Following the installation of the 19th century paintings in the Fine Rooms, the gallery has been able to reinstate its programme of temporary exhibitions. In addition to room 15, which will function as the principal exhibition space, room 8 will now also be used for changing displays, including of works on long-term loan and selections from the prints and drawings collection. One of the goals of the gallery’s exhibition policy is to place outstanding new object-based research in the public domain, particularly in collaboration with the faculty of the Institute, and the winter exhibitions illustrate what we can expect from this approach.


Manet exhibition photograph
Édouard Manet, The Luncheon (Le Déjeuner), 1868. Oil on canvas, 118 x 153.9 cm. Inv. nr. 8638. Bayerische Staatgemäldesammlungen, Munich


Manet Face to Face (until 9th January) brings together two of the most celebrated and enigmatic paintings by Edouard Manet: Le déjeuner (1868), one of the great treasures of Munich’s Neue Pinakothek, and Un Bar aux Folies-Bergère (1881-2), in a special display supported by The Gabrielle Jungels-Winkler Foundation. First exhibited at the Paris Salon, the two paintings are closely related in size, theme and orientation, with their enigmatic central figures offering a particularly powerful comparison. They also both confound conventions of narrative picture-making, resisting interpretation from a single social or moral viewpoint.

 

Manet exhibition photograph
Édouard Manet, A Barat the Folies-Bergère (Un Bar aux Folies-Bergère), 1881-2. Oil on canvas, 96 x 130 cm. P.1934.SC.234. The Samuel Courtauld Trust, Courtauld Institute of Art Gallery, London


The bone beneath the pulp’: Drawings by Wyndham Lewis (until 13th February) will feature over 50 works by this important British modernist. The exhibition presents drawings spanning Lewis’s career on loan from the Wyndham Lewis Memorial Trust and its Trustees. This will be the first exhibition to consider Lewis’s drawings as a distinct contribution to his art and, as with Manet Face to Face, the accompanying catalogue will present substantial new research, with several of the works here published for the first time.

A full programme of lectures, study days, lunch-time talks and other educational events will accompany both exhibitions.

Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957), Figure (Spanish woman) 1912
Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957), Figure (Spanish woman) 1912 © Wyndham Lewis Memorial Trust (G. and V. Lane
Collection)
 

Ernst Vegelin van Claerbergen
Chief Curator, Courtauld Insitute Gallery