Review of Gabriele Münter: Painting to the Point at Museum Ludwig, Cologne

26/12/18

Gabriele Münter: Painting to the Point

Museum Ludwig, Cologne

15 September 2018 – 13 January 2019

The German painter Gabriele Münter (1877-1962) holds a special place in my heart, since, at the age of 17, I spent the summer in the small and charming Bavarian Alpine town of Murnau, completing a language course at the Goethe Institute, and there encountered for the first time the work of Münter and her contemporaries. For it was in Murnau that the Berlin-born artist settled in 1909; there that she and Russian émigré artist Wassily Kandinsky lived together in the “Yellow House”, which went on to become the birthplace of the Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider group of expressionist artists); and there that she continued to live until her death, at the age of 85. The Staffelsee (the lake on the shores of which Murnau sits), the onion-shaped dome atop the church tower, and the purple and green Alps in the distance are all sights that warm my heart, much as they must have done Münter’s, given the number of times that she painted them. As soon as I read the announcement about Gabriele Münter: Painting to the Point, at the Museum Ludwig, this exhibition was therefore a must for me. 

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Review of Renoir Father and Son: Painting and Cinema at Musée d’Orsay, Paris

02/12/18
Renoir Father and Son: Painting and CinemaMusée d’Orsay, Paris
6 November 2018 – 27 January 2019

Walking into the side galleries in the impressive Musée d’Orsay, Paris, on a wet and windy late-autumn day, there is suddenly the feeling of spring – a girl laughs as she gaily swings back and forth, and a young couple promenade, doe-eyed, enjoying the first throes of young love. In black and white, these scenes play out on a loop on a large screen – extracts from some of the best-known and best-loved early films by the French film director Jean Renoir (1894-1979), while, on the surrounding walls, colour luminesces, as the same – or very similar – scenes are frozen, like screen grabs, on the canvases of his father, Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919), the impressionist painter. 

And so it goes on for the duration of the exhibition, which fills the galleries along the length of the first floor of the museum: Renoir-father and Renoir-son interspersed and in conversation – repeated motifs, repeated scenery, repeated models. The idea is not to place Jean in his father’s shadow, but to explore the extent to which his father’s legacy, and their close relationship, with Jean’s intimate understanding of his father’s painting process, influenced his directing career – either in terms of deliberately paying homage to, or deliberately seeking to move away from, such ascendancy. As Jean said towards the end of his career: “I have spent my life trying to determine the extent of the influence of my father upon me,” going on to describe his ambivalence and the periods “when I did my utmost to escape from it to dwell upon those when my mind was filled with the precepts I thought I had gleaned from him”.

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Review of Daubigny, Monet, Van Gogh: Impressions of Landscape at the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

01/11/16

Daubigny, Monet, Van Gogh: Impressions of Landscape

Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

21 October 2016 – 29 January 2017

Daubigny, Monet, Van Gogh. You might be forgiven for not immediately rushing to see this exhibition on the strength of its protagonist alone. The names Monet and Van Gogh draw a crowd, but Daubigny, it seems, has been largely forgotten in recent years. Part of the reasoning behind this touring exhibition – already shown at the Taft Museum, Cincinnati, and the National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh – is to redress this error, since, in the 19th century itself, Charles-François Daubigny (1817-1878) was not only one of the best-known artists in France, but one of the most successful and influential. His pioneering and innovative use of impasto techniques, the palette knife, and a sketchy application of broad brushstrokes of paint, along with his enjoyment of painting en plein air, broke with salon tradition and paved the way for the younger generation of impressionists.

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