RA Magazine's pick of this week’s art events (21 - 27 June)

Posted: 21 June 2013 by Sam Phillips

_{L.S. Lowry, 'The Fever Van', 1935. Walker Art Gallery (Liverpool, UK).} Lowry and the Painting of Modern Life
Tate Britain, 26 June – 20 October 2013
‘If people call me a Sunday painter I'm a Sunday painter who paints every day of the week!’ said an exasperated L.S. Lowry in answer to critics who characterized his work as naïve.

Tate Britain’s much anticipated survey of the Lancashire-born artist – the first major London exhibition of his landscapes since his death in 1976 – will similarly stress that Lowry was no untaught amateur, but instead the country’s most accomplished painter of the modern city, who can be seen in parallel with Van Gogh, Pissarro and Seurat.

_{Johannes Vermeer, 'The Music Lesson', about 1662-3. Oil on canvas. 73.3 x 64.5 cm. Royal Collection Trust © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2013.} Vermeer and Music
National Gallery, 26 June – 8 September 2013
The rarity of Vermeer’s paintings makes any loan exhibition that brings them together an essential visit. In the National Gallery’s new show, also opening on Wednesday, Kenwood House’s The Guitar Player (1672) and the Royal Collections’ The Music Lesson (c.1662-5) come together with the National’s two paintings to examine the significance of music on the art and life of the seventeenth-century Netherlands.

Be sure to plan your trip for either Thursday, Friday or Saturday, when performances by the Academy of Ancient Music will take place in the exhibition space.

Fiona Maddocks expands further on the show in her lovely article for latest issue of RA Magazine.

Collecting Gauguin: Samuel Courtauld in the 20s
Courtauld Institute of Art, until 8 September 2013
One of the highlights of any visit to the Courtauld Institute Of Art are the gorgeous Gauguins on view, which are the country’s finest holdings of the Post-Impressionist artist.

_{Paul Gauguin, 'Nevermore', 1897. Oil on canvas, 60.5 x 116 cm. © The Courtauld Gallery, London.}

An exhibition has just opened that shows these acquisitions by Samuel Courtauld in their entirety, including a marble portrait of his Danish wife (only one of two sculptures that the Paris-born artist ever made) and multiple works on paper. Two works formerly in Courtauld’s collection are reunited with the group: Martinique Landscape (1887) from Edinburgh’s Scottish National Gallery and Bathers at Tahiti (1897) from Birmingham’s Barber Institute of Fine Arts,

_{Walter Sickert, 'Ennui' (Medium Plate), 1914. Etching, 9 x 7 ins (22.6 x 17.6 cm). Courtesy The Fine Art Society.} Sickert: From Life
Fine Art Society, until 11 July 2013
Bond Street’s Fine Art Society has staged a first-class survey of works by Walter Sickert RA, open now until mid-July.

Focusing upon a wide range of the artist’s output in oil, watercolour, graphite and etching – from his strangely haunting images of theatre interiors to his downbeat domestic scenes – the show of 50 works is definitely worth a visit before or after a trip to the Academy’s Summer Exhibition.

Highlights include an array of street scenes from Sickert’s trips to Dieppe, and two etched versions of the claustrophobic Ennui (c.1914), which shows a bored couple in an interior of which Virginia Woolf once famoulsy wrote, ‘The grimness of that situation lies in the fact that there is no crisis’.

_{Leandro Erlich, 'Swimming Pool', 2008. Installation view at MoMA PS1, New York. Mixed media, dimensions variable. © Leandro Erlich. Photography: Matthew Septimus. Courtesy: Sean Kelly Gallery, New York.} Leandro Erlich: Dalston House
Barbican, 26 June - 4 August 2013
The Barbican is spreading outside its iconic Brutalist building with its programme Beyond Barbican this summer, which sees art projects and music festivals spring up across the area to the east of the institution.

Again from Wednesday (a busy day of art openings!), Argentine artist Leandro Erlich creates a site-specific art installation in Dalston, on Ashwin Street, just around the corner from Dalston Kingsland Station.

Commenting on the architectural change the area has seen, Erlich will create a façade of the kind of Victorian terrace once ubiquitous – except the façade will lie on the ground, and mirrors will give the impression that passers-by are above it.

Sam Phillips is a London-based arts journalist and contributor to RA Magazine