On Thursday night, the Kunstpalast gallery in Düsseldorf treated us to a fantastic live-streamed programme of tours around the current exhibitions. The whole programme is now available on YouTube.
First up was the gallery’s major retrospective of Swiss painter Angelica Kauffman (1741-1807), the most famous female artist of the 18th century, painting in the neoclassical style so fashionable in her time.We are shown the first portrait she prodigiously painted at age 12, when she was still deciding whether to become an artist or an opera singer. Trained by her father, also a painter, she worked first in Rome before moving to England where she was a founding member of the Royal Academy in 1768. Kauffman identified as a history painter, then classified as the most elite category of academic painting. This was unusual for a woman, as most were denied the laborious training in classical literature and anatomy studies that history painting required.
The tours around the other exhibitions of renowned fashion photographer Peter Lindbergh and ‘Sichtweisen’, the gallery’s recently acquired photography collection, are interspersed with performances by German neo-soul and jazz band Molass.
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