Tag Archives: Museum Exhibits

Reviews: ‘The Week In Art’

March 31, 2023: The Art Newspaper’s annual report on museum visitor figures around the world has been published.

We talk to Lee Cheshire, who co-edited the report, and to Charles Saumarez Smith, a former director or chief executive of three London museums and galleries—the National Portrait Gallery, National Gallery and Royal Academy of Arts—about how important the figures are to museums and whether they are a valid gauge of institutions’ success.

The exhibition Manet/Degas opened at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris this week, before travelling later in the year to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Ben Luke visits the show in Paris and speaks to Laurence des Cars, the former director of the Musée d’Orsay and now president-director of the Musée du Louvre, and Stéphane Guégan, the co-curator of the exhibition.

And in London, a show of the paintings of Berthe Morisot, the pioneering Impressionist with artistic and familial connections to Manet and Degas, has opened at the Dulwich Picture Gallery.

This episode’s Work of the Week is Morisot’s Woman at Her Toilette (1875-80). Lois Oliver, the curator of the exhibition in Dulwich, tells us about this pivotal picture.Manet/Degas, Musée d’Orsay, Paris, until 23 July; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 24 September-7 January 2024Berthe Morisot: Shaping Impressionism, Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, until 10 September, Musée Marmottan Monet later in 2023 (dates to be announced). 

Reviews: ‘The Week In Art’

March 24, 2023: This week: Art Basel Hong Kong bounces back. After cancellations, delays and two years of restricted fairs, the fair has returned to something like pre-Covid normality.

So, as other Asian art centres like Seoul and Singapore become increasingly influential, what is the atmosphere like in Hong Kong? Gareth Harris, chief contributing editor at The Art Newspaper, joins us to discuss the fair, the M+ museum and more. It is becoming increasingly clear that social media corporations have become self-appointed cultural gatekeepers that decide which works of art can freely circulate, be pushed into the digital margins or even banned.

Our live editor, Aimee Dawson, talks to the artist Emma Shapiro and Elizabeth Larison, the Director of the Arts & Culture Advocacy Program at the National Coalition Against Censorship, about the issue and a project to counter this tendency, called Don’t Delete Art. And this episode’s Work of the Week is Naabami (thou shall/will see): Barangaroo (army of me), a photographic project by Brenda L. Croft, in which she depicts fellow First Nations women and girls.

The work is part of The National 4: Australian Art Now, a survey across multiple venues in Sydney. One of the show’s curators, Beatrice Gralton, tells us about Croft’s epic series.Art Basel Hong Kong, until 25 March.Visit Don’t Delete Art: dontdelete.artThe National 4: Australian Art Now continues until 23 July. 

Interviews: British Artist Cecily Brown At The Met

The Metropolitan Museum of Art (March 19, 2023) – Go behind the scenes with artist Cecily Brown, who discusses the inspiration and making of Cecily Brown: Death and the Maid, the first full-fledged museum survey of Brown’s work in New York since she made the city her home.

Cecily Brown: Death and the Maid assembles a select group of some fifty paintings, drawings, sketchbooks, and monotypes from across her career to explore the intertwined themes of still life, memento mori, mirroring, and vanitas—symbolic depictions of human vanity or life’s brevity—that have propelled her dynamic and impactful practice for decades. On view April 4th, 2023 through December 3rd, 2023.

Learn more about the exhibition: https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions…

Reviews: ‘The Week In Art’

March 17, 2023: the extraordinary story behind what Canadian police have called “the biggest art fraud in history”. More than 1,000 fake works purporting to be by the First Nations artist Norval Morrisseau are seized and eight people have been charged.

The Art Newspaper’s Editor, Americas, Ben Sutton, tells the extraordinary story, involving a rock star, a television documentary and alleged forgery rings, and what it tells us about the market for First Nations art in Canada. A report into artists’ pay in the UK has exposed the inordinately low sums paid to artists for their labour by arts organisations.

We talk to the art collective Industria, who wrote the report, and Julie Lomax, the CEO of a-n, The Artists’ Information Company, which has published the study. And this episode’s Work of the Week is An Old Woman (around 1513) by the Northern Renaissance artist Quinten Massys, a painting better known as The Ugly Duchess.

A new exhibition at the National Gallery focuses on this work in its collection, exploring its origins in a drawing by Leonardo da Vinci, and the combination of satire, folklore, humanism and misogyny from which it emerged. Emma Capron, the curator of the show, tells us more.A PDF of Industria’s Structurally F–cked report can be found at a-n.co.uk. Industria’s website is we-industria.org.The Ugly Duchess: Beauty and Satire in the Renaissance, National Gallery, London, until 11 June.

Reviews: ‘The Week In Art’

March 10, 2023: Is the Old Masters market struggling? As Tefaf opens its fair in Maastricht, we look at this major moment in the market calendar and what it tells us about the strength or otherwise of the market for historic art.

The Art Newspaper’s Acting Art Market editor, Anny Shaw, joins us from the fair. The Institut du Monde Arabe, or Arab World Institute, in Paris has just received a major gift of more than 1,600 modern and contemporary works from the French-Lebanese dealer and collector Claude Lemand and his wife, France—a collection that will transform the displays in the institute’s museum. We talk to the director of the museum,

Nathalie Bondil, about her future plans and the €6m project to transform the institute. And this episode’s Work of the Week is a self-portrait in red chalk by the Venetian Rococo artist Rosalba Carriera. Dagmar Kornbacher, the director of the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin, tells me about the drawing, which is a key work in Muse or Maestra?, the museum’s new exhibition of work by historic Italian women artists.Tefaf Maastricht, until 19 March.Muse or Maestra?: Women in the Italian Art World, 1400-1800, Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin, until 4 June. 

