PAINTER'S PAINTINGS: NATIONAL GALLERY EXHIBITION TO SHOWCASE ARTWORK SECRETLY COLLECTED BY VYING RIVAL ARTISTS

The Painters’ Paintings exhibition will include paintings by Freud, Matisse, Reynolds, Lord Leighton, Degas and Van Dyck. CREDIT: NATIONAL GALLERY 

 Hannah Furness

The personal tastes of the world’s most famous artists are to be revealed in a new National Gallery exhibition, showing how they secretly collected their rivals’ work to keep an eye on the competition.

The Painters’ Paintings exhibition, due to open in London next week, will match paintings including Freud, Matisse, Reynolds, Lord Leighton, Degas and Van Dyck with their own art collections.

As well as showing off their tastes, the collection will reveal the complex rivalries of the art world, providing a unique insight into who was keeping track of one another’s work.

 

The National Gallery, Trafalgar Square  CREDIT: JONATHAN PLAYER /REX FEATURES 

Matisse’s collection will include one work by Picasso, representing a famous rivalry which saw the artists send one another paintings throughout their careers in swaps which left both “much concerned about, if not threatened by, each other’s genius”.

Living with the two portraits of Dora Maar, a curator said, left Matisse “constantly reminded of Picasso’s challenge”.

Portrait of Dora Maar, 1942 CREDIT:  PABLO PICASSO

The exhibition was inspired by a painting from the collection of Lucian Freud, Corot’s Italian Women, which was given to the gallery after his death in 2011 and set curators wondering about other artists’ collections.

They have now tracked down 85 works, half from the National Gallery and half from private collections and institutions around the world, to showcase the very best of art lovers’ art.

Divided into eight rooms, it will reveal how Freud collectied Cezanne, Auerbach, Degas and Constable, while Degas himself chose pieces by Pissarro, Gauguin, Manet, Delacroix and Rousseau.

Portrait of a Woman: Dora Maar CREDIT:  PABLO PICASSO

Matisse’s collection, starring Picasso, will include works by Degas, Cezanne, Gauguin and Signac, while Reynolds preferred Rembrandt and Gainsborough, and Van Dyck hung works by Titian.

Anne Robbins, curator, said: “We hope it will be a rich experience, where you will be invited in to look at these paintings from a completely different angle.”

Dr Gabriele Finaldi, director of the National Gallery, said: “Artists by definition live with their own pictures, but what motivates them to possess works by other painters, be they contemporaries – friends or rivals – or older masters?

Three Bathers Paul Cézanne 1879-1882 CREDIT: PAUL CÉZANNE

“Admiration and influence play their part, no doubt, but so too do personal association and kindred-spiritness, social prestige and the desire to emulate another’s achievement.

“At time the reasons can be more complex or darker and require delving deeply into the artist’s psyche where, for example, fierce competitiveness and self-reproach rub uncomfortably against each other.”

The exhibition opens at the National Gallery on June 23. 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/06/18/painters-paintings-national-gallery-exhibition-to-showcase-artwo/