Latest news with #impressionism
The Independent
09-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
National Gallery exhibition to shine a light on works of Renoir
The National Gallery is to stage a major exhibition of paintings by Renoir, described as the 'most significant' collection of the French impressionist's work in the UK for 20 years. The exhibition, Renoir And Love, will feature more than 50 works, and will go on display at the London gallery from October next year. Organised in partnership with the Musee d'Orsay in Paris and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Renoir And Love will focus on the artist's career between the mid-1860s and the mid-1880s. A National Gallery spokesman said the exhibition 'traces the evolution of the imagery of affection, seduction, conversation, male camaraderie and the sociability of the cafe and theatre, as well as merry-making, flirtation, courtship and child-rearing in Renoir's art'. Exhibition co-curator Christopher Riopelle, the Neil Westreich Curator of Post 1800 Paintings at the National Gallery, said: 'More than any of his contemporaries, Renoir was committed to chronicling love and friendship and their informal manifestations as keys to modern life. 'Whether on Parisian street corners or in sun-dappled woodlands, he understood that emotion could be as fleeting, as evanescent, as blinding, as his other great and transitory subject, sunlight itself.' The exhibition will be on display from October 3 next year until January 31 2027.
Yahoo
09-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
National Gallery exhibition to shine a light on works of Renoir
The National Gallery is to stage a major exhibition of paintings by Renoir, described as the 'most significant' collection of the French impressionist's work in the UK for 20 years. The exhibition, Renoir And Love, will feature more than 50 works, and will go on display at the London gallery from October next year. Organised in partnership with the Musee d'Orsay in Paris and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Renoir And Love will focus on the artist's career between the mid-1860s and the mid-1880s. A National Gallery spokesman said the exhibition 'traces the evolution of the imagery of affection, seduction, conversation, male camaraderie and the sociability of the cafe and theatre, as well as merry-making, flirtation, courtship and child-rearing in Renoir's art'. Exhibition co-curator Christopher Riopelle, the Neil Westreich Curator of Post 1800 Paintings at the National Gallery, said: 'More than any of his contemporaries, Renoir was committed to chronicling love and friendship and their informal manifestations as keys to modern life. 'Whether on Parisian street corners or in sun-dappled woodlands, he understood that emotion could be as fleeting, as evanescent, as blinding, as his other great and transitory subject, sunlight itself.' The exhibition will be on display from October 3 next year until January 31 2027.
UAE Moments
02-07-2025
- Entertainment
- UAE Moments
The Six Best Paintings by Vincent van Gogh
Vincent van Gogh is one of the most celebrated and influential artists in history. Known for his expressive use of color, bold brushstrokes, and emotionally charged works, van Gogh created around 900 paintings during his lifetime. Though he faced personal struggles and limited recognition while alive, his artwork is now considered priceless. Here are six of the best paintings by Vincent van Gogh that exemplify his visionary talent and enduring legacy. 1. The Starry Night (1889) Arguably van Gogh's most iconic work, The Starry Night captures a swirling night sky over the village of Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. Created while van Gogh was in a mental asylum, the painting expresses both turbulence and serenity with its dynamic sky, cypress trees, and quiet town below. The bold colors and rhythmic brushwork make it one of the most recognized and loved paintings in the world. Location: The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York 2. Irises (1889) Painted during his time at the asylum in Saint-Rémy, Irises showcases van Gogh's fascination with nature and color. The vivid blues, purples, and greens highlight his attention to detail and unique composition style. Each iris is given its personality, making the painting feel alive and full of motion. Location: J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles 3. Sunflowers (1888) Van Gogh's Sunflowers series is among his most celebrated works. The version created in Arles features a vibrant bouquet of sunflowers in a simple vase. The yellows range from golden to ochre, reflecting van Gogh's mastery of color and light. The painting symbolizes friendship and gratitude and was created to decorate the guest room for his friend Paul Gauguin. Location: National Gallery, London 4. The Bedroom in Arles (1888) The Bedroom is a deeply personal painting that represents comfort, solitude, and van Gogh's longing for stability. The use of flat colors and skewed perspective gives the room a dreamlike quality. This painting was one of van Gogh's favorites, and he created three versions of it. Location: Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam 5. Wheatfield with Crows (1890) Believed to be one of van Gogh's final works, Wheatfield with Crows conveys a sense of foreboding and emotional intensity. The dark sky, swirling crows, and divided path reflect the inner turmoil he experienced shortly before his death. The painting is often seen as a haunting yet powerful farewell from the artist. Location: Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam 6. The Avenue of Les Alyscamps (1888) Painted during his time in Arles, The Avenue of Les Alyscamps depicts a tree-lined Roman necropolis path in rich autumn colors. Van Gogh was inspired by the changing seasons and often painted this site with Gauguin. The vibrant oranges and yellows highlight his skill in capturing the mood and atmosphere of a setting. Final Brushstroke Vincent van Gogh's work transcends time, emotion, and artistic convention. These six paintings reflect his unique vision and the intensity with which he saw the world. Whether you're an art lover or a curious admirer, exploring these masterpieces offers a deeper appreciation of one of history's greatest painters.
