'Raphael' at the National Gallery

The big exhibition at the National Gallery is all about Raphael, with works on display from across his career. Raphael is one of the big three of the high renaissance and stands beside Leonardo and Michelangelo in the pantheon of the greats in artistic achievement. Where they both lived long lives, Raphael died at the age of 37 in 1520 so who knows what he might have gone on to achieve? The National Gallery is blessed in having a good selection of his paintings in its collection and these are added to by works from around the world creating a rather large exhibition. 

The exhibition starts in Room 1 beside the portico entrance and then winds through other rooms so the Gallery is using the Getty entrance as the way into the exhibition. Exhibitions are usually in the purpose built exhibition space downstairs in the Sainsbury Wing but I like it when they use other spaces for exhibitions since it changes the atmosphere of the place. It's appropriate that these old paintings are on the original walls of the Gallery.

One of the first paintings you see is a small head of Saint Sebastian painted when Raphael was about 20 years old. Not for Raphael the usual near naked figure with arrows in him, he shows us a rather plump-cheeked saint idly playing with an arrow wearing sumptuous robes. The colours are gorgeous and immediately attracted me from across the room. Another early painting that immediately drew my eye was a small Saint George fighting the poor dragon. I liked the broken lance, the genteel landscape, the princess running away in the distance and just look at that big, barrel-chested horse - that's a war horse and half! The painting is about 12" x 9" and in an interesting tabernacle-style wooden frame. I'd be happy to have it on my wall but I'd be on the dragon's side.

As you'd expect, there are quite a few Virgin and Child paintings with various saints. I think my favourite was the round 'Virgin and Child with the Infant Saint John the Baptist' (also known as 'The Alba Madonna'). It's quite an arresting painting with rather over-muscled infants but what kept me looking were the eyes of all three characters - just look at their sharp gazes. Mary and the infant John are looking at the cross the Child is playing with, his future foretold, while the Child looks at John, the cousin who will later baptise him. Set in a gentle rural landscape with buildings in the background, not the sometimes harsh landscapes painters imagined they were like in the Holy Land or overly lush Tuscan landscapes, it's a bit pared back and all the better for it. 

Imagine my surprise when I walked into another room and 'The School of Athens' filled one of the walls at almost full scale. The painting is a fresco in a private room in the Vatican so it's actually painted onto/into the wall but it was still a delight to see this reproduction. It's debated, but I choose to believe that Raphael painted his fellow masters in this painting with Leonardo centre stage as Aristotle, a brooding Michelangelo on the steps and a self-portrait of himself just coming into the scene on the right. He's the new boy in town after all. 

The exhibition includes some of Raphael's delicate drawings, some on loan from the Ashmolean that held a great exhibition of his drawings a few years ago. Something I didn't know about Raphael is that he also started to produce prints, taking his lead from Durer. This was a very good way of getting his name more widely known and people who couldn't afford a painting might be able to acquire a print. Here is 'The Judgement of Paris' with an awful lot going on.

A large painting that caught me eye, mainly due to the composition, was 'Saint Cecilia with Saints Paul, John the Evangelist, Augustine and Mary Magdalene'. They're almost life-sized but there's a gap above and below them. Saint Cecilia is the patron saint of music but she is so enthralled by the heavenly music above that she drops all her instruments to the ground. I think my favourite part of the painting is the pile of musical instruments that are all so delicately and realistically painted. I also like the almost haughty Magdalene who, unusually, has her hair covered.

There is a room dedicated to Raphael's tapestry designs that, interestingly, had to be drawn backwards so when they were made up by the expert weavers in Bruges they could come out as a mirror image and the right way round. The V&A has the huge cartoons for some of the tapestries he designed for the Sistine Chapel in St Peter's at the Vatican. There is also a small room about Raphael's architectural work. He did a bit of everything it seems.

The final room is given over to Raphael's portraiture. Apparently he was too busy to do many portraits but did important political portraits and portraits of his friends. There's an extravagant portrait of Lorenzo de Medici in incredible fabrics but the painting I'll show is much simpler, his 'Self Portrait with Giulio Romano', possibly completed in the year Raphael died. Romano was one of Raphael's main assistants and the pose suggests that Raphael is almost saying if you get a Romano painting it's like you have one of mine, he's that good. It's quite a touching painting and sad when you realise he died shorty after completing it.

A final painting is the poster boy for the exhibition, one of Raphael's good friends 'Bindo Altoviti' on loan from the National Gallery of Art in Washington. It's a very delicate painting, just look at the strands of hair and the light hair growing on his cheek, so much detail added for his friend.

