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The Courtauld Gallery

  • Art
  • Aldwych
  • Recommended
  1. The Courtauld Gallery
    The Courtauld Gallery
  2. The Courtauld Gallery
    The Courtauld Gallery
  3. Photographer
    David LeveneThe Courtauld Gallery. Photograph by David Levene. 5/11/21
  4. Photographer
    David LeveneThe Courtauld Gallery. Photograph by David Levene. 5/11/21
  5. The Courtauld Gallery
    The Courtauld Gallery
  6. The Courtauld Gallery
    The Courtauld Gallery
  7. The Courtauld Gallery
    The Courtauld GalleryThe Courtauld Gallery
  8. The Courtauld Gallery
    Alastair FyfeThe Courtauld Gallery
  9. The Courtauld Gallery
    benedict johnson
  10. Photographer
    David LeveneThe Courtauld Gallery. Photograph by David Levene. 5/11/21
  11. Photographer
    David LeveneThe Courtauld Gallery. Photograph by David Levene. 5/11/21
  12. Photographer
    David LeveneThe Courtauld Gallery. Photograph by David Levene. 5/11/21
  13. Photographer
    David LeveneThe Courtauld Gallery. Photograph by David Levene. 5/11/21
  14. Photographer
    David LeveneThe Courtauld Gallery. Photograph by David Levene. 5/11/21
  15. The Courtauld Gallery
    The Courtauld Gallery
Frank Auerbach: The Charcoal Heads opens soon at The Courtauld Gallery (9 Feb - 27 May 2024). Book Now - bit.ly/4200P0r
- The Courtauld Gallery

Time Out says

There’s certainly some serious pedigree to this exceptional gallery, located since 1989 within the enviable setting of Somerset House, on the Strand. It’s part of the Courtauld Institute of Art (itself connected to the University of London), and has been showcasing world-class art since the 1930s. It’s now home to more than 500 paintings, and a further 26,000 prints and drawings. 

The artwork ranges from the Middle Ages all the way through to 20th-century masterpieces. Highlights include three from van Gogh (including Self Portrait with Bandaged Ear), as well as works from Gainsborough, van Dyck, Rubens, Degas, Monet, Goya and Botticelli. Quite the collection, then.

Alongside this exceptional permanent collection, the gallery runs hugely popular exhibitions showcasing their curatorial expertise. Make sure you check out The Courtauld Lates if you can – a cracking-looking series of events featuring after-hours art, cocktails and music, with a setting quite unlike anywhere else. Highly recommended.

The Courtauld Gallery says
The Courtauld Gallery is home to one of the world's greatest art collections, located in the magnificent historical setting of Somerset House in Central London.

The Courtauld’s vast collection includes paintings, drawings, prints, sculpture and decorative arts ranging from the Renaissance through to the 20th century.

The gallery is renowned for its remarkable group of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art works, including the world-famous A Bar at the Folies Bergère by Édouard Manet, Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear by Vincent van Gogh and the most significant collection of works by Paul Cézanne in the UK. Other artists on display include Degas, Gauguin, Monet and Seurat.

The Blavatnik Fine Rooms provide a stunning setting for showcasing Botticelli’s large-scale The Trinity With Saints and The Courtauld’s celebrated collection of works by Peter Paul Rubens, and more.

There are also galleries dedicated to paintings and decorative arts from the Medieval and Early Renaissance periods, 20th century art and the Bloomsbury Group.

Alongside its permanent collection, the Gallery hosts critically acclaimed temporary exhibitions. The next exhibition to open at The Courtauld Gallery is Frank Auerbach: The Charcoal Heads (9 Feb - 27 May 2024).

Exhibitions by Roger Mayne, Claude Monet, Henry Moore and Vanessa Bell will go on display at The Courtauld Gallery in 2024.

Details

Address:
Somerset House
The Strand
London
WC2R 0RN
Transport:
Tube: Temple
Price:
Weekday tickets £10 / Weekend tickets £12, Free to Friends of The Courtauld, under-18s, full-time UK students, teachers and with National Art Pass. Temporary exhibitions have an additional fee.
Opening hours:
Daily 10am-6pm (last adm 5.15pm).
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What’s on

Frank Auerbach: ‘The Charcoal Heads’

  • 5 out of 5 stars

Heads hang heavy, bodies sink into the shadowy corners of the room. Frank Auerbach’s charcoal portraits are dismal, dour things, heaving with hurt and pain, but they’re also brutally, shockingly beautiful. Auerbach came of age alongside Leon Kossoff, Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon (he’s still at it well into his 90s too), part of a group of Londoners intent on reworking the form of painting itself. Auerbach did that in the post-war period with thick globs of pigment, creating dense, viscous canvases, closer to sculptures than paintings. But this show at the Courtauld is about his charcoal portraits from the 1950s and ’60s.  They’re not his most famous works, but they’re incredible. Each one is drawn and redrawn over and over again, erased and remade, erased and remade, so many times that he wears through the paper. They’re feverish, violent, desperate things.  Grim, spectral presences on scarred landscapes His sitters always turn away, eyes in the gutter, shoulders slumped. Leon Kossoff is a vast cranium, his face lost in darkness. Auerbach’s wife Julia is fragile and stick thin. Stella West is skeletal and sickly. Gerda Boehm is sharp and fractured. Everyone here looks somehow haunted. Only Auerbach himself looks directly out at the viewer, in a rare early self-portrait, but it’s maybe the least successful work here. It’s better when he’s looking outside of himself, digging at another’s essence and pain. Some works are nothing but shadow, a smudge of grey forming a cheek in