Happenings // events
January 2016 promises another hit show for the Royal Academy of Arts, based in London’s Piccadilly. Painting the Modern Garden: Monet to Matisse commences January 30 to April 20. The exhibition will bring together over 120 works, from public institutions and private collections across Europe and the USA, including 35 paintings by Monet. Arguably the most important painter of gardens in the history of art, Monet was also an avid horticulturist who cultivated gardens wherever he lived. As early as the 1860s, a symbiotic relationship developed between his activities as a horticulturist and his paintings of gardens, a relationship that can be traced from his early years in Sainte-Addressed to his final months at Giverny. ‘I perhaps owe it to flowers,’ he wrote, ‘that I became a painter.’ A rich selection of documentary materials
including horticultural books and journals, as well as receipts for purchases of plants and excerpts from letters, will be included in the exhibition. Highlights of the exhibition will include a magnificent selection of Monet’s water lily paintings including the great Agapanthus Triptych of 1916-19. It will be the first time this monumental triptych has been displayed together in Europe. This exhibition will be among the first to consider Monet’s Grandes Décorations as a response to the traumatic events of World War I, and the first to juxtapose the large Water Lilies with garden paintings by other artists reacting to this period of suffering and loss. Other highlights will include works by Edouard Manet, Mary Cassatt, Berthe Morisot, Paul Cézanne, John Singer Sargent, Henri Matisse, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Vincent van Gogh, Gustav Klimt and Edouard Vuillard.
“Art doesn’t just capture and convey the excitement, the thrill of life. Sometimes it does even more: it is that thrill”
—Julian Barnes, Keeping an Eye Open: Essays on Art, Jonathan Cape, 2015
VeRmeeR at BuckiNgham Palace From mid-November comes a rare chance to see Johannes Vermeer’s Lady at the Virginals with a Gentleman also known as ‘The Music Lesson’, 1662-65. The painting is central to an exhibition of twenty masterpieces from the Royal Collection. Entitled ‘Masters of the Everyday: Dutch Artists in the Age of Vermeer’, the show may be seen at The Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, from Friday, 13 November 2015 to Sunday, 14 February 2016, and also includes works by Gerrit Dou, Gabriel Metsu, Jan Steen and Pieter de Hooch. Images: © THe sTaTe HeRmITage mUseUm, PHOTOgRaPHY BY VLaDImIR TeReBeNIN; © THe QUeeN’s gaLLeRY
Royal academy’s gReat New yeaR show
Above: Lady in the Garden, Claude Monet, c.1867.
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03/08/2015 15:12