Skip to main content

Opening and Closing in April

We'll start this month at the King's Gallery in London, where more than 300 artworks and other objects from the Royal Collection will be on display from April 11 for  The Edwardians: Age of Elegance . Illustrating the tastes of the period between the death of Victoria and World War I, the show features the work of John Singer Sargent , Edward Burne-Jones , William Morris and Carl Fabergé, among others. On to November 23. More Morris at, unsurprisingly, the William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow.  Morris Mania , which runs from April 5 to September 21, aims to show how his designs have continued to capture the imagination down the decades, popping up in films and on television, in every part of the home, on trainers, wellies, and even in nuclear submarines.... From much the same era, Guildhall Art Gallery in the City offers  Evelyn De Morgan: The Modern Painter in Victorian London  from April 4 to January 4. De Morgan's late Pre-Raphaelite work with its beautifull...

Subscribe to updates

Opening in February

Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon are the stars of Tate Britain's big overview of British 20th-century figurative painting, All Too Human: Bacon, Freud and a Century of Painting Life, which starts on February 28 and runs until August 27. It promises about 100 works, with Walter Sickert, Stanley Spencer and Frank Auerbach among the other artists featured. 

Over at the National Gallery, a small free display in Room 1 marks the 400th anniversary of the birth of Bartolome Esteban Murillo by showcasing his only two known self-portraits. They can be seen from February 28 to May 21.

Dulwich Picture Gallery's new exhibition is devoted to the Canadian artist David Milne, a contemporary of Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven, the subjects of an enlightening Dulwich show a few years ago. David Milne: Modern Painting opens February 14 and is on until May 7.
The Victoria & Albert Museum has a new show looking at the golden age of luxury sea travel: Ocean Liners: Speed & Style. Running from February 3 to June 10, it will explore in more than 250 objects the design and cultural impact of a mode of a transport that's now virtually disappeared.

Outside London, Chichester's Pallant House Gallery will draw on its significant collection for POP! Art in a Changing Britain, which starts on February 24. Peter Blake, Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi are among the artists featured until May 7.

Finally, there's a big Rubens exhibition arriving at thStädel Museum in Frankfurt from Vienna, where it had good reviews. Rubens: The Power of Transformation includes 31 paintings by the Flemish master, and Titian and Tintoretto are also represented. Running from February 8 to May 21, the exhibition aims to show how Rubens drew on the art of previous generations and why he's still an artist to be reckoned with. 

Image

David Milne, Pink Reflections, Bishop's Pond, 1920, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Gift from the Douglas M. Duncan Collection, 1970. Photo: NGC. (c) The Estate of David Milne.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

What's On in 2025

What will be the exhibition highlights of 2025 around Britain and Europe? At the end of the year, Tate Britain will be marking 250 years since the birth of JMW Turner and John Constable with a potential blockbuster. Meanwhile, the Swiss are  making a big thing  of the 100th anniversary of the death of Félix Vallotton  (a real favourite of ours). Among women artists in the spotlight will be Anna Ancher, Ithell Colquhoun, Artemisia Gentileschi and Suzanne Valadon. Here's a selection of what's coming up, in more or less chronological order; as ever, we make no claim to comprehensiveness, and our choice very much reflects our personal taste. And in our search for the most interesting shows, we're visiting Ascona, Baden-Baden, Chemnitz and Winterthur, among other places.  January  We start off in Paris, at the Pompidou Centre; the 1970s inside-out building is showing its age and it'll be shut in the summer for a renovation programme scheduled to last until 2030. Bef...

Carrington: You've Met Leonora, Now Discover Dora

Carrington: She only wanted to be known by her surname, unwittingly posing a conundrum for art historians, curators and the wider world a century later.  Because it's another somewhat later Carrington, the long-lived Surrealist and totally unrelated, who's recently become Britain's most expensive woman artist. But today we're at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester to see an exhibition not about Leonora but about Dora Carrington. She hated that name Dora -- so Victorian -- but with Leonora so much in the limelight (and the subject of a  recent show at Newlands House in Petworth, just a few miles up the road), the curators at the Pallant didn't have much option, so they've had to call their retrospective  Dora Carrington: Beyond Bloomsbury .  Leonora was a bit of a rebel, as we found out in Petworth. Dora too. But we ought to respect her wish. Carrington, then, has been a bit neglected recently; this is the first show of her works in three decades. And while ther...

The Thrill of Pleasure: Bridget Riley

Prepare yourself for some sensory overload. Curves, stripes, zig-zags, wavy lines, dots, in black and white or colour. Look at many of the paintings of Bridget Riley and you're unable to escape the eerie sensation that the picture in front of you is in motion, has its own inner three-dimensional life, is not just inert paint on flat canvas, panel or plaster. It's by no means unusual to see selections of Riley's paintings on display, but a blockbuster exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh brings together 70 years of her pictures in a dazzling extravaganza of abstraction, including a recreation of her only actual 3D work, which you walk into for a perspectival sensurround experience. It's "that thrill of pleasure which sight itself reveals," as Riley once said. It's a really terrific show, and the thrill of pleasure in the Scottish capital was enhanced by the unexpected lack of visitors on the day we went to see it, with huge empty sp...