ABC News
16-06-2025
- Entertainment
- ABC News
Gippsland exhibition explores Joseph Turner's impact on Australian landscape art
A major exhibition showcasing the work of one of Britain's greatest landscape artists, Joseph M.W Turner, is being touted as the first of its kind in Australia. The Turner & Australia exhibition at the Gippsland Art Gallery in Sale features 11 original works by the master of landscape and light, who profoundly influenced impressionist technique and abstract modern art. The works will be exhibited alongside 300 comparable paintings by Australian landscape artists such as John Glover, Eugene Von Gerard, Fredrick McCubbin, Arthur Streeton and Tom Roberts. Gallery director Simon Gregg said the exhibition aimed to highlight Turner's profound impact on Australian art. "It's really about capturing some of that mysterious spirit of what Turner was doing, his approach to depicting the natural environment, his vision that he had two centuries ago and re-animating it in an Australian context," Mr Gregg said. Mr Gregg said Turner, who died in 1851, was a "god-like figure in Australian art". "There is an intense drama — the light and the tone that he brings into his work — and if you go backwards through time, all roads lead to Turner," Mr Gregg said. Born to a working class family in London in 1775, Joseph Mallard William Turner was a talented child prodigy with an accurate eye for detail. At the age of 14 he became an apprentice draftsman to an architect, before entering the prestigious Royal Academy Schools a year later. Turner would travel through the British countryside, sketching landscape features such as valleys, mountains and castles from different angles as the light changed throughout the day. "He'd later pick out one or two sketches and actually fill them in with the watercolours, with the memory fresh in his mind of what colours he had seen," Mr Gregg said. On return to his London studio, he would pull together the best elements of his sketches, bringing the sky of one image and the geographical features of others into hybrid compositions. By the mid-1790s, Turner began painting with oil. He studied the stormy Dutch marine paintings of the 17th century and the serene landscapes of French artists Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain. During his travels through Wales and Europe, Turner was drawn to extreme weather events and apocalyptic scenarios. Venturing into the jagged Swiss alpine region, he was one of the first artists to visually embody philosopher Edmund Burke's concept of 'the sublime'. Turner's depictions of swirling mists, sinister fogs, tumultuous seas and haze-veiled sunlight would eventually see him paint less distinctive geographical forms, instead capturing them dissolved, blurred and blown out by light. As a literary concept of the 18th century, the sublime referred to things that were beyond human comprehension; the meeting point of beauty and terror in the natural world, and the insignificance of man amid the divine, exhilarating and mysterious forces of nature. "Over the course of time he became more interested in depicting something that was less tangible, more of an experience of being in pure atmosphere," Mr Gregg said. "Claude Monet, the French impressionist, absolutely idolised Turner because Turner was painting with pure light and colour. "You could credit Turner as the first impressionist painter; he was in many ways the first pure abstract painter as well." With the arrival of the industrial revolution, Turner turned his hand to documenting the burgeoning industrialised world. While most artists were still painting pretty views of the English countryside, Turner was painting scenes of modern industry. "He was also credited as the first artist to show pollution, particularly in London," Mr Gregg said. "In 1828 he did this painting of the [River] Thames, but it's all muddy and brown and grey; that's because he was showing this thick industrial fog that was rolling over the city." By the 1830s and 40s, art critics started to turn against Turner. His violent application of paint and hazy pastel plumes would drown out his subjects to the point of being indistinguishable. It was an illusion dismissed by one critic as "soap suds and white wash". "No-one was painting anything like this," Mr Gregg said. "It wasn't really until 50 or 100 years later that people really understood what Turner has been trying to do." As one of the pioneers of painting "landscape for landscape's sake", and depicting landscape as a living, moving character with emotion and feeling, Mr Gregg said he often wondered how Turner might have responded to the savage extremes of the "beautiful and terrifying" Australian landscape. "We're an island continent with oceans, beaches, mountains, deserts. We have intense light, we have incredible storms, all these things that Turner was actually seeking out," Mr Gregg said. "So you have to wonder what he might have done if he had ever come to Australia." Turner & Australia is showing at the Gippsland Art Gallery in Sale until August 24, 2025.
