This week: three big London shows, in depth. As Marina Abramović draws huge crowds to the Royal Academy of Arts in London, we interview her about the exhibition—the first ever dedicated to a woman artist in the Royal Academy’s main galleries.
Frans Hals, Portrait of a Couple, probably Isaac Abrahamsz Massa and Beatrix van der Laen (about 1622)
© Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
At the National Gallery, meanwhile, is a remarkable survey of the paintings of the 17th-century Dutch master Frans Hals, which will tour next year to Amsterdam and Berlin. We take a tour with Bart Cornelis, curator of the National’s incarnation of the show.
Peter Paul Rubens, Frans Snyders, Three Nymphs with a Cornucopia (1625-28)
© Museo Nacional del Prado
And this episode’s Work of the Week is Peter Paul Rubens’s Three Nymphs with a Cornucopia of around 1625 to 1628 (painted with Frans Snyders). In the collection of the Prado in Madrid, it is one of a number of major loans to the exhibition Rubens and Women at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London. Amy Orrock, one of the curators of the exhibition, tells us more.
- Marina Abramović, Royal Academy of Arts, London, until 1 January 2024. You can hear our interview with Abramović during the Covid lockdown in our episode from 8 May 2020, and a conversation with Tate Modern’s Catherine Wood about her long-term partner and collaborator Ulay, following his death in 2020, in the episode from 6 March that year
- The Credit Suisse Exhibition: Frans Hals, National Gallery, London, until 21 January 2024
- Rubens & Women, Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, until 28 January 2024