Neja's Art Walks

12/01/2025

Inspired by the psychoanalyst theory of the unconscious by Sigmund Freud, Surrealism used irrational images to portray the working of the human mind. Max Ernst's Pietà or Revolution by Night is typical example of this approach. The painting replaces the traditional scene of Mary clasping the body of Christ with an image of the artist himself, held by his father.

The painting is interpreted as symbolic of the turbulent relationship between the artist and his father, as an amateur painter and staunch Catholic. In the painting, Ernst replaces the classic image of the Virgin Mary holding the crucified body of Jesus (Pietà) with his father as Mary and the artist himself as Jesus. The expressions on both faces are blank as though in a state of sleepwalking. In the background drawn on a wall is a man with a bandaged head ascending a flight of stairs. A profile on the work in the British newspaper The Guardian indicates the figure could represent either Sigmund Freud or the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who suffered a head wound during World War I.

Pietà or Revolution by Night is currently on show at Tate Modern in London. To book our See Tate Modern with an Art Historian walk, please send us a message.

11/01/2025

30 hours in Paris, stop 1.

The Giacometti Institute is located in the heart of the Montparnasse district where Giacometti lived and worked throughout his career. It is housed in the former studio of the artist-decorator Paul Follot, a classified Art Deco mansion, whose decorations have been preserved, restored and refurbished.

If currently gas on show a small number of paintings by Giorgio Morandi.

07/01/2025

Happy Christmas to everyone who celebrates today!

This contemporary icon was painted by in palekh style. Palekh Russian lacquer art on papier-mâché first appeared in 1923 in the village of the same name, and is based on a long local history of icon painting. The miniatures are usually set off with a complicated pattern made with gold dissolved in aqua regia.

06/01/2025

The particular light of Provence guided Cezanne on his creative path to the threshold of abstraction.

Today, it's in Aix-en-Provence and surrounding area that you can share Cezanne's experience intensely, as you visit the streets, places and landscapes that marked the life, the outlook and the work of the father of modern painting...

"the father of us all!" Picasso said.

02/01/2025

The Devil — A Life (2020-24) by Nick Cave is a series of seventeen glazed ceramic figurines that tells the cradle-to-grave story of the Devil. More everyman than fearsome Antichrist, he is an allegorical character who experiences the vicissitudes of life in a very human way.

In Cave’s series, the young Devil inherits the world, grows up and falls in love. He is brave, fights a lion and rides off to war. He kills his firstborn son, is shunned for his transgressions and turns into a shell of his former self. Ultimately, he suffers an abject death before achieving, in the final work, a child’s posthumous forgiveness. It is a trajectory that evokes Shakespeare’s Seven Ages of Man from As You Like it, through which the playwright classified the roles we are assigned in life: infant, schoolchild, lover, soldier, judge, dotage and decrepitude.

31/12/2024

Happy New Year to you and yours!
Let 2025 be filled with good art.

Yours, Julia/ NEJA's Art Walks

29/12/2024

Painted shortly before van Dyck left Antwerp for Italy in the autumn of 1621, this striking picture of an Andalusian stallion constitutes the artist’s first independent grand-scale depiction of a horse. It was executed in preparation for the posthumous equestrian portrait of Emperor Charles V now in the Uffizi, Florence, van Dyck's earliest surviving equestrian portrait in a genre that hastened his reputation as one of the most sought-after portraitists in Europe during the first half of the seventeenth century.

Send us a message if you would like to book our Mayfair art walk in London.

26/12/2024

May I wish all my readers a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
Let the peace be with you.

Yours, Julia/ NEJA's Art Walks.

24/12/2024

Merry Christmas to you and yours!
Stay healthy and book an art walk!

Yours, NEJA’s Art Walks x

By Paul Cornoyer, Christmas in Madison Square Park (c.1910).

24/12/2024

Merry Christmas to you and yours!
Stay healthy and book an art walk!

Yours, NEJA's Art Walks x

By Paul Cornoyer, Christmas in Madison Square Park (c.1910).

22/12/2024

This expansive veduta of the Bacino di San Marco is an impressive example of the sweeping panoramas that established Antonio Joli as one of the most acclaimed and sought-after vedutisti of the eighteenth century. It depicts to the left the Punta della Dogana, one of the points of arrival into the city of Venice, and accommodates in its broad perspectival sweep a multitude of Venetian landmarks, including to the right the Palladian Basilica of San Giorgio Maggiore, and further in the distance the Riva degli Schiavoni, punctuated by the Piazzetta, the Doge’s Palace and the Prisons of San Marco.

Born in Modena, Joli enjoyed a highly successful career as a painter of vedute and capricci, working first in various Italian cities and subsequently in Dresden, London and Madrid. He is first recorded in Venice in the spring of 1732 and remained in the city for ten years. He made a name for himself working as a scenografo, designing sets for theatrical and musical performances as well as for festivals in Venice, Modena and Padua.