It's a very good exhibition and bigger than I was expecting. Highly recommended.

'Artemisia' at the National Gallery

The first major exhibition of paintings by Artemisia Gentileschi in the UK has just opened at the National Gallery in London and it's well worth visiting. She's not a terribly well known artist so hopefully this exhibition will change that and give her the credit she deserves. Born in 1593, her father was an artist and follower of Caravaggio and that influenced her own paintings. She was raped by an artist friend of her dad's who was successfully prosecuted and she is noted for her depictions of powerful women, occasionally cutting off mens' heads. 

She left Rome for Florence where she became the first woman admitted to the Accademia, lived in Venice and Naples, was commissioned by Charles I and spent time in London with her dad who died here and then she returned to Italy. She had children, had love affairs and enjoyed an international reputation as an artist at the time but that reputation diminished over the years and is only now being rediscovered.

'Artemisia' is in the exhibition suite in the Sainsbury Wing and is quite large and spread out. Most of her paintings are large and it doesn't take many to fill up the walls of each room. There are also a few original letters from her and her husband with the curly script you'd expect from the first half of the 1600s. You need to be masked to get into the National Gallery at the allotted time on your ticket, then head downstairs to the exhibition space and join a short queue to get into the exhibition. There's a free audioguide to the exhibition you can stream and listen to on your own device of choice if you want to. And then in you go to the exhibition.

Artemisia seems to have had a stock of subjects she painted and painted again, such as Judith cutting off the head of Holofernes, sometimes with spouts of blood and other times with dribbles. Also Susanna and the Elders where the old men spy on the youthful Susanna and threaten to report her as whore unless she has sex with them. Susanna is definitely the victim of men in these paintings, trying to cover her nakedness from the lecherous old men.

It's difficult not to associate these paintings with her experience of being raped as a girl/young woman. There are also paintings of the death of Cleopatra and the asp, a powerful queen choosing death over slavery. There's a strong sense of morality, of nobility, in these paintings. Better to die in control of one's destiny than die as a slave. 

She used her own image as the basis for some of her paintings, such as her painting of Saint Catherine with her wheel symbol and holding the palm leaf of a martyr which is in the National Gallery collection and herself as a painter in the 'Allegory of Painting' in the Royal Collection. There's also a self-portrait of her as a lute player. I prefer the Saint Catherine painting since we see the face almost full on with a direct gaze, a confident woman knowing her fate and willing to face it without fear or shame.

It's well worth seeing this exhibition if you can, the first exhibition of her work in the UK. She led a colourful life and it's been interesting finding out more about her.

Leonardo da Vinci 'Virgin of the Rocks' at the National Gallery

The new exhibition at the National Gallery is 'Leonardo: Experience a Masterpiece' about his painting, 'Virgin of the Rocks' which is the National Gallery's collection. They've taken over most of the ground floor galleries for this exhibition and reconfigured them so you walk from one immersive room into the next as you get closer to the actual painting. There is only one painting in this exhibition and that's the 'Virgin of the Rocks'.

The 'Virgin of the Rocks' is one of the highlights of the National Gallery collection, one of the few Leonardo da Vinci paintings that exist. There's an earlier version of this painting in the Louvre but I prefer the London version as a more aesthetically pleasing composition.

The first room you go into doesn't really seem to serve any purpose, a stack of boxes looking at a big projection of a mountain with some of the boxes blocked with copies of Leonardo's famous backwards 'mirror' writing. Why? I don't know. Next you go into a room that's set up partially like an artist's studio and partly like a conservation room with text books and technical journals. Most people hovered by the door looking in at a video projection about he painting when I was there rather than walking right into the room. It wasn't clear if you could touch things on the desks or not so I didn't.

The next room was far more playful and interesting, a room of light and shade, but still a bit puzzling.  There's a life sized photo of a woman dressed like the Virgin in the middle of a big circle that lights up and shines in different directions that you control with your finger on a large dial in front of the  photo. It's fun to play with it but only one person can play at a time. Also in the room are three smallish boxes with different things inside and with six levers with which you control the direction and intensity of light to create different shadow effects. I really liked playing with this piece, especially on the man's head.

Another box had a large rock inside and the other had various geometric shapes. It was fun to play with the lights but it raised a few questions for me. Only one person can play at a time so is the National Gallery assuming there'll be a queue to play with the exhibit, in which case why plan for an unsatisfactory experience for punters? Or is the assumption that not many people will go into the exhibition? In which case why give over so much space to it and have the large room at the end as a shop? It wasn't very busy when I was there which was good for me but not good for the exhibition given that it's only just opened and, generally speaking, the busiest time for an exhibition is when it's just opened.

