The Art Exhibitions Blog

For the Victorians, art wasn't just about what you could see on the canvas; it could also activate your other senses.  Scented Visions: Smell in Art 1850-1914 at the Watts Gallery near Guildford takes you on an olfactory journey back in time. And it's also a social-history lesson, showing the way art reflected how Victorian life was not just a bed of roses. In this picture, the actress Ellen Terry is holding an eye-catching red flower close to her nose, which we assumed was so that she could inhale the fragrance. It's the poster image for this show and a perfect way to promote an exhibition about smell. But, as the wall caption points out, the blooms are camellias, which have no scent; she's acting smelling, and she must choose between the camellias and the nobler values of the humble fragrant violets in her other hand, reflecting her choice to give up the stage for life as the muse of the great Victorian artist, GF Watts, 30 years older than her, and who painted this ...

Self-portraits; now, we've seen quite a lot of exhibitions of those over the years. You know how Rembrandt or Vincent van Gogh saw themselves. But how do artists depict other artists? What happens when Peter Blake meets David Hockney, when Eric Ravilious takes on Edward Bawden? Answers can be found at the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester in a very interesting and illuminating exhibition entitled  Seeing Each Other: Portraits of Artists .  And sometimes the artist you see is a different artist from the one you might be expecting. When Mary McCartney photographed Tracey Emin in 2000, what came out was Frida Kahlo. McCartney felt a close affinity with the Mexican artist, and so did Emin, whose controversial My Bed had just been shortlisted for the Turner Prize. McCartney said she'd had a daydream of Emin as Kahlo, who spent a lot of time in bed herself as a result of her disabling injuries.  Emin was made up and dressed for the shoot, and then, according to McCartney , "...

Tate Britain offers a double-header of 20th-century British artists this month with  Edward Burra -- Ithell Colquhoun . Though they were close contemporaries, it's not an obvious combination; Burra is perhaps best known for his depictions of sometimes seedy inter-war nightlife, Colquhoun for her Surrealist work. This show features more than 80 pictures by Burra and over 140 Colquhoun exhibits. On from June 13 to October 19.  At the National Portrait Gallery, you can see  Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting , featuring 45 works from across the career of the contemporary British artist known for her large-scale, close-up paintings of the human body. June 20 to September 7. Another double bill, this time at the Royal Academy, where contemporary artist Anselm Kiefer is paired with one of the all-time greats, Vincent Van Gogh. As a teenager Kiefer received a travel grant to follow in Vincent's footsteps. From June 28 to October 26 Kiefer/Van Gogh  looks at the Dutchman...

The fabrics swirl, billow, ripple and cling.... the colours are gorgeous, the atmosphere often dreamlike. It is a feast for the eyes.  We've come to see  Evelyn De Morgan: The Modern Painter in Victorian London at the Guildhall Art Gallery in the very heart of the City. It's a bit of a misnomer, that title, because De Morgan's work doesn't really convey much of an impression of modernity, certainly not in the sense of late 19th-century technological and scientific progress. The style is reminiscent in many ways of the Pre-Raphaelites from earlier in the Victorian era, and  Edward Burne-Jones  in particular.  But what was modern about Evelyn De Morgan was in fact the most obvious thing about her; she was a woman, in what was still a very male art world.   Before we get into De Morgan's history, let's start with a painting to give a flavour of her art, and it's one of the most spectacular in this exhibition: The Storm Spirits . Just pause for a moment t...

If you were asked to name a Mexican painter, you'd probably initially think of Frida Kahlo. Then, maybe, Diego Rivera. But the first historical Mexican artist -- indeed the first from Latin America -- to get an exhibition at London's National Gallery in its 200-year existence is José María Velasco. No, we didn't know anything about him either, so we were keen to see the show.    And what you discover in  José María Velasco: A View of Mexico  is certainly exotic, though not perhaps in the way you're expecting. Velasco, born in 1840, was trained in a tradition of European landscape painting, and while some of the pictures you see at the National Gallery have an air of the Old World, this one definitely doesn't:   The cactus is spectacular enough, with its green branches reaching into the blue sky above the hills beyond, but it's only when you notice the man in the shade beneath it that you realise how immense this plant really is. This is a painting that...

Which Japanese artist had the greatest influence on the West at the end of the 19th century? Perhaps not so much Katsushika Hokusai , despite The Great Wave ; maybe more Utagawa Hiroshige, four decades younger and the last great exponent of the ukiyo-e tradition, with his stunningly framed landscapes. From May 1, you have the chance at the British Museum in London to experience Horoshige's world, which ended just as Japan started to open up to the outside. Featuring a large body of work from a major US collection,  Hiroshige: Artist of the Open Road  is on until September 7. And also at the British Museum, a second new exhibition explores the origins of Hindu, Jain and Buddhist sacred art, going back at least 2,000 years. More than 180 objects from the museum's collection as well as items on loan will be on display.  Ancient India: Living Traditions  runs from May 22 to October 19.  If you enjoyed the colour and swagger of the John Singer Sargent show at Tate ...