Art Exhibitions of the year 2023

 

Elias, Bodegon, 1933

This year, I’ve written about ten exhibitions, ordered in approximately reverse chronological order of viewing: 

• Frans Hals (National Gallery)
• Real Families (Fitzwilliam)
• Black Atlantic (Fitzwilliam)
• Rubens and Women (Dulwich)
• Morandi (Estorick)
• Labyrinth (Fitzwilliam)
• Sussex Landscape (Pallant House)
• Islanders (Fitzwilliam)
• Cezanne (Tate)
• Feliu Elias (MNAC, Barcelona)

Of those, my top three were:

Feliu Elias, a painter I’d never heard of before seeing this exhibition, and what a revelation! A painter who could move confidently between cartoons, and still lifes and portraits in oil, and impresses by the seriousness and thoroughness with which he approaches both. The most mundane, everyday objects, such as saucepans, are treated almost with reverence.  

Rubens, for his ravishing depiction of women – even his works of classical mythology end up having the same figure as his wife. I don’t think the TLS review of this show (by Breeze Barrington) did the exhibition justice. She complained that the women in the paintings are “not the focus”, and  “it would help to say more about who they [the women in the paintings] were in their own right”. Yet we don’t ask Frans Hals (or any portrait painter) to tell us all about the characters. The job of the portrait painter is to bring the sitter to life through their expression, their form. 

Frans Hals, whose paintings stand out so powerfully that you can recognize then at the other end of a gallery. If portrait painting is bringing a figure to life, then Hals reveals a whole living world. 

All in all, a great year for art, even if (as I noticed most in the Real Families exhibition) there is an increasing tendency to curate art exhibitions by criteria very different to quality of the artwork - a rather worrying trend.