking for the return of a portion of a unique monument, the privileged symbol of a whole culture’.
As images, ancient Roman wall paintings command attention for their bold compositions, vibrant and saturated colours, convincing naturalism and the fantastical mythologies they depict. As objects they also captivate for the dramatic circumstances surrounding their near- destruction, the miracle (or rarity) of their survival and the alchemical nature of lime plaster and pigment.
Boomers Daily 