Jan van eyck

Saturday

4 April 2020

The art of the hermit

Late in the afternoon on Valentine’s Day, I walked through an almost empty Uffizi. Coronavirus was then a Wuhan phenomenon. Our temperatures had been taken at the airport, but there were no restrictions on travel and those wearing masks looked eccentric. I congratulated myself on finding Florence so quiet. Off-season, I thought smugly. That’s the way to do it. Heaven knows it’s empty now. The painting that caught my eye on that distant-seeming visit was a long, low cassone-shaped painting on the theme of the Thebaid attributed to Fra Angelico (c.1420). The Thebaid is a collection of texts telling of the saints who in the first centuries of Christianity retreated to the barren lands around the Egyptian city of Thebes.

Martin Gayford

Are there ways in which virtual exhibitions are better than real ones?

Six months ago I published a book about travelling to look at works of art. One such journey involved a round trip of about 6,000 miles to contemplate minimalist sculptures in the Texan desert. But the point wasn’t so much the distance as the importance of standing physically in front of the works themselves. Seeing the actual thing, I argued, was fundamentally different from looking at it in a book or on a screen. Nowadays, of course, unless you live within walking distance of a notable sculpture, that’s really all there is. A week ago my inbox was flooded with messages announcing that the art institutions of the world were closing until further notice. A few days later there was another deluge of announcements, but this time it was online exhibitions.

Wednesday

3 October 2018

Benjamin Riley

The glory that was the Low Countries, the disaster that is the European Union

From our US edition

In 1983, ten European heads of state, signing the Solemn Declaration on European Union, declared a goal of ‘ever closer union’ — something Belgium, in its role as home-nation to the EU, has been abetting ever since, but which the democratic publics of the EU’s constituent nations keep blocking at the ballot box. Since 1954, visitors to the Frick Collection have been attempting an ever closer union with the Flemish master Jan van Eyck’s Virgin and Child, with Saints and Donor (c. 1441–43), but have been blocked by a forbidding console table, which guards and obscures van Eyck’s work in the Boucher ante-room. Europe’s ‘ever closer union’ has been a disaster for democracy.