MARCH 2010
Royal Academy - The Real Van Gogh: The Artist and His Letters - Ends 18th April
 
'Self Portrait as an Artist' January 1888, Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam. Still Life with a Plate of Onions', 1889 Oil on canvas 49.6 x 644 cm. Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, The Netherlands.
A landmark exhibition of the work of Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) The focus of the exhibition is the artist's remarkable correspondence. Over 35 original letters, rarely exhibited to the public due to their fragility, will be on display, together with around 65 paintings and 30 drawings that express the principal themes to be found within the correspondence. Really worth seeing! If you are a 'Friend' you don't need to queue or book tickets.
RA Opening times: 10-6pm every day except Friday 10pm. Open until 9pm on Saturdays for the Van Gogh exhibition. Ends 18th April 2010.
www.royalacademy.org.uk
Tate Britain - Henry Moore - Ends 8 August
Henry Moore - Recumbent Figure 1938
Tate © the Henry Moore Foundation . Photo: Rocco Redondo
Radical, experimental and avant-garde, Henry Moore (1898–1986) was one of Britain’s greatest artists. This stunning exhibition takes a fresh look at his work and legacy, presenting over 150 stone sculptures, wood carvings, bronzes and drawings.
Moore rebelled against his teachers’ traditional views of sculpture, instead taking inspiration from non-Western works he saw in museums. He pioneered carving directly from materials, evolving his signature abstract forms derived from the human body. This exhibition presents examples of the defining subjects of his work, such as the reclining figure, mother and child, abstract compositions and drawings of wartime London. The works are situated in the turbulent ebb and flow of twentieth-century history, sometimes uncovering a dark and erotically charged dimension that makes us look at them in a new light. The trauma of war, the advent of psychoanalysis, new ideas of sexuality, primitive art and surrealism all had an influence on Moore’s work.
Highlights of the show include a group of key reclining figures carved in Elm, which illustrate the development of this key image over his career. Moore was an Official War Artist and his drawings of huddled Londoners sheltering from the onslaught of the Blitz captured the popular imagination, winning him a place in the hearts of the public.
Visit Henry Moore's sculpture studios, home and gardens at Perry Green, Hertfordshire, and the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds. Both are part of The Henry Moore Foundation, set up by the artist in 1977.
Tate Britain opening times: 10.00–17.50 Open until 22.00 on the first Friday of each month. Ends 8th August 2010
http://www.tate.org.uk/
Tate Modern - Arshile Gorky - A Retrospective - Ends 3 May 2010
“The most important figure in American Art before J.Pollock” - The Daily Telegraph
This exhibition celebrates the extraordinary life and work of Arshile Gorky (c.1904-1948). Along with Rothko, Pollock and de Kooning, Gorky was one of the most powerful American painters of the twentieth century, and a seminal figure in the formation of Abstract Expressionism. The exhibition includes paintings and drawings from across his career, and a handful of rarely seen sculptures.
The Armenian-born artist first arrived in the US in 1920 fleeing persecution in his home country. He adopted the name Arshile Gorky with reference to the Russian writer Maxim Gorky. First in Boston and, after 1924, then in New York, he studied the Modern European masters in books and galleries, teaching himself art by combining this with art classes. His early still-lives show his reliance upon the examples of Cezanne, Picasso and others, but his portraits in the 1920s and 1930s, especially the two versions of The Artist and His Mother, show how Gorky was able to pour his personal experiences and his studies into a highly individual realism.
During the 1940s Gorky encountered Surrealists exiled from wartime Europe. Stimulated by their ideas of free flowing, automatic painting, he rapidly developed the style for which he became famous. Works such as Waterfall 1943 are evocative, layered, and translucent, with a liquid glowing quality. Gorky's characteristic paintings of this final period include biomorphic forms in strong colours, shifting abstract elements and the energetic line that he developed in his drawings. They capture a sensual enjoyment of landscape as well as the mood and memories that the subjects can evoke. Just as he came to be seen as a leading figure in Abstract Expressionism, his career was cut short by a series of personal tragedies, which ended with him committing suicide in 1948.
Tate Modern opening times: Sunday – Thursday, 10.00–18.00 Friday and Saturday, 10.00–22.00 Ends 3 May 2010
http://www.tate.org.uk/
Tate Modern - Van Doesburg and the International Avant-GardeVan Doesburg and the International Avant-Garde - ends 16 May
Van Doesburg, who worked in disciplines within art, design and text, founded the far-reaching movement and magazine De Stijl. This artistic movement of painters, architects and designers sought to build a new society in the aftermath of World War I, advocating an international style of art and design based on a strict geometry of horizontals and verticals.
Including over 350 works (many unseen in the UK before) by key artists as Jean Arp, Constantin Brancusi, László Moholy-Nagy, Piet Mondrian, Francis Picabia, Gerrit Rietveld, Kurt Schwitters and Sophie Taeuber, the exhibition features van Doesburg's rarely-seen Counter-Composition paintings and designs for the Café Aubette in Stasbourg,
Tate Modern opening times: Sunday – Thursday, 10.00–18.00 Friday and Saturday, 10.00–22.00 Ends 16 May 2010
http://www.tate.org.uk/
The Courtauld Gallery - Michelangelo's Dream - ends 16 May
   Michelangelo’s masterpiece The Dream is one of the greatest of all Renaissance drawings. This complex work shows a nude youth being roused by a winged spirit from the vices that surround him.
The Dream was probably part of the celebrated group of drawings which Michelangelo made as gifts for Tommaso de' Cavalieri, a young Roman nobleman with whom he had fallen passionately in love. With loans from international collections, the exhibition unites The Dream for the first time with these extraordinary drawings.
