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September 2015

Vol. 157 | No. 1350

Free review

Leonardo da Vinci

 

LEONARDO DA VINCI exhibitions risk being a little like the Chelsea Flower Show: the individual plants are marvellous but the show gardens can be deplorable. Conceptual frameworks, devised for display, do not always do justice to the prodigious quality of what they contain. To create a comprehensive exhibition devoted to Leonardo is a great challenge because the complexity of his thought and the diversity of his activities as an artist defy any simple presentation. Fortunately the thoughtfully conceived exhibition Leonardo 1452–1519 at the Palazzo Reale, Milan (closed 25th July), a very ambitious project which sought to integrate Leonardo’s activity in painting and sculpture with his other intellectual pursuits, avoided potential pitfalls. It was organised around a limited range of paintings, a copious selection of drawings and a very wide and rich selection of comparative material.

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Free review

René Gimpel’s ‘Diary of an Art Dealer’

By Diana J Kostyrko

WHEN THE JOURNAL of René Gimpel was first published in Paris in 1963, Gaston-Louis Vuitton (1883–1970), Gimpel’s second cousin and the president of the famous Vuitton luggage enterprise, was initially in ‘a state of euphoria’. On closer reading, however, his reaction was less sympathetic: ‘you must have edited it, and you did well to do so. I would even say that you did not go far enough’, he wrote in a letter to the dead author’s youngest son, Jean Gimpel.1 Vuitton was correct on one point at least. 

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  • Rossetti-2

    Edward Burne-Jones, William Morris, Dante Gabriel ­Rossetti, Harry Ward and illuminated manuscripts

    By Philip McEvansoneya
  • Laura-Knight

    Laura and Harold Knight in the First World War

    By Timothy Wilcox
  • Rembrandt

    Rembrandt and Cézanne

    By Richard Verdi
  • Gimpel

    René Gimpel’s ‘Diary of an Art Dealer’

    By Diana J Kostyrko
  • Sickert

    The sources of two late views of Venice by Sickert

    By Wendy Baron
  • Hamilton

    Richard Hamilton at the Slade School of Fine Art (1948-51) and his ‘abstract’ paintings of the early 1950s

    By Giovanni Casini
  • Geoffrey Beard (1929–2015)

    By Nicholas Goodison
  • Clothing the Clergy: Virtue and Power in Medieval Europe c.800–1200, M.C. Miller

  • The Mongol Century: visual cultures of Yuan China, 1271–1368, S. McCausland

    By Frances Wood
  • Material, Technik, Ästhetik und ­Wissenschaft der Farbe 1750–1850, A. Pietsch

    By Ulrike Kern
  • Gustave Courbet, U Küster, ed., with contributions by S. ­Guégan, M. Hilaire, L. Madeline, B. Mottin and J.H. Rubin. Gustave Courbet, Les années suisses, L. Madeline, ed.

    By Klaus Herding
  • Cartier in the 20th Century, M. Young-Sánchez, ed.

    By David Anfam
  • Franz Marc: The Complete Works, A. Hoberg and I. Jansen

    By Jill (J. L.) Lloyd
  • The Recurrent, Haunting Ghost. Essays on the Art, Life and Legacy of Marcel Duchamp, F.M. Naumann The Grand Old Lady of Modern Art. Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Nude Descending a Staircase’, I. Fleuriet Duchamp in Munich 1912, H Friedel, T. Girst, M. Mühling and F. Rappe, eds., with essays by H. Molderings, K. von ­Berswordt-Wallrabe, M.R. Taylor, S. Bogen and T. Girst

    By Hellmut Wohl
  • Eduardo Paolozzi, J. Collins

    By Fanny Singer
  • The Buildings of England. Bedfordshire, Huntingdonshire and Peterborough, C. O’Brien and N. Pevsner

    By Alan Cox