The next room was dark and empty - literally - except for some gauzy material suspected in mid air showing designs for the church the painting was designed for and a projector that seemed to be on a one minute repeat showing the building of the church in Milan. This was nice enough but very short. The most exciting bit was when I stepped forward into the line of the protector and waited for the floor to explode around me as the church columns sprang into life. That was almost a disorienting experience and I loved it. I went back to do it again.

It did raise questions about 'why?' again. It's a large virtually empty room. While I was enjoying the church exploding into life around me a guard felt th need to tell me that there was another room at the end of the room with the actual painting in it - there was no sign that there was another room but I sort of guessed that there was since I had't seen the painting yet. If a guard has to tell you where to go next then that's not really a good look.

The final room includes the actual painting at the centre of various projections of what the original altarpiece it was part of might have looked like. There are no records of what it looked like and the church no longer exists so it's anyone's guess really., The National Gallery has used its experts to re-imagine what the altarpiece might have looked like and developed some video projections to show it to us.

This exhibition seems to be the National Gallery's foray into the use of technology in an art exhibition and is trying to make it immersive so that you experience the exhibition rather than just look at it. There is only one painting on show but lots of technology in the forms of lights and projections. Someone has spent a lot of time developing these special effects in an attempt too look at a work of art in a different way. In principle I approve of it but it still left me puzzled and wondering if there'd been any user testing at all. This video projection lasts for about five minutes, showing different versions of that the altarpiece might have looked like and I really enjoyed this bit, going back for seconds.

I'm not quite sure what I thought about this exhibition. I suspect it needs a bit more of an explanation in the promotional materials as to what you can expect and I'd hate to be there when it was busy since you wouldn't be able to really enjoy the experience. Good on the National Gallery for being brave enough to try this kind of "immersive" exhibition but I'd really recommend some user testing and testing how crowds might work in something like this.

'Olga Picasso' by Picasso at the CaixaForum, Madrid

The current exhibition at the CaixaForum in Madrid is focused on Olga Picasso, wife of Picasso, and it is full of his drawings and many are of her. There are some paintings as well as the many drawings and it's noticeable that paintings of her stop as the marriage deteriorated and he found a new muse and lover.

Olga was Russian and danced with Diaghilev's Ballet Russe, which is how Picasso met her since designed the costumes and set for one of the ballets. They met in 1917 and married in 1918. Her family in Russia fought against the revolutionaries and she lost touch with them for a while. She also injured herself and couldn't dance, which took away meaning to her life for her as she settled into becoming Mrs Picasso.

The first few rooms of the exhibition are filled with line drawings of Olga doing various activities, reading, sitting, playing the piano, often with graphite on paper, sometimes very large sheets of paper. Picasso clearly loved her judging from these drawing, both muse and lover. They also show what an excellent draftsman Picasso was, capturing a likeness with a few strokes of a graphite stick, often simple line drawings with no shading or emphasis. I wonder what Olga thought about being drawn again and again? Did you enjoy it, enjoy the attention? See it as the price of being the wife of an artist who was becoming increasingly famous and rich? Or was it something to be endured?

Then the inevitable happened and they had a child, a son they called Paulo. The drawings and paintings change to focus on motherhood with lots of drawings of Olga with Paolo, mother and son, Virgin and Child, an old, old subject. I wonder how many of these paintings and drawings the mother and baby actually posed for and how many were made up compositions by Picasso?

There are also drawings about woman as a creator, as being fecund and producing the next generation. I particularly liked a large drawing called 'The Source' with Olga lounging against a rock with an urn in her lap which is emptying it's contents onto the ground with one of her breast exposed. It's almost an image of the mother goddess, the fertility goddess waiting to give birth to the next race of humans.

We then see them as a family group as Paulo grows up and becomes a boy rather than a baby. There are drawings of the circuses they went to see, a family on the beach, portraits of Paulo and one with him dressed up in a harlequin outfit just like his dad. It's all very domestic and serene but, at the same time, the marriage was breaking down and Picasso had found another lover, another muse to inspire him, a 17 year old girl in Paris. The drawings and paintings take another turn and become darker, or at least those chosen to be in the exhibition become darker. 

Picasso creates his own mythology around him being a Minotaur, half-man and half-bull, a primal figure. There are many drawings of the Minotaur, mainly focused on lust and passion, occasionally violence. There was one drawing of the Minotaur having rough sex with a female centaur - I've never come across female centaurs before but I suppose there must have been some. There's also a drawing called 'Bacchic Scene with Minotaur' that looks less about Bacchus and more about group sex to me. What was going on in his imagination during this period? I'm not sure I want to know the answer to that.

