The dramatic boom and bust of The Golden Age

For a period of barely 100 years, The Netherlands boasted the most powerful empire in the world – a power driven by markets rather than privilege.

And one of its successful areas was its art market: the great painters Rembrandt, Frans Hals and Vermeer contributed to a cultural explosion known as The Golden Age.

And like the tiny country they lived and worked in, these painters experienced good fortune as well as bad – enjoying prestige, wealth and prosperity before falling into poverty.

Vermeer’s fortunes in particular were tied to those of the Republic: 1672, when the artist turned 40, was its ‘year of disaster’, as English, French and German forces tried to invade from different directions. The Dutch survived – but their global supremacy did not, and Vermeer also fell upon hard times before dying soon after.

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Mersey ferry gets the dazzle treatment from Sir Peter Blake

Seven ship painters spent 10 days covering a Mersey ferry in the reds, oranges, blues, yellows, pinks, greens, blacks and whites carefully specified by Sir Peter Blake and the one obvious thing now is that no one’s going to miss it.

“It is a crazy concept,” said Blake on board the ship he has now “dazzled” with wild colours and patterns. “They’ve done it so beautifully and it looks fantastic. It is very exciting to see it.”

The Mersey ferry Snowdrop has become the third vessel to be painted in this way in homage to the artists 100 years ago who painted British ships in “dazzle camouflage” to mislead German U-boat captains.

The organisation 14-18 Now, responsible for five years of art commissions marking the first world war centenary, estimate that 8 million people haveseen two contemporary dazzle ships that were unveiled last year on the Thames in London and on Liverpool waterfront. The Snowdrop is now the only one that will actually go anywhere.

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Dutch royal family to return Nazi looted art

The Dutch royal family has said it will return a painting from its collection thought to have been looted by the Nazis during World War Two.
The painting, by Joris van der Haagen, had been bought by Queen Juliana from a Dutch art dealer in 1960.
The palace said an investigation looked at tens of thousands of art works in the House of Orange's collection.
Officials have contacted the heirs of the original owner, who was not named, to arrange its return.
"A Jewish collector was forced in 1942 to hand over the painting Haagse Bos with view over Huis Ten Bosch Palace by Joris van der Haagen to the (Nazi) bank Lippmann, Rosenthal & Co in Amsterdam," said the report, which was commissioned by the palace in 2012.

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Burning of Temple in Londonderry takes place - BBC

The burning of a 70-foot carved wooden tower called Temple has taken place in Londonderry.

More than 15,000 people attended the event on Saturday night as the artwork was set alight in the Waterside area.

The project was the work of US artist David Best, and his aim was to offer an alternative perspective on bonfires.

He said the temple had given the people of Derry a neutral, cross-community space where they "celebrated and reflected on their losses together".
'Forgiveness and celebration'

More than 60,000 people visited the structure in the week before it was set alight, leaving hundreds of personal messages of love and loss inside the temple.

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How Western art learned to stop fearing the East - BBC

On 29 May 1453, Constantinople, capital of the mighty Byzantine Empire, fell to an army of Ottoman Turks who had besieged the city for seven weeks. For three days, the victorious 21-year-old Sultan Mehmed II allowed his soldiers to rampage in the metropolis, pillaging whatever they could find.

From the perspective of Europe’s rulers, it was a catastrophic blow for Christendom: the balance of power in the world had changed for good. Nearly three decades later, the Ottomans struck deeper into Europe, storming the southern Italian city of Otranto, and executing more than 800 inhabitants who refused to convert to Islam.

By 1529, Ottoman troops led by Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent were outside the walls of Vienna. According to Haydn Williams, author of Turquerie: An Eighteenth-Century European Fantasy, published last year, Western Europe fell into “a state of shock”.

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Visions of Chagall: Seeing a new world - BBC

‘One grows into the works,’ says Meret Meyer, as we stand before her grandfather’s paintings, marvelling at the figures that seem to dance and shimmer on the wall. ‘Everywhere there are metaphors.’ But above all, there is beauty.

A Russian Jew, Marc Chagall survived Tsarist pogroms, Soviet communism and the Nazi Holocaust. His long life was a mirror of the last century.


I do not want to be like all the others, I want to see a new world
Marc Chagall
Yet though his pictures are etched with grief, their overriding emotion is joy. ‘I do not want to be like all the others,’ declared Chagall. ‘I want to see a new world.’ He created a new world in his paintings. Thirty years since his death, his joie de vivre still shines through.

This big new retrospective of Chagall’s work attracted 340,000 visitors during its first run in Milan over Christmas. For the next four months it’s in Brussels, at the Musées Royaux des Beaux Arts. It covers the full sweep of Chagall’s career, from his poignant early paintings of village life to his florid designs for the Metropolitan Opera in New York, more than half a century later.

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Monet for nothing: How Paul Durand-Ruel risked it all for Impressionism - BBC

In 1870 the French art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel fled from Paris to London, to escape the chaos and carnage of the Franco-Prussian War. In London he met two fellow refugees, Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro.

It was the start of an unlikely partnership which opened the door to modern art.

Durand-Ruel in his gallery around 1910 (Archives Durand-Ruel)
Durand-Ruel was a conservative, a monarchist and a devout Catholic, but he fell in love with Monet and Pissarro’s radical approach to painting. He adored their love of light, their emphasis on atmosphere and emotion.

He started buying up their work, and the work of their contemporaries. Over the next 50 years he bought over 1000 Monets, around 800 Pissarros, about 1500 Renoirs, and hundreds of works by Degas, Sisley and Manet. He mounted exhibitions in Paris, London and America.

Thanks to Durand-Ruel, these ‘Impressionists’ (as myopic art critics called them, disparagingly) were able to make a living. As Monet said, ‘without him, we wouldn’t have survived.’

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When we were Young... British Artists - BBC

Talented. Entrepreneurial. Ambitious. Happy to shock. Catnip to the tabloids. The Young British Artists, as coined by Michael Corris in ArtForum in 1992 (then acronymed in 1996) were all these things. They knew how to work. And party.

Shapero Modern, a new gallery in Mayfair specialising in in modern and contemporary prints, captures both aspects of the YBAs in a new show entitled Rack 'em Up: British Contemporary Editions, 1990–2000. It features editions of works by Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas, Jake & Dinos Chapman, Tracey Emin et al.

The exhibition, which runs until 27 March 2015, also includes photographs of the off-duty artists by Johnnie Shand Kydd, a selection of which are shown below.

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