I wrote an article on the artists who loved Argenteuil in France. Click here to read it.
Tag Archives: art history
Venice in Art
I wrote an article about Venice in art. Click here to read it.
Constable Exhibition at The Lightbox
‘Painting is with me but another word for feeling’.
So John Constable told Archdeacon John Fisher in a letter in October 1821. If you visit the latest exhibition at The Lightbox in Woking, you will be able to see Constable’s innermost clandestine feelings expressed on the walls of the gallery.
Constable was one of the first artists of the Romantic Movement to view landscapes for their own beauty, rather than as a backdrop for a historical scene. He created his art directly from nature rather than from his imagination and he resisted the fashion of the day to piece together elements taken from nature to form a classical landscape.
William and Evelyn De Morgan Exhibition at the Watts Gallery
After seeing the inspiring Richard Dadd exhibition, I went along to the William De Morgan exhibition in the next room at the Watts Gallery.
Continue reading William and Evelyn De Morgan Exhibition at the Watts Gallery
Richard Dadd Exhibition at the Watts Gallery
‘He was considered a violent and dangerous patient (…) After he killed his father, his rooms were searched and a portfolio was found containing likenesses of many of his friends all with their throats cut.’
So artist Richard Dadd’s condition was described in his Casenotes from Bethlem, a psychiatric hospital, in 1854.
Continue reading Richard Dadd Exhibition at the Watts Gallery
Andrew Graham-Dixon Guest Lecture at St John’s School
(Picture courtesy of St John’s School)
St John’s School in Leatherhead opened its doors last Thursday to host a guest lecture by the world-renowned art critic, historian and broadcaster Andrew Graham-Dixon.
Past St John’s pupils gathered with current students in the school chapel to hear the lecture on Caravaggio and his relationship with Christianity in his art.
Andrew Graham-Dixon’s talk ‘Whose Christ is it Anyway?’ explored Caravaggio’s unruly and indeed obscure background; in fact there are few concrete biographic details, and some of the most illuminating information about him can be found in criminal records of the time. He famously killed a man and was regularly in fights. His artistic technique mirrored his shadowy life, as Andrew Graham-Dixon observed that: ‘Light and shadows are key to his work and he himself was like a living chiaroscuro.’ He skilfully played with light on his canvas while dodging the spotlight in life, as he purportedly wore black and had his hair untidy to aid his camouflage!
Caravaggio lost most of his family to the bubonic plague when he was young. The Renaissance was a time of great uncertainty over what happened in the afterlife, so the present-day tensions only heightened those concerns. Graham-Dixon explained that Caravaggio often captured that very doubt in his paintings. Also, in a similar way, Caravaggio’s treatment of miracles is particularly interesting, paradoxical even, marked in a step away from the ‘fanfare’ announcement of a miracle taking place. The audience was told that: ‘Miracles are subtle in Caravaggio’s paintings. The Supper at Emmaus shows those who see the miracle, and those who don’t.’
Caravaggio frequently revisited the dramatic physicality of death in his paintings. Andrew Graham-Dixon told the audience that we can learn through the x-ray of Judith Beheading Holofernes that Caravaggio repositioned the head of one of his subjects to depict the most dramatic and bloody angle; and that Hollywood director Martin Scorsese had remarked to him that it was Caravaggio who had taught him ‘How hard it is to kill a man!’ – the similarities of the difficulty involved in showing the physical elements of death on screen and in art.
I thoroughly enjoyed the informative lecture.
Andrew Graham-Dixon’s book ‘Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane’ published by Penguin. RRP £12.99