From Leonardo’s ‘Mona Lisa’ to Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks, we love paintings with an element of mystery. Scholars have been puzzling over pictures like Giorgione’s ‘Tempest’ for centuries, but more recently artists have deliberately created realistic paintings in which the mood or meaning is far from clear. Along with the paintings already mentioned, this wide-ranging international survey includes pictures by Poussin and Vermeer, Manet and Gauguin, Hammershoi and De Chirico, Andrew Wyeth and Eric Ravilious, Gwen John and Balthus – the French artist who liked, incidentally, to describe himself as ‘a painter about whom nothing is known’. Why do some paintings have these enigmatic qualities? Are there particular techniques that artists use to achieve them? And what do these paintings tell us about our world – and ourselves?
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