I'm not sure about this exhibition. I found it rather unsettling, the move from sweet, romantic young love to the the darker world of the Minotaur. It's quite a journey and not what I expected when I went into the exhibition. Anyway, here's 'Sitting Minotaur with a Dagger' from 1933.

                         

'Charles I: King and Collector' at the Royal Academy

The new blockbuster exhibition in London is all about Charles I's collection of paintings and other art works at the Royal Academy. And it is a BIG exhibition. It's full of room after room of great paintings with hardly a dull note and some works by artists I've never come across before. There are four tapestries designed by Raphael and nine enormous canvases my Mantegna showing a triumphal procession in ancient Rome, loads of portraits of Charles and the royal family by van Dyck, self-portraits by Rubens and van Dyck, Charles on horses, a room of miniatures and lots more besides. This really is an exhibition to linger over and there's something here for everyone.

I found myself mulling over how this exhibition came together and imagined the curators having a cuppa in the cafe one day and chatting about their dream exhibitions - if only we could get X Y Z together - and here they are. Charles I's collection was spread far and wide after his execution and, while many were subsequently bought back, many still reside in collections around Europe. This exhibition brings many of them together again.

One of my favourite paintings was 'Portrait of a Woman in Green' by Agnolo Bronzino. If you ignore those enormous green sleeves for a moment, you could easily see that woman on a bus or train going about her business today.

She is so fresh and 'real' with her patient face waiting to get on the next train because this one is too crowded. She looks kindly with a bit of backbone when needed, easily the manager of a busy office. That bright green dress against the rich, deep red background makes the painting really noticeable - how often do you see that rich green in old paintings? The painting was really noticeable and I'd love to know who she was and what happened to her. Maybe that's covered in the catalogue?

Another painting that caught my eye was a large one by Rubens, 'Minerva Protects Pax from Mars'. The titular characters are in the background while a great deal of frolic goes on in the foreground, presumably showing the benefits of a peaceful life and nation. I particularly liked the little group of children at the bottom-right of the painting - just look at those faces. I've no idea what that satyr is up to. And look at Minerva's arm pushing against Mars' shield - we don't quite see muscles and tendons pushing against her skin but that demonstrates her power against the god of war.

I also really liked the 'Adoration of the Shepherds' by Jacopo Bassano. The Virgin and Child are centre-stage in the brightest part of the painting while Joseph sits on the ground with his dog curled up beside him (I don't remember a dog being in the story but he looks cosy down there).

It's called 'adoration' but I didn't get that feeling from the shepherds, rather there's a suggestion that they're a bit agitated and don't really know what to do because they've never worshipped a baby before so they've brought a sheep as a gift. Well, what do you bring a baby that angels seem to know? Luckily, all is right with the world because the donkey and ox are there for consistency.

It was a surprise to see Jan Gossaert's curly-haired 'Adam and Eve', partly because of all the flesh on display - with a few exceptions, most of the paintings have fully clothed people in them. Of course, trees were really handy in Biblical times because they always seemed to sprout a branch at crotch height to avoid any embarrassment. Bit unfortunate if you walked into the branch though, especially if it had thorns. I'll leave that thought there.

Another painting I liked was of the royal kids by van Dyck with their enormous dog (and a tiny pooch). I stood there pondering dressing kids as little adults but then focused on the dog - if I was them I'd want to ride round on his back! He looks docile enough but has a striking musculature. It's also a bit of a show-off painting with all that beautiful fabric and lace on show, almost like van Dyck was saying, 'just look what I can do and how good I am - I'm certainly worth every penny you're paying me'.  And, indeed he was.

There were lots of paintings of Charles himself, mainly large, always regal and calm, sometimes outdoors on horseback and sometimes in a more courtly setting. His flamboyant clothes were always gorgeous and it's easy to imagine artists being very careful to ensure he's shown off to best effect. One of my favourites was a simple line drawing by van Dyck towards the end of the exhibition.

I've recently taken up drawing so it was fascinating to see this lesson from a real master, bringing the likeness to life without over-doing it and without filling the page with chalk. There's no shading or detail on the hat or clothes, it's all about the face. Very minimal with the lines but still brings the drawing to life. I bought the postcard of this drawing to keep with my drawing stuff as a reminder and a lesson. It really is quite marvellous in its simplicity. Thank you Mr van Dyck.

This really is an exceptional exhibition and I'll certainly want to visit again when the crowds of the first few weeks start to thin out a bit (at least I hope they will).