Michelangelo’s Dream also includes a selection of previously unexhibited handwritten poems which the artist composed for Cavalieri. Further closely related drawings by Michelangelo as well as works by Albrecht Dürer and others will shed light on the meaning of Michelangelo’s enigmatic masterpiece.
Courtauld Opening times: Daily 10.00 – 18.00 Ends 16 May
www.courtauld.ac.uk
The National Gallery - Painting History: Delaroche and Lady Jane Grey - Ends 23 May
Paul Delaroche was one of the most celebrated artists of his time. His large history paintings received wide acclaim at the Paris annual exhibition, then dominated by the conflicting influences of Neo-classicism and Romanticism.
Such was Delaroche’s success that it often exceeded that of his contemporaries, Ingres and Delacroix. His paintings combine Ingres’s highly finished style with Delacroix’s historical themes to great effect, resembling stage productions where dramatic scenes are being acted.
National Gallery Opening times: Daily 10am–6pm, Fridays 10am–9pm. Ends - 23 May 2010
www.nationalgallery.org.uk/
National Portrait Gallery - Irving Penn Portraits Ends - 6th June
  Alfred Hitchcock, New York, 1947
National Portrait Gallery, London © Condé Nast Publications, Inc.
Marlene Dietrich, New York, 1948
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution. Gift of Irving Penn
© Condé Nast Publications, Inc.
Irving Penn (1917–2009) was one of the great photographers of our time. Focusing specifically on his portraits of major cultural figures of the last seven decades, Irving Penn Portraits is a glorious celebration of his work in this genre. The exhibition is brought together from major international collections and includes over 120 silver and platinum prints, many vintage, ranging from his portraits for Vogue magazine in the 1940s to some of his last work.
Penn photographed an extraordinary range of sitters from the worlds of literature, music and the visual and performing arts. Among those featured in the exhibition are Truman Capote, Salvador Dali, Christian Dior, T.S. Eliot, Duke Ellington, Grace Kelly, Rudolf Nureyev, Al Pacino, Edith Piaf, Pablo Picasso and Harold Pinter.
Opening hours: Daily 10am–6pm, Thursday-Friday until 21:00 Ends - 6th June
www.npg.org.uk
The Serpentine Gallery - Richard Hamilton - Ends 25 April
Portrait of Gaitskell by Richard Hamilton
Hamilton, born in 1922, was a leading instigator of Pop Art in Britain and a key member of the Independent Group, formed in the 1950s by a group of artists and writers at London's Institute of Contemporary Arts. Retrospective exhibitions of his work have been held in the UK at the Hanover Gallery (1964) and Tate Gallery (1970 and 1992). Hamilton was Britain's representative at the 1993 Venice Biennale
Richard Hamilton has embraced many different media since the 1950s, including painting, printmaking, installation, typography and industrial design. This major exhibition will reassess the nature of the British artist’s pioneering contribution, focusing on Hamilton’s political works.
Opening hours: Open daily, 10am - 6pm Ends - 25th April
www.serpentinegallery.org/
Tate Britain - Chris Ofili - Ends 16 May
Ofili was established through exhibitions by Charles Saatchi and the travelling exhibition Sensation (1997) and a member of the Young British Artists. Ofili has also had numerous solo shows since the early 1990s including the Serpentine Gallery. In 1998, Ofili won the Turner Prize, and in 2003 he was selected to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale of that year, where his work for the British Pavilion was done in collaboration with the architect David Adjaye. Had been known for using elephant dung in his work - the new body of work is based on his experiences living on the island of Trinidad for the last five years.
Tate Britain opening times: 10.00–17.50 Open until 22.00 on the first Friday of each month. Ends - 16 May 2010
http://www.tate.org.uk/
Tate Modern - The Unilever Series: Miroslaw Balka - Turbine Hall - ends 5th April
How It Is by Polish artist Miroslaw Balka is a giant grey steel structure with a vast dark chamber, which in construction reflects the surrounding architecture - almost as if the interior space of the Turbine Hall has been turned inside out. Hovering somewhere between sculpture and architecture, on 2 metre stilts, it stands 13 metres high and 30 metres long. Visitors can walk underneath it, listening to the echoing sound of footsteps on steel, or enter via a ramp into a pitch black interior, creating a sense of unease.
Underlying this chamber is a number of allusions to recent Polish history – the ramp at the entrance to the Ghetto in Warsaw, or the trucks which took Jews away to the camps of Treblinka or Auschwitz, for example. By entering the dark space, visitors place considerable trust in the organisation, something that could also be seen in relation to the recent risks often taken by immigrants travelling. Balka intends to provide an experience for visitors which is both personal and collective, creating a range of sensory and emotional experiences through sound, contrasting light and shade, individual experience and awareness of others, perhaps provoking feelings of apprehension, excitement or intrigue.
Tate Modern opening times: Sunday – Thursday, 10.00–18.00 Friday and Saturday, 10.00–22.00 Ends 5th April 2010
http://www.tate.org.uk/
The Saatchi Gallery - The Empire Strikes Back: Indian Art Today - Ends 7th May
As the title suggests - an exhibition of contemporary artists painting in India today. Hasn't had great reviews.
Opening hours: Daily 10am–6pm - ends 7th May. HOWEVER, check the website - it is frequently closed!!
www.saatchigallery.com
The Hayward Gallery
The Hayward Gallery is closed from February to May 2010 for essential repairs and renewal. It reopens on 19 June with Ernesto Neto.
www.southbankcentre.co.uk/find/hayward-gallery-visual-arts
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