Art exhibitions worth a visit

Thanks, that looks good. We are staying with friends in Beckenham at the end of the month so maybe we could go from there. There is loads to do in Hampstead, though quite a few NT places are closed unfortunately.

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Well, @Eoink I have to say that our trip to Hampstead was lovely. Kenwood House is super, with really enthusiastic and knowledgeable volunteers. The Rembrandt is an amazing picture and we were able to look at it without hordes of tourists with cameras. Hampstead itself is delightful and I can see why it’s so well regarded. The view from the Heath over London is incredible, rather like looking over Paris from the SacrĂ©-CƓur.

Thank you so much for promoting us to go.

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I’m really glad you enjoyed it, Kenwood is a hidden treasure of London, and so wonderfully situated on the edge of the Heath.

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Today we went to see the Van Eyck exhibition at MSK in Ghent. It’s had rave reviews and when that happens it’s so easy to be disappointed. But it was absolutely brilliant. The newly restored panels from the Ghent Altarpiece are displayed with paintings by contemporaneous and later artists following the themes of the panels and it works so well. There are Van Eycks from all over, including the US and it’s amazing to see them all together, which probably won’t happen again for a long while. We went to Ghent from Antwerp - both cities are great to visit and it’s really easy on the Eurostar.

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That’s booked for early next month - Ghent is my favourite Belgian city.
I’m sure it’s miles better than the Leonardo exhibition which I saw in Paris last week - rather disappointing, millions of people all standing for hours in front of the works with their mobiles
 and the exhibition failed to convince me (yet again) that Leonardo was the greatest Renaissance artist - which he is claimed to be.
I see that there’s going to be a LĂ©on Spillaert exhibition at the RA. That should be very good, Spillaert is one of my favourite 20th century Belgian artist - very different from Ensor. Don’t miss that.

For those of you in the UK who fancy a few days away I would recommend a visit to the Mauritshuis in The Hague. A great selection of the works of Rembrandt , Vermeer and other Dutch artists. The Hague doesn’t get many tourists ( relative to Amsterdam and other major European cities) and so you can normally expect a leisurely stroll around , especially during the week . We lived in The Hague for 5 years, returning in 2018 and it’s a place I still miss. 10 minutes walk from the Mauritshuis is the Escher museum , there is the Peace Palace, the old Parliament buildings, and you can take a tram down to the beach at Scheveningen for a bracing walk . Delft is only ten minutes away by train and it’s a wonderful small city ( more picturesque then Amsterdam and without the crowds).

There weren’t loads and loads of people but there were a lot in some rooms, and a guided tour which was a bit of a nuisance thought once we’d got ahead of it, it wasn’t an issue. One tip - if you get your ticket on the internet it’s €25 but if you pay at the desk it’s €28.

After a visit to Heal’s, I popped down the road to the National Gallery. There is a room of David Bombergs, which is a nice insight into pre- WW1 Modernist art.
For me more interesting was an exhibition of work by Nicolaes Maes, a 17th Century Dutch painter, not one I knew well. He was a student of Rembrandt, and a very fine artist. His “genre scenes”, peeks into domestic scenes, are really interesting, eavesdropping foreground characters raise their finger to their lips to stop us from exposing them. The bulk of the exhibition is portraiture as that made him more money, he’s a very skilled artist and the portraits are very well executed and do catch personality. Interestingly there are portraits of the businessman Jacob Trip and his wife Margaretha de Geer, a pop upstairs allows a comparison to Rembrandt’s portraits of the same couple.
All in all an exhibition which has left me with great respect for an artist I barely knew before.

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Just seen the Van Eycks in Ghent - a first-class exhibition indeed. Not too many people (the coronavirus scare?), NO photography
 All in all, a much more pleasant experience than the Leonardo exhibition in Paris. The only downside: the catalogue is 70€, a lot more than usual.

Another exhibition worth seeing perhaps: William Kentridge, in Northern France.

No photos is a good thing we were Paris last year and every museum was ruined by people taking photos.

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Went to see Ronnie Wood’s show at Ashridge House.

A mixed bag it’s fair to say. He defo has something that’s appealing in many of his works, however I feel that too frequently he keeps it well hidden!

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Oh dear.

Be fair. I think this has touches of Guernica
touches I said.

G

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Nice frame


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Funnily enough


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Another glass exhibition, Gillies Jones (Stephen and Kate) have an exhibition in the Danby Visitor Centre at the North Yorks. Moors National Park. It’s celebrating 25 years of them working from their studio in Rosedale Abbey. I went to the private view yesterday, it opens today. There is some stunning glass, Stephen is a master glass blower and Kate captures the essence of the landscape in her engraving.

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For anyone in the Hertfordshire area there is a beautiful installation at St Albans Cathedral until 14th May. A glass artist, Layne Rowe, has used his time in lockdown to make an installation of a pair of wings as a memorial to the pandemic. They’re made up of 160 individually made glass feathers, and stand the height of a human.

That’s Layne in the picture below.

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Yes, I very much like the Musee d’Orsay.

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Art of Ilya Repin; here a portrait of composer Modest Mussorgsky


at Helsinki Ateneum until end of August.

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