Ben Elwes Fine Art, Master Paintings Week, London, 4-11 July 2014, is showing a portrait of Admiral Abdelkader Perez, Moroccan ambassador to England in 1723 and 1737, whose Spanish family name suggests he was descended from morisco refugees from Spain. The portrait was painted by Michael Dahl (1659-1743), the London-based Swedish artist.
21 June 2014
Conference on Fifty Years after Panofsky’s Tomb Sculpture: New Approaches, New Perspectives, New Material, Courtauld Institute of Art, London.
Will include two 25-minute papers on Portuguese tombs:
1) ‘Medieval Women commemorated as readers: the iconography of reading as a specific feature of female Portuguese medieval monuments’ delivered by Joana Ramôa Melo of the New University of Lisbon;
2) Does technical investigation fully answer art history questions? A case study of a Portuguese copper tomb from the early fifteenth century by Marisa Costa of the University of Lisbon.
Ticket price £16 (£11 students/concessions)
Sorolla: El Color del Mart (The Colour of the Sea), CaixaForum, Barcelona, 12 June – 14 September 2014. Previously shown at the Museo Sorolla, Madrid, from which many of the paintings have been selected along with works from the Museo Thyssen in Malaga. The exhibition focuses on Sorolla’s favourite theme, the sea and the many colours of its waters. A downloadable colour-illustrated leaflet in Spanish can be found at http://obrasocial.lacaixa.es/deployedfiles/obrasocial/Estaticos/pdf/Nuestros_centros/caixaforumbarcelona/Sorolla_cfbcn_es.pdf
Susana Solana, Fundació Suñol, Barcelona, 23 May-6 September.
A focused display from the Fundació’s collection of the abstract sculptures and installations produced by the Barcelona-born Susana Solana (1946).
Since she began her career in the 1980s Solana has become internationally renowned through exhibitions at Kassel Documenta (1987, 1992), São Paolo Bienal (1987) and the Venice Biennale (1988, 1993). She has also collaborated with architects such as Rafael Moneo on exterior projects.
José de Madrazo y Agudo (1781-1859) Drawings, Fundación Botín, Santander, 12 June – 14 September. Exhibition of a previously unpublicized aspect of Madrazo’s work, including many drawings from the hundreds of previously unknown works recently discovered by the Prado in the hands of Madrazo’s descendants. The exhibition includes 61 drawings, four prints and four oils and a bust portrait of the artist by Ponciano Ponzano. Apart from the 58 works lent by the Prado there are also loans from the Museo Nacional de Romanticismo, Madrid; Lille’s Musée des Beaux Arts; the Kunstsammlungen, Dresden; and the Hispanic Society of New York. José de Madrazo was the patriarch of the artistic Madrazo clan and trained in the neoclassical style in Paris under David (1748-1825). The exhibition is curated by Carlos G Navarro, from the Department of 19th-century painting at the Prado, who will also be working on a future Madrazo catalogue raisonné. This is a further example in the series of monographic exhibitions organized since 2007 by the Fundación Botín to showcase the work of Spanish master draughtsmen.
Spanish Photography (1850-1870) in the Biblioteca Nacional de España, Madrid, 27 May – 14 September, 2014.
Photographs by named and anonymous artists working in Spain such as Charles Clifford, Jean Laurent, José Martínez Sánchez, Alonso Martínez y Hermano, José Spreafico and Joaquín Pedrosa.
The Prado has put on display (from April 2014 onwards) in the appropriate gallery rooms its acquisitions over the last year. These include six Spanish paintings: two early works painted by Alonso Cano before 1638, St Teresa of Avila’s Vision of Christ Crucified and St Teresa’s Vision of the Resurrected Christ (or) The Mystic Marriage of St Teresa, both in Room 10a; Luis Morales’ Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane, with an elaborate and detailed landscape; in Room 7 a Cristo exemplo de martires painted by Juan de Roelas and his workshop for Seville’s Mercedarian monastery; in Room 18 an iconographically unusual painting elaborating on the theme of the Immaculate depicting God portraying the Immaculate Virgin by the Rome and Valencia-trained José García Hidalgo (1645-1717), who moved to Madrid in 1674; and finally in Room 10, an anonymous seventeenth-century and highly naturalistic Repentant St Peter.The Prado has also acquired Mariano Fortuny’s 1867 copy of Ribera’s St Andrew. It was put on show in April 2014 in Room 9 alongside the original painting by Ribera which served as its model, in a small in-focus display, which also includes Fortuny’s Naked old man in the sun, painted in Granada between 1870 and 1872, and his watercolour copy of Velázquez’s Menippus.
El Greco y la Pintura Moderna (El Greco and Modern Painting), Prado Museum, Madrid, 24 June – 5 October 2014.
The latest of the exhibitions in Spain devoted to the Cretan’s art and influence focuses on the rediscovery of El Greco by nineteenth- and twentieth-century modern and avant-garde artists in France, Germany, Spain and North and South America. 26 works by El Greco alongside more than 80 modern paintings and drawings, including Cézanne’s version of the Lady in an Ermine Wrap (lent to Spain for the first time), and works by Manet, Picasso and Expressionist groups amongst others. The exhibition aims to reveal how El Greco’s influence extended through Expressionism and Cubism to post World War II Abstract Expressionist artists in America such as Jackson Pollock and the angst-ridden figuration in the UK of Francis Bacon. It will also include works by Max Beckmann, Marc Chagall André Derain, Robert Delaunay, Alberto Giacometti, Oskar Kokoschka, August Macke, Amedeo Modigliani, Diego Rivera, Egon Schiele, and Chaïm Soutine. It has been organised by Javier Barón, curator of nineteenth-century art at the Prado.
España de Moda (Fifty years of Spanish Fashion), Museo del Traje, Madrid, 13 May – 31 August 2014. Exhibition of dress, drawings and posters. Includes interviews with leading Spanish fashion designers from the 1960s onwards, who developed from being producers of luxury goods to adapting to new economic factors in the 1970s and introducing prêt-a-porter garments; to the present position with young designers working for established world-renowned companies.
Cristina Rodrigues: Women from My Country, Manchester Cathedral, 3 July – 21 September. A 3-part installation, sponsored by the Arts Council, will be unveiled by the Portuguese-born Manchester-based artist. The 3 works are individually entitled The Queen, Enlightenment and Blanket, the latter made from adufes, square tambourines traditionally played by women in central inland Portugal, woven together with Portuguese lace and multi-coloured ribbons braided by local Manchester women.
ARTES 