Burlington Contemporary is the Burlington Magazine’s free online platform for reviews and research on international contemporary art.
Burlington Contemporary is the Burlington Magazine’s free online platform for reviews and research on international contemporary art.
‘Now you can gasp’, said the Chairman of the Trustees of the British Museum to guests at a recent fundraising dinner. He had just revealed the valuation of £1 billion for the magnificent collection of Chinese ceramics that has been given to the museum by the Sir Percival David Foundation. Munificence on this scale is normally only associated with the richest of American museums, so a new record seems to have been set in the European context by this extraordinary gesture.
A key architect of the history of Abstract Expressionism, its sources, development and legacy, David Anfam re-examined and extended our knowledge of a wide range of twentieth- and twenty- first-century artists. His expertise facilitated the establishment of the Clyfford Still Museum, Denver, and his approachable teaching and writing opened up new avenues for thinking about art.
In 2024, to mark seventy-five years since the artist’s death, four concurrent exhibitions dedicated to Ensor have been staged in Antwerp. The most substantial of these is In Your Wildest Dreams: Ensor Beyond Impressionism at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts, which is the culmination of years of research into the museum’s collection of Ensor’s works – the largest in the world.
A devotional work by the fifteenth-century painter Lorenzo d’Alessandro da San Severino, who worked in the Marche, emerged at a recent Paris auction. It was commissioned by a friend of the artist and adds significantly to our understanding of this fascinating but neglected painter.
The Museo Del Prado, Madrid, preserves in its rich collection of drawings an interesting study with a composition in a mixtilinear frame. It is identified as an ‘Ecstasy of a Jesuit saint’ and categorised as an anonymous work from the second half of the seventeenth century. As will be demonstrated, this drawing, which can be dated more accurately to the 1730s, unquestionably demonstrates the stylistic characteristics of the Portuguese painter Francisco Vieira de Matos (1699–1783) – better known as Vieira Lusitano – and can be identified as the ‘Ecstasy of St John of God’.
Stefano Tofanelli (1752–1812), who was born in Nave, near Lucca, may be counted as being among the leading painters active in Rome during the papacy of Pius VI (reg. 1775– 99). In spite of the fact that his career was no less prestigious than that of such celebrated contemporaries as Bernardino Nocchi (1741– 1812), Vincenzo Camuccini (1771–1844) and Gaspare Landi (1756–1830) – not least by virtue of the prestigious honours accorded to him – his life and works have been the victims of entirely unmerited scholarly neglect.
