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Laura Cumming’s best art of 2019

A bumper year gave us Leonardo, Munch, Rembrandt and reconsideration of some brilliant artists who happened to be women. See our top 10 list below

High art, low tactics: 2019 gave us plenty of both. Leonardo’s drawings in London, and now Edinburgh, were presented in all their stupendous range – from the embryo snug in its nutshell womb to the workmen struggling with a ladder like Laurel and Hardy, from imaginary dragons to the mystery of the resurrection. Nothing could bring us closer to the revelations of his mind and eye.

But if this was a high point, Leonardo was also the subject of the year’s worst show. Five centuries after his death, the National Gallery’s vacuous Leonardo: Experience a Masterpiece offered three rooms of crass CGI mock-ups but only one real painting, marred by shifting projections; at £18 a ticket, an outrageous tax on knowledge.

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from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/36bhe4n
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