HUON MALLALIEU
EXTENDED SHOWS
After three months of looking at old favourites, it is now (with crossed fingers) back to the future.
There are a number of shows that I was cross to have missed during our Van Winkleish sequestration, and it is splendid to find on our emerging that several have been extended.
Among them are The Young Rembrandt at the Ashmolean, Oxford, which I previewed in the April issue. The museum is expecting to reopen in mid-august, and the exhibition will now continue until some point in December.
At Compton Verney, Cranach (previewed in the Spring issue) has already reopened, and will continue until 3rd January, and at Tate St Ives, Naum Gabo (previewed March issue) will now run until 27th September. The Hepworth Wakefield’s pairing of photographer Bill Brandt and sculptor Henry Moore will be extended to 1st November. The two first met in 1942 when both were working on ‘shelter pictures’, and they shared ideas and themes to an unexpected extent.
The National Gallery’s Titian: Love, Desire, Death was not to be missed. Resurrected, it will run until 17th January. There are the six paintings commissioned by Philip II from Ovid’s Metamorphoses together with the later Death of Actaeon. They are the culmination of European mythological painting; as well as sex and death, they are full of motion and sound.
Also at the National to 20th September is the newly opened Nicolaes Maes, with paintings and drawings by one of Rembrandt’s most notable pupils. His domestic quiet provides a calming contrast to the loud lusts of the gods.
The Aubrey Beardsley show at Tate Britain, extended to 20th September, is also full of sex, death and decadence. He was tubercular, yet – in a career that began when he was 18 and ended with his death in 1898, at the age of only 25 – he produced a formidable body of illustration. The 200-plus works in the show demonstrate why he became one of the most influential British artists of the following century. It might be best to ignore the woke labels, though.