His success led to increasing demand from patrons for easel paintings, particularly views of the city — a genre in which he was strongly influenced by the work of his contemporary, Canaletto, whom he may have met in 1735. After departing from the city in 1742, he moved to London, several years before Canaletto, where he was employed as a scene painter at the King's Theatre in the Haymarket between 1744 and 1748. During his London years, Joli found a ready market not only for his Italian vedute, which he had already developed, but also for views of the British capital. By 1750 he had left England, although he continued to accept commissions from British patrons while living both in Spain and Naples.

19/12/2024

This seminal painting is the earliest and one of the most familiar of all George Stubbs’ depictions of dogs and was painted circa 1766-68, at the height of the artist’s career.

Highly prized by sportsmen for their ability to locate and indicate the presence of game, particularly the partridge, pointers were first imported to England from the Continent at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Stubbs’ faithful image captures the physiognomy of this now extinct ancestor of the breed which, through selective crossing with native types of dogs, would gradually evolve into the lighter, more broken coated pointer we know today.

To book one of our London's art walks, please send us a message.

16/12/2024

The loveliest of art walkers from San Paolo posing in front of some of the paperwork’s by Ellsworth Kelly.

Born in Newburgh, New York, Kelly served in the military during World War II, allowing him to study art in Boston and Paris on the GI Bill through the mid-to-late 1940s. In Paris, he absorbed the lessons of Byzantine icons and Romanesque frescoes, Jean Arp’s experiments with chance and Henri Matisse’s economical line, all of which helped him develop his own artistic language.

Rather than composing, he began “choosing things out there in the world and presenting them,” adopting the forms of a window, some awnings, or the shadows of a staircase, and offering them as apparent abstractions.1 The result was a language both personal (keyed to Kelly’s particular eye) and universal (presented without alteration or comment).

To book one of our art walks, please send us a message.

11/12/2024

This depiction of the Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine is testament to the transformative years that Rubens, the greatest artist of the Flemish Baroque, spent in Italy at the beginning of his career between 1600 and 1608. The influence on Rubens of classical Antiquity, the painting, sculpture and architecture of the Renaissance, and the works of his Italian contemporaries, was long-lasting and definitive.

This painting, most probably executed a few years after Rubens returned to Antwerp, circa 1615, was clearly inspired by the sacre conversazioni and colourful palette of Titian and the Venetian school. It contains both the rich colouring and free brushwork for which Rubens is most prized, as well as pentimenti and motifs which, along with its correlation to a related drawing, offer an insight into the artist’s creative process.

To book our National Gallery art walk, please send us a message.

11/12/2024

Art walkers are queuing behind the Michelangelo Pistoletto‘s Standing Man (1962/ 1982).

A leading figure of the Arte Povera movement and one of the most celebrated artists in Europe, Michelangelo Pistoletto (b. 1933, Biella, Italy) created his first Mirror Paintings in 1961–62. These works earned him international acclaim, leading to significant exhibitions in Europe and the US.

The works have become a hallmark of his oeuvre, with the artist constantly creating, challenging and innovating through his iconic medium of the mirror, throughout the course of his 60-year career.

To book our See Tate Modern with an Art Historian walk, please send us a message.

06/12/2024

What do you think?

The soft brown hue will be seen throughout design and creative media in 2025, Pantone predicts.

05/12/2024

An incisive storyteller, Artemisia Gentileschi is known for her powerful depictions of women from history, and indeed her images of biblical heroines are among her most compelling creations. In this confidently painted work of the 1620s, a Caravaggesque realism is brought to this powerful subject. Barefoot, Mary Magdalen is depicted here in a rugged coastal setting that evokes the wilderness where she lived in solitude. The picture makes reference to the saint’s sea voyage to the southern coast of France, where, according to legend, she sought refuge at Sainte-Baume in Provence. The Magdalen as protagonist is an important theme for Artemisia and one that constitutes a recurring thread in her work.

This newly identified picture has recently been dated to Artemisia’s second Roman period, when having returned to the Eternal City, the artist—celebrated and in high demand—responded to a shift in local taste. Throughout her career Artemisia was drawn to paint Mary Magdalen, whose life of sin and repentance offered rich narrative potential.

To book our national Gallery art walk, please send us a message

03/12/2024

I wish I had £300000 to buy this etching of the shell by Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn. Rembrandt made very few still lifes during his career, and this, the conus marmoreus or ‘marbled cone’, is his only etched still life. The stature of The Shell is such that it has inspired generations of artists following him to pay homage to it.

Shell collecting was very popular in the Netherlands during the 17th century, and a group of shells were included in the inventory made of Rembrandt’s studio in 1656, the year in which he was made bankrupt. The elevated treatment of the shell serves to heighten the rarity and desirability of such shells in the 17th century, which were transported on ships from the Dutch East India company and incorporated into collections of art and natural objects known as Kunstkammer and Wunderkammer (chambers of art and natural wonders).

To book our Mayfair art walk in London, please send us a message.