William Blake - The Ashmolean

William Blake, The Ancient of Days, 1794

William Blake: Apprentice and Master is at The Ashmolean until 1 March 2015. 

The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. 

He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence. 

A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees. 

The most sublime act is to set another before you. 

The fox condemns the trap, not himself. 

One thought fills immensity. 

Exuberance is Beauty. 

Enough! or Too much. 

(A selection from The Proverbs of Hell in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, by William Blake. Engraved c.1790)

Has any artist so perfectly integrated word and image as William Blake? Has any artist so brilliantly married lyricism with revolutionary politics and visionary originality? I love William Blake’s work and am thrilled to see that the Ashmolean has recreated the studio (originally at No 13 Hercules Buildings, Hercules Road, Lambeth) in which he produced his illuminated books and developed innovatory printmaking techniques. Among the works on display are several illuminated books, including The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and a complete set of the plates from Europe: A Prophecy, and individual plates such as Nebuchadnezzar and Newton. 
Watch BBC Arts film: Inside the Studio of William Blake; read an essay by Phillip Pullman: William Blake and Me, a review by Laura Cumming and an article about the exhibition by Mark Brown. Click on images to enlarge.

William Blake, Nebuchadnezzar, 1795

William Blake, Satan, c1789

William Blake, Newton, 1795-c1805

William Blake, The Ghost of a Flea, c1819-20

William Blake,  The Marriage of Heaven and Hell - title page, c1790-3

William Blake,  The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: The Proverbs of Hell, c1790-3

William Blake, The Dance of Albion (Glad Day), c1796

Francis Bacon / Henry Moore - Ashmolean Museum

Francis Bacon, Study for a Portrait of Pope Innocent X, 1965

Francis Bacon / Henry Moore: Flesh and Bone is at the Ashmolean Museum until 19 January 2014.
Henry Moore, sculptor, (1898-1986) and Francis Bacon, painter, (1905-1992) were contemporaries and, arguably, through the 1950s and 60s the most successful and famous British artists of their generation. They were however very different men, as neatly described by Simon Wilson in the RA Magazine:

Henry Moore: dour, taciturn, down-to-earth, sober Yorkshireman and countryman, emphatically heterosexual, notably uxorious, draughtsman of genius, sculptor to his fingertips. His friend the poet Stephen Spender once noted how ‘normal as a man’ Moore was. Francis Bacon: garrulous, wasp-witted, champagne swilling metropolitan dandy, promiscuous masochistic homosexual with a taste for rough trade, painter of genius who claimed never to make drawings. Moore, sculptor of massively calm monuments of the earth mother in repose; Bacon, painter of grotesquely twisted humanity, writhing agonising in the void.

Though both artists can be seen to have drawn influence from Picasso the moods of their work seem polar opposites: in Alastair Smart's words, A case of existential howls and universal serenity. Nevertheless, this exhibition sets out to find common ground between the two artists: they were both, after all, obsessively preoccupied with the body. Rachel Cooke quotes Myfanwy Piper's perceptive observation in 1963, that Moore 'never forgets… the strength of the bone beneath the flesh' while Bacon 'never forgets that flesh is meat'.

An interesting exhibition. Read reviews by Rachel Cooke, Alastair Smart, Simon Wilson.

Henry Moore, King and Queen, 1952-3

Francis Bacon, Second Version of Triptych, 1944

Henry Moore, Reclining Figure: Festival, 1951

Francis Bacon, Lying Figure in a Mirror, 1971

Henry Moore, Animal Head, 1951

Francis Bacon, Head II, 1949

Jenny Saville - Modern Art Oxford

Jenny Saville, Atonement Studies: Central Panel (Rosetta), 2005-06

Jenny Saville is at Modern Art Oxford and the Ashmolean (23 June - 16 September 2012) and is the artist's first major, solo exhibition in a public gallery. Saville came to attention in the 1990s with her large  paintings of large bodies mapped out with contour lines indicative of planned surgical modification: women's engorged bellies, swollen breasts and thighs, shouting of anguished self-image in bloody gobs of pigment (Skye Sherwin in The Guardian). Her work has continued to focus on the female (and transgender) body and face; recent work includes drawings and paintings inspired by Renaissance Virgin and Child paintings.

Read an interview with Rachel Cooke: I want to be a painter of modern life, and modern bodies.

Jenny Saville, Fulcrum, 1997-99

Jenny Saville, Bleach, 2008

Jenny Saville, Entry, 2004-2005

Jenny Saville, Passage, 2004-2005

Jenny Saville, Reverse, 2003

Jenny Saville, Torso II, 2005