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A Swede at Home and Abroad

It might seem a bit odd travelling to Madrid to see an exhibition by a Scandinavian artist.... but the Swede Anders Zorn made the journey to Spain nine times in his career. He wasn't a painter we'd been familiar with, the Swedes lagging some way behind their Nordic neighbours in our art explorations; we'd been intrigued by the idea of seeing a retrospective of his work in Hamburg late last year but didn't make it, so we seized the chance to view the same show at the Mapfre Foundation in Madrid under the title  Anders Zorn: Travelling the World, Remembering the Land . Zorn, who lived from 1860 to 1920, was a big name in his day, and it's easy to appreciate why from this exhibition. He had fantastic technique and worked in a broad range of genres, famed particularly for his portraiture. But he's quite difficult to pigeonhole, and as for some of his early subject matter, it really is rather sickly sweet.    As the exhibition title spells out, Zorn explored the worl...
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Opening in December

The Dutch Golden Age wasn't just Rembrandt, Hals and Vermeer. A little further inland from the North Sea, the painters of Utrecht -- Dirck van Baburen, Hendrick ter Brugghen and Gerard van Honthorst -- pursued a very different course, echoing the drama and light effects pioneered in the far south of Europe by Caravaggio. That's the theme of Utrecht, Caravaggio and Europe at the Centraal Museum in Utrecht from December 16 to March 24, with 60 loans from across Europe and the US. Caravaggio's Entombment of Christ from the Vatican can be seen for the first four weeks of the exhibition.
At the Petit Palais in Paris, there are two shows that are a little out of the ordinary. The strange dream-like images of late 19th-century Belgian Symbolist Fernand Khnopff are the subject of a major retrospective in an exhibition subtitled The Master of Enigma. Even odder are the drawings of Jean Jacques Lequeu, who died in poverty in 1826 having created his own architectural fantasy world. Both shows start on December 11 and run to March 17.

Vienna's Leopold Museum reopens on December 6 after a month of rebuilding with the excellent Egon Schiele show still on and a couple of new exhibitions starting that day as well. Most notably, Gustav Klimt and the other great Viennese Jugendstil exponent Koloman Moser feature along with pioneering Expressionist Richard Gerstl in Klimt Moser Gerstl until March 10.

Meanwhile, another Austrian Expressionist, Oskar Kokoschka, one of the most important artists of the 20th century, gets a retrospective at Zurich's Kunsthaus. This show, which is being staged in collaboration with the Leopold in Vienna, runs from December 14 to March 10 and will have some 200 exhibits, covering every stage of Kokoschka's long career.
Not many openings in December; normal service resumes in the New Year.

Images

Caravaggio, The Entombment of Christ, 1602-03. © Pinacoteca Vaticana, Vatican City
Oskar Kokoschka, Self-Portrait with Crossed Arms, 1923, Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz. Photo: © Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz/PUNCTUM /Bertram Kober © Fondation Oskar Kokoschka/2018 ProLitteris, Zurich
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