What was the last exhibition, gallery or museum you visited?
Posted by: Kevin-W on 19 March 2013
And what did you see?
I'll get the ball rolling. Last Thursday went to the private view of the George Bellows exhibition at the Royal Academy in London.
Bellows is often regarded as a neglected American artist, especially when compared to his much more famous near-contemporary Edward Hopper. While it has to be said that most of his New York Docks and boxing pictures are classics, much of the work shown in (what I think is his first major UK retrospective) is sub-par, and nowhere near as good as Hopper.
The early portraits, which owe a debt to Manet, are very good, with their thick impasto; the scenes of New York on the brink of change are of similarly high quality; his charcoal portraits and scenes from urban life are often exceptional. Many of his landscapes are wonderful too.
But his later work, especially his First World War pictures, are dreadful: static and anodyne, they remind me of hack propaganda. And the late portraits and groups are awful, stuck between the 19th and 20th centuries: it's as if the dynamism so evident in his NYC and boxing paintings had been completely drained from him towards the end of his life.
There is a very, very good smaller exhibition here, but on the evidence of the work on display, Bellows is a competent second-tier painter, and no more.
So what about you, guys and gals?
Great thread idea.
Back from Belgium last week and spent a great few hours at the Groeningemuseum in Bruges. I've been before and remember being taken aback by the early Flemish Primitives; and so it was again.
This is very much not my usual taste in art (which tends towards the modern and the minimalist if anything) but these pictures have a transcendent quality and a freshness that is quite exquisite. The characters that populate some are also deliciously human with rumpled faces, warts and beligerent expressions. The earliest pictures are also astonishingly fresh, far more so than the Renaissance collection that follows (and they also include a typically barking Hieronymous Bosch too which is always a laugh).
Like many of the best galleries the exhibition is quite small giving the chance to concentrate on a few well chosen and presented pictures.
These really are not pictures that show well on a computer screen but I love this character (detail) and you get some idea of the richness of these lovely paintings.
Time to get this going again.
The brilliant Bowie is exhibition at the V&A. Well worth a return visit methinks.
We went early Saturday morning - it was already very crowded but as it's a timed entry exhibition, if you go backwards you usually get more space to see everything.
If you're a Bowie fan this is an essential visit.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/h...et-72157608249640636
MAM, Milwaukee Art Museum, which is always a treat to visit and admire Santiago Calatrava's architecture. The show we went to see, 'History of Photography', was interesting though on the light side in term of images selected to be displayed.