The Courtauld Gallery Exhibition & Special Display Programme June 2016 – January 2017
FORTHCOMING EXHIBITIONS
Summer Showcase
Georgiana Houghton: Spirit Drawings
16 June – 11 September 2016
Georgiana Houghton: Spirit Drawings will showcase a series of automatic ‘spirit drawings’ where the fluid forms and dense rich patterns of the work anticipate the abstraction of early 20th century art. In the 1860s and 70s, Georgiana Houghton produced a series of largely abstract watercolours. Detailed explanations on the back of the paintings declare that various spirits guided her hand. In 1871 Houghton rented a gallery in Bond Street and presented 155 of these works to a London audience. While the majority of Houghton’s work survives in the Victorian Spiritualists’ Union in Melbourne, up until now her work has been largely unknown beyond a circle of specialists.
Autumn Exhibition
Rodin & Dance: The Essence of Movement
20 October 2016 – 22 January 2017
This is the first major research-based exhibition to focus on Rodin’s passion for dance and bodies in extreme poses. Only discovered in the artist’s studio after his death, these small-scale experimental sculptures serve as a fascinating insight into a modern master and the radical new dance forms emerging in Paris at the time. These leaping, twisting figures in terracotta and plaster are presented alongside a series of drawings depicting performers from the Royal Cambodian dance troupe that enthralled France in 1906 as well as models that posed for him in the privacy of his studio. Hidden from public view during Rodin’s lifetime, the studies push the boundaries of sculpture.
FORTHCOMING DRAWINGS GALLERY DISPLAYS
Drawings Gallery Display: Trees
18 June – 25 September 2016
Ranging from the early sixteenth to the mid nineteenth centuries and including works by Fra Bartolommeo, Jan van Goyen, Claude Lorrain and John Constable among others, this show will explore artists’ enduring fascination with the tree. Portraits of individual trees and a selection of forest scenes will offer an insight into the way in which artists throughout the ages have treated trees with the same reverence and psychological insight as a portraitist would regard a sitter.
s death, these small-scale experimental sculptures serve as a fascinating insight into a modern master and the radical new dance forms emerging in Paris at the time. These leaping, twisting figures in terracotta and plaster are presented alongside a series of drawings depicting performers from the Royal Cambodian dance troupe that enthralled France in 1906 as well as models that posed for him in the privacy of his studio. Hidden from public view during Rodin’s lifetime, the studies push the boundaries of sculpture.
Drawings Gallery Display: A Civic Utopia: France 1760-1840
8 October – 8 January 2017
A Civic Utopia opens on 8 October and will examine the place of architecture in establishing the notion of public life. Bringing together a number of drawings of public buildings and spaces from the late Ancien Régime through to the early years of King Louis-Philippe in France, they explore the idea of a ‘scientific’ city, in which rational and symbolic expressions of civic life established a pattern for the improvement of society. If Utopia is defined as the imagining of a comprehensive ideal system or pattern of civil organisation, then we can see this French vision as utopian, in which public places and buildings function to encourage the moral character of society.
FINAL WEEKS
Botticelli and Treasures from the Hamilton Collection
Until 15 May 2016
Described as ‘pure bliss’ (The Independent) and ‘a magnificent and startlingly original vision of Paradise’ (The Sunday Times), the exhibition showcases 30 rarely seen drawings charting Dante’s imaginary journey through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise. The Hamilton Collection was sold to Berlin in 1882 by the 12th Duke of Hamilton and 10 rarely seen vellum drawings from each of the three parts of the Divine Comedy are exhibited alongside a selection of Renaissance illuminated manuscripts, including the Hamilton Bible.
Bruegel in Black and White: Three Grisailles Reunited
Until 8 May 2016
With fewer than 40 paintings attributed to Bruegel, this exhibition brings together for the first time the artist’s only three surviving grisailles: The Courtauld’s Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery, The Death of the Virgin from Upton House (National Trust) and Three Soldiers from the Frick Collection in New York. Including replicas made by Bruegel’s sons, as well as other grisailles, the exhibition provides insight into this elusive Northern European artist and the practice of grisaille painting.
Drawings Gallery Display: Ornament by Design
Until 12 June 2016
Ornament by Design examines the relationship between decoration and architecture in drawing. Tracing the ways in which the subtle lines of adornment can transform the surface of buildings and things into objects of desire through the examination of a range of seventeeth- and eighteenth-century French designs for ceilings and capriccios alongside studies for specific ornamental brackets and frames.