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Last art exhibition you visited?


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"It's interesting - the difference in seeing the work in the flesh. The artist that surprised me most was Dali I think, due to the small scale... sometimes it can be disappointing - I know it sounds ridiculous, but even when I visited the Great Pyramid it was a bit of an anti-climax, I couldn't really grasp the scale or something - due to over-familiarity"

"Actually much of Dali's later work, as well as Metamorphosis of Narcissus, look just fine in person. But after seeing it for most of one's college years on dorm room posters, Persistance of Memory is a let down. It is tiny and you can't see it particularly well in a museum setting as everyone else is crowding in."

The opposite can also be true. I'm no art expert (my interest does not go much beyond reacting to classical LP covers and the links with the history of the time the paintings come from), but I recall seeing the Impressionist paintings in Paris in the very early 80s before they moved into the big railway station and being stunned by Van Gogh and Renoir. With the latter it was the way he portrayed the play of light on leaves so perfectly.

Oh definitely. Even some of the abstract expressionists, particularly Pollack and Guston, have many paintings that are essentially three dimensional because of the heavy, heavy layering of paint. They come across considerably better in person. And don't forget Ad Reinhardt who started intentionally painting black on black so that it couldn't be reproduced well and one had to see it at a gallery. (This happens to be an idea that is perhaps more powerful than the actual work itself. For some reason -- perhaps as an in-joke -- the MoMA catalog actually has one of these black-on-black paintings, when they really should have given the page over to something else.)

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Today I used my Portland Art Museum membership to see (on the very last day) Thomas Moran's Shashone Falls on the Snake River, big epic 19th C. landscape - very vivd light & shadow on water and rocks and sky. Also a couple of nice Monets on loan, one water lillies, one not.

Moran was a magnificent American artist, who incidentally was born in Bolton, about ten miles from here. I think this is the Portland Moran:

Shoshone_Falls.jpg

Bolton Art Gallery has some of his paintings and I saw more at this magnificent exhibition at Tate Britain a few years ago:

51X0VA6T0QL._SL500_AA300_.jpg

Edited by BillF
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  • 3 weeks later...

Was in that London for work yesterday, so snuck off in the p.m. to the Courtauld, after the praise it got in the thread on Sickert.... Great museum indeed! Vlaminck totally different in the flesh - and coming as it did after the post-impressionist room, you could really see where the name 'Wild Beasts' came from. There was a painting in the expressionist room by a woman of a young girl which was extraordinary - almost 3 dimensional, but I can't remember the artist's name - she died shortly after childbirth and did a lot of paintings of the innocence of childhood... (anyone know?)

And another surprise (to me) was a landscape by Renoir that looked very Van Gogh-like. Can't remember the title to that either... :huh:

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Was in that London for work yesterday, so snuck off in the p.m. to the Courtauld, after the praise it got in the thread on Sickert....

Yeah, I really like that gallery.

Anyway, I saw the Jim Nutt exhibit that just opened at the MCA. Interesting approach is that half the 4th floor is given over to artists inspired by Nutt and the Hairy Who more generally. And that was ok. But the other half is all Nutt, all the time. Just not that impressed with his work overall and frankly bored with his recent work.

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Last really great exh. I saw was in November at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis - three levels (I hesitate to call them floors) dedicated to the work of Yves Klein. I've always liked Klein a lot - the Restany book from, I think, the late '60s, is fabulous - but one usually gets to see only one or two Kleins in a gallery. This was a broad, detailed overview, absolutely stunning and well-hung. An odd character, for sure, but definitely not a charlatan and the colors/forms are absolutely mind-melting.

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  • 7 months later...

Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera at Pallant House in Chichester last month... very impressive - like some reviews said, at this scale Kahlo stands out (I'd love to see Rivera's murals) but this Portrait of Natasha Gelman by Rivera was gorgeous in EVERY way :wub: (she must have been chuffed with it!)

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Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera at Pallant House in Chichester last month... very impressive - like some reviews said, at this scale Kahlo stands out (I'd love to see Rivera's murals) but this Portrait of Natasha Gelman by Rivera was gorgeous in EVERY way :wub: (she must have been chuffed with it!)

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hope to be there next Monday. Only just discovered excellent pallant house after a trip to the Lucienne Day exhibition earlier in the year.

My last exhibitions were very informative John Piper retrospective at Eastbourne and the John Craxton at tate britain, not forgetting a second visit to the Miro at Tate Modern

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It's been so long since this thread popped up that I'd forgotten all the things I'd seen. So here goes with a second bite of the cherry. Saw this with a Newcastle friend at the Laing Art Gallery. It's shortly to be unleashed on London. Strongly recommended!

http://www.twmuseums.org.uk/laing/thingstoseeanddo/exhibition/2011/03/05/john-martin-heaven-hell/

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I nearly saw that Piper show, we were on holiday near Brighton (when we visited Pallant House) and went to Eastbourne and by chance saw the posters - but the gallery was shut. In fact, strangely, Eastbourne itself was kind of shut - lots of the shops along the front were closed, and this in late August..

Nearby at Charleston Farmhouse there was a small exhibit of Paul Nash's wood engravings.

Hope to see the Magritte before it closes

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strangely, Eastbourne itself was kind of shut - lots of the shops along the front were closed, and this in late August..

Nearby at Charleston Farmhouse there was a small exhibit of Paul Nash's wood engravings.

yes Eastbourne was still shut in September - looking very 'austerity'. Wish I'd known about the Nash

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  • 2 weeks later...

William Etty last weekend at York... only a flying visit - lots of voluptuous nudes, his chief concern apparently.

William-Etty-Sleeping-Nymph-Satyrs.jpg

In my youth Etty was described as "pornographic". I don't think he'd qualify for that description now! :lol: Just so typical of so much repressed sex in Victorian art!

This one, just up the road from me, ought to be worth a look.

http://www.whitworth.manchester.ac.uk/whatson/exhibitions/darkmatters/

Edited by BillF
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