The Guardian
09-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘It makes me sick!' How the likes of the French impressionists went from ‘lunatics' to luminaries
'Five or six lunatics deranged by ambition – one of them a woman – have chosen to exhibit their works,' French critic Albert Wolff wrote in a review of an art exhibition in Paris in 1876. The lunatics in question were a group of up-and-coming artists: Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Berthe Morisot, Camille Pissarro and Edgar Degas. Almost 150 years later, we know now that those lunatics took over the asylum. The impressionists, who rebelled against the old masters by painting lighter, brighter, ephemeral scenes, are today's old masters; what was so shocking then is now all over our calendars, coffee cups and phone cases. But back in 1876, those looking at their works 'are content to laugh at such things,' Wolff wrote sniffily. 'But it makes me sick at heart.' There were eight impressionist exhibitions between 1874 and 1886. From the first, much fuss was made of these paintings that captured quotidian moments like picnics, laundry day and music lessons, rather than the few subjects deemed acceptable by the establishment (the big three: biblical, mythological or historical). The impressionists – a derogatory label they would later adopt with pride – saw worth and beauty everywhere: a garlic seller or a ballet dancer or a baby nephew deserved immortalising as much as Jesus or Napoleon. Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning But newspapers recorded the public gasping, hooting and even fainting over such art. There was a shared suspicion that these sloppy rebels weren't bothered to paint properly, or perhaps simply couldn't. After the very first show in 1874, one critic accused Monet of having 'declared war on beauty', while Morisot's own tutor wrote to her mother with his damning verdict of her new gang: 'All of these people are more or less touched in the head.' A huge collection of French impressionism has arrived at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, which is mostly on loan from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston – a gallery founded in 1870, just four years before the first impressionists were shocking France. 'Making everyday reality the subject of art – it seems so obvious today, but it's a wonderful thing to remember that it wasn't inevitable,' says Katie Hanson, a curator at MFA Boston. 'It took courage, and a village, to make impressionism a reality.' French Impressionism opens on a room for a literal village: Barbizon, a small town located about 50km from Paris, to which many artists flocked due to its proximity to the very paintable Forest of Fontainebleau – and for being conveniently on a train line. The School of Barbizon inspired many of the impressionists who followed 30 years later. There are even direct links to be found – take Narcisse Virgile Diaz de la Peña, who followed Theodore Rousseau around the forest watching him paint; 30 years later, Diaz was in the forest when he ran into a young Renoir at work and gave him the career-changing advice to lighten up his palette. 'When you start peeling back the onion you find all these points of connection and mutual support underneath,' says Hanson. MFA Boston is home to more than 500,000 works, which means it can send off this many masterpieces without a second thought. It can even do it twice: French Impressionism was first staged at the NGV in 2021, before it was closed prematurely due to Covid lockdowns. It is what Julian Barnes once called a 'masterpieces-on-a-washing-line approach'; you may find you struggle to appreciate every single painting on display. But you can navigate French Impressionism by playing who-knows-who. There are the mentors like Eugène Boudin who, despite not being an impressionist, gets a whole room to himself for having spotted teenage Monet's talent and encouraged him to work 'en plein air', as he did; and a few works by Diaz, who supported Renoir and even bought him paint when he couldn't make ends meet. Then there are the friends who didn't quite make it into the gang – like Norwegian impressionist Frits Thaulow, French realist Henri Fantin-Latour and, of course, Édouard Manet, who was so close to the impressionists that he was widely regarded as their leader, despite his choice to never exhibit with them. Sign up to Saved for Later Catch up on the fun stuff with Guardian Australia's culture and lifestyle rundown of pop culture, trends and tips after newsletter promotion There are also the admirers, like Vincent Van Gogh, who was painting in France at the same time but noted he was not 'one of the club', and even a spot for the admired: Victorine Meurent, who was Manet's favourite model and also a painter, whose fabulously haughty self-portrait was found in a Parisian flea market in 2010 and acquired by MFA Boston in 2021. The four-year delay in this exhibition returning to Melbourne means Meurent now gets to share the spotlight with Manet's flirtier view of her – though the exhibition remains an undeniable sausage fest; in the four years since the first attempt to stage it, the number of Morisot paintings has gone from one to two. Pleasure lies in discovering the impressionists' relationships with one another. Misanthropic Paul Cézanne and argumentative Degas; the social butterflies Monet and Renoir; Morisot, the rare woman among men and a dab hand at dealing with their moods and egos; and Pissarro, the cheerful link between everyone, affectionately dubbed 'Papa'. They painted each other's wives, brothers, children, servants, crushes. Not that they always got along – 'they were artists, after all,' Hanson says. So why Boston? Why did a US city take such a shine to the impressionists when Paris was falling over itself to laugh at them? French gallerist Paul Durand-Ruel, the impressionists' greatest cheerleader, was already selling Barbizon landscapes to eager Americans when impressionism arrived. When he first exhibited the impressionists in Manhattan in 1886, both the public and press were more curious and impressed than the French had been a decade before. Durand-Ruel opened a permanent gallery in New York in 1888, selling impressionist masterpieces to wealthy east coast collectors, including Bostonians. 'Boston was prepared to like impressionism because they already liked French painters and unidealised landscapes,' says Hanson. 'Bostonians had a real love of nature and naturalism – think of Whitman or Thoreau. People in the Boston area were really focusing on nature's many splendours, so impressionism wasn't a step too far for them.' If you saw the aborted version of French Impressionism in 2021, it is much more maximalist this time around, with the NGV styling the interiors to look like an opulent Bostonian mansion. The plush lounges scattered around don't make for good vantage points on busy days – but there are enough instantly pleasing sights on any horizon to keep up morale if you get frustrated by the crowds: the fizzy pastels of Monet's view of Venice, an unexpected Van Gogh, Renoir's instantly recognisable Dance at Bougival. So while you're dodging prams or queueing for a look, think back to those first exhibitions in Paris – at least you are not peering past angry Parisians in top hats. Probably. French Impressionism from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston is open at the NGV until 5 October.
