Review of Toulouse-Lautrec and the Masters of Montmartre online at Victoria Art Gallery, Bath

18/11/20

Toulouse-Lautrec and the Masters of Montmartre 

Victoria Art Gallery, Bath

Available online

 

“They don’t pretend to be precious stuff; they’ll be torn down in a little while and others will be put up, and so on: they don’t give a damn! That’s great! – and that’s art, by God, and the best kind, mixed in with life, art without any bluffing or boasting and within the easy reach of ordinary guys,” said the anarchist art critic and aesthete Félix Fénéon.

 

This exhibition, comprising 80 colour “street art” posters by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and his contemporaries, including Pierre Bonnard, Jules Chéret, Alphonse Mucha and Théophile Steinlen, was long in the planning at Victoria Art Gallery in Bath. Sadly, it was open for less than two months before closing because of the Covid pandemic. The gallery, however, which intends to remain closed until next spring, has responded by moving nearly 50 works from the exhibition online: and not just the images, but also audio accompaniments for 16 of them, giving information about the artists, the bohemian celebrities of turn-of-the-century Montmartre, and background music to bring the atmosphere of the café-concert to life. 

Read the full review here

 

Review of Bonnard: En toute intimité at the Musée Bonnard, Le Cannet, France

13/01/17

Bonnard: En toute intimité

Musée Bonnard, Le Cannet, France

26 November 2016 – 23 April 2017

With the title Bonnard: En toute intimité, one might well expect an exhibition focusing on the artist’s nudes, or more erotic elements of his work, but, just as Tracey Emin’s tent, Everyone I Have Every Slept With 1963-1995, includes those with whom she simply enjoyed (or otherwise) the intimacy of a shared bed – or womb – so this beautifully curated show at the Musée Bonnard, in the artist’s ultimate hometown of Le Cannet, on the Côte d’Azur, looks at those people, places and things to which the artist was especially close at different points throughout his life. Arranged largely chronologically, it comprises about 60 works from the museum’s collection, alongside a handful of loans, and a number of new acquisitions from the Musée d’Orsay.

Read the rest of this review here

Image:

Pierre Bonnard

Paysage, soleil couchant (Landscape at sunset), c1923. 

Oil on canvas, 59 x 72.5 cm. 

Musée Bonnard, Le Cannet, gift from the Fondation Meyer pour le développement culturel et artistique, permanent loan from the musée d’Orsay, Paris. 

© Adagp, Paris 2016. © RMN-Grand Palais (musée d'Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowski.