Displaying items by tag: Tate Britain

The Tate has acquired a rare circa-1650s painting of an unknown woman, by Joan Carlile, thought to be Britain’s first professional female portrait painter. The earliest of Carlile’s works to enter the collection, it is also the earliest work by a woman artists to enter the museum.

One wet autumn night in 1951, the travel writer Peter Fleming – the elder and, at that point, more famous brother of Ian – was leaving the theatre when he heard a woman ask her companion to dinner to meet “a friend back from Rangoon”.

This fleeting snatch of conversation prompted Fleming to write a celebrated essay about how isolated and provincial postwar, post-imperial Britain had suddenly become. Twenty years earlier, he realised, half his friends and contemporaries would have been working in such cities across the British empire.

Tate Britain has hired the founder of Nottingham Contemporary to replace director Penelope Curtis, who presided over an often controversial five years at the organization.

Sir Nicholas Serota, director of Tate, said Alex Farquharson had established Nottingham Contemporary “as one of the leading galleries in the UK”. It is one of a number of regional contemporary art galleries to have opened in the past 10 years. “He has created a programme that serves local and national audiences, working closely with artists and reflecting history as well as the present,” Serota said.

Tate Modern will next year present shows devoted to two giants of 20th-century art, the American artists Georgia O’Keeffe and Robert Rauschenberg.

Announcing its 2016 program, Tate also revealed that the works of Francis Bacon will be on display at its outpost in Liverpool, Paul Nash at Tate Britain, and a solo show by the young British artist Jessica Warboys at St Ives.

Tate Britain presents the first major London retrospective for almost half a century of the work of Barbara Hepworth, one of Britain’s greatest artists. Barbara Hepworth (1903-75) was a leading figure of the international modern art movement in the 1930s, and one of the most successful sculptors in the world during the 1950s and 1960s. This major retrospective emphasises Hepworth’s often overlooked prominence in the international art world. It also highlights the different contexts and spaces in which Hepworth developed and presented her work, from the studio to the landscape.

Sotheby’s announced that Edgar Degas’ "Petite danseuse de quatorze ans," estimated to fetch £10 – 15 million, will feature in the forthcoming Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale in London on June 24, 2015. "Petite danseuse de quatorze ans" is the most ambitious and iconic of Degas’ works and one of only a handful of bronze casts that remain in private hands - the majority are housed in major international museum collections, including Tate, London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Philadelphia Museum of Art and Museé d’Orsay, Paris.

Major touring art exhibitions are rarely the same from one venue to the next, for a variety of reasons. Lenders drop out, certain canvases can’t travel, or the available rooms in one museum are smaller than those in another.

Even in this context, there’s a dollop of overstatement in the Art Gallery of Ontario’s announcement that it will be the only Canadian stop for “a critically acclaimed solo exhibition from Tate Britain” of late paintings by J.M.W. Turner. The Tate show included more than 150 works; the AGO will show around 50.

The Tate will receive an extra £6m from the government to help fund the cost of running Tate Modern, we have learned. The agreement, which has not been formally announced, was made ahead of the General Election, which saw the Conservative Party win a slim majority.

The promise of extra money for the Tate is a remarkable achievement by the Tate’s director, Nicholas Serota, who 15 years ago secured an extra £5m from the then Labour government so that Tate Modern could open without charging for admission.

Godfrey Worsdale, the director of BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, will leave his post in July 2015 to take up the role of director at The Henry Moore Foundation, in Leeds.

“Godfrey has made an outstanding contribution to BALTIC during his seven year tenure as director," BALTIC chairman Peter Buchan said in a statement. “The strength of his reputation brought the illustrious Turner Prize to BALTIC, the first non-Tate venue to be accorded that privilege in 2011. It was under his guidance that BALTIC was shortlisted as Museum of the Year in 2013 and the gallery earlier this year welcomed its 6 millionth visitor," he added.