Reviews: ‘The Week In Art’

March 3, 2023: as the Art Dubai fair opens, The Art Newspaper’s acting digital editor Aimee Dawson tells us about this latest edition, its ongoing commitment to displaying the art of the global south and its continued focus on digital art.

The Museum of Modern Art in New York opens the largest media exhibition it has ever staged, Signals: How Video Transformed the World on 5 March. It looks at how artists around the globe have used video as a networked technology capable of reaching huge audiences but also how they have employed video to reflect on or engage in activism and urgent political developments.

We talk to the show’s curators, Stuart Comer and Michelle Kuo. And this episode’s Work of the Week is a coffee pot and milk jug from 1960 by Lucie Rie, the great modernist potter. Eliza Spindel, co-curator of the exhibition Lucie Rie: The Adventure of Pottery at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge, UK, tells us about these objects and Rie’s life and work.Art Dubai until 5 March.Signals: How Video Transformed the World, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 5 March-8 July.Lucie Rie: The Adventure of Pottery, Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, UK, 4 March-25 June. 

Reviews: ‘The Week In Art’

The Week In Art Podcast (February 24, 2023): Nigeria heads to the polls this weekend; what are the implications for its museums and art scene?

Dolly Kola-Balogun, director of the Retro Africa gallery in Abuja, reflects on the candidates and discusses the importance of art, and culture more widely, to the country’s future. We also talk to Patrick Bringley, the author of a new book All the Beauty in the World: the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me, in which he reflects on his experiences as a guard at the museum and coming to terms with the loss of his brother.

And this episode’s Work of the Week is Boats in Front of the Grotto in the Park at Méréville by Hubert Robert. It features in The Garden: Six Centuries of Art and Nature at the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, whose curator, Magnus Olausson, tells us about the painting.All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me, by Patrick Bringley, Simon and Schuster (US) $27.99, out now. The Bodley Head (UK), £20, 16 March.The Garden—Six Centuries of Art and Nature, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, Sweden, until 7 January 2024. 

International Art: Apollo Magazine – February 2023

Apollo Magazine – February 2023:

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  • How Christopher Wren built his reputation
  • The changing face of Silicon Valley
  • An interview with Zineb Sedira
  • The tiger who smoked a pipe
  • Plus: the uncertain market for Old Masters, the Cambridge colleges that have turned to wood, the artists who have taken young women seriously, and reviews of Guido Reni, Edward Hopper and the new museum at the Bibliothèque nationale

Reviews: ‘The Week In Art’

January 13, 2023: In the first episode of the year, we look ahead at the next 12 months. Anny Shaw, the acting art market editor at The Art Newspaper, peers into her crystal ball and tries to predict the fortunes of the art market this year.

Then, Jane Morris, one of our editors-at-large, José da Silva, our exhibitions editor, and host Ben Luke select the museum projects, biennales and exhibitions that they are most looking forward to in 2023.Events discussed:

  • The Grand Egyptian Museum: no confirmed opening date.
  • \The National Portrait Gallery reopens on 22 June.
  • Factory International, Manchester, also opens in June.
  • Yayoi Kusama’s You Me and the Balloons opens there on 29 June, as does the Manchester International Festival.
  • The Sharjah Biennial: Thinking Historically in the Present opens on 7 February.
  • The Gwangju Biennial: Soft and Weak Like Water opens on 7 April.
  • Celebration Picasso 1973-2023
  • Vermeer opens at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, on 10 February.

Reviews: ‘The Week In Art’

This week: we talk to Emma Brown of Just Stop Oil about why the group targeted Vincent Van Gogh’s Sunflowers in the National Gallery, London, for its climate emergency protest.

Stacy Boldrick, assistant professor of museum studies at the University of Leicester, discusses the climate protests in the context of the long history of iconoclasm and attacks on works of art. The first version of Paris+, Art Basel’s fair in the French capital, opened this week, and we ask Melanie Gerlis, a columnist for the Financial Times and The Art Newspaper, how it compares to Paris’s previous fair, Fiac, and to the Frieze fairs in London last week.

And this episode’s Work of the Week is Frank Bowling’s Suncrush (1976), which features in an exhibition of the Guyana-born artist’s work at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Reto Thüring, the curator of the show, tells us about the painting and Bowling’s 10-year stay in America in the 1960s and 1970s.

Links:juststopoil.orgStacy Boldrick, Iconoclasm and the Museum, Routledge, 212pp, £27.99, $35.96 (pb)Paris+, until 23 October.Melanie Gerlis, The Art Fair Story: a Rollercoaster Ride, Lund Humphries, 104pp, £19.99, $34.99 (hb)Frank Bowling’s Americas, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 22 October-9 April 2023; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 13 May-10 September next year. Related shows: Equals 6: A Sum Effect of Frank Bowling’s 5+1, University Hall Gallery, UMass Boston, 14 November-18 February 2023; Revisiting 5+1, Paul W. Zuccaire Gallery, Staller Center for the Arts, Stony Brook University, 10 November-23 February 2023.