TURNER. Paintings and watercolours from the Tate.

There are times, especially after a pandemic and a lockdown, when I find myself craving art. I want to be in a beautiful setting looking at beautiful creations be it paintings, sculptures, crafts, ceramics, calligraphy, photography, or anything else.

In this brutish world, it’s important to nourish the soul and feel uplifted and inspired. Can you imagine a world without art? It would be a dark and desolate place … sort of like the inside of Trump’s head, bleak and vacuous.

So I will go to the Turner exhibition at the much-loved Jacquemart-André museum, I’ll book my ticket online and choose a Monday which is the late-night opening, and I’ll wear a face mask.

Undoubtedly the greatest representative of the golden age of English watercolor, Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) exploited the effects of light and transparency on English landscapes or Venetian lagoons. Celebrated by his contemporaries, he continues today to move many admirers. This exhibition reveals the role played by watercolors in Turner’s life and art, from the youth works he sent to the Royal Academy to the fascinating luminous and colorful experiments of his maturity. For a modern audience, these are among his most radical and accomplished works. Thanks to outstanding loans from London’s Tate Britain, home to the world’s largest Turner collection, the Jacquemart-André Museum hosts an exhibition of sixty watercolors and ten oil paintings, some of which have never been seen before in France.

https://www.musee-jacquemart-andre.com/en/home

Because the paintings are on loan from the Tate, I began thinking about great art and how it’s transported from city to city, museum to museum. I did some googling and came up with this interesting article written by Andrew Dickson. It’s entitled – How to move a masterpiece: the secret business of shipping priceless artworks

The article even mentions the transporting of the Mona Lisa from her home in the Louvre to Washington D.C.’s National Gallery of Art in 1963 … at the request of Jackie Kennedy.

Curators at the Louvre were aghast after they heard that Jackie Kennedy had charmed the French culture minister André Malraux into agreeing to loan the Mona Lisa to the US in 1963 (many threatened to resign). Even the director of the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC was unwilling to take it, apprehensive about the risks. In the end, ……

 

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/mar/21/how-to-move-a-masterpiece-secret-business-shipping-priceless-artworks-art-handling