The Art Exhibitions Blog

Pierre Bonnard: The Colour of Memory  is the first big exhibition of the year at Tate Modern in London, running from January 23 to May 6. The Tate is aiming to show how Bonnard's intense colours and modern compositions transformed art in the first half of the 20th century, with 100 pictures from museums and private collections around the world. Two Temple Place in central London is a fantastically atmospheric venue for an exhibition. Its new show is all about that most influential of 19th-century art critics, John Ruskin, and his legacy, and it marks the bicentenary of his birth. With more than 190 exhibits, John Ruskin: The Power of Seeing  runs from January 26 to April 22. Admission is free. Prized Possessions: Dutch Paintings from National Trust Houses is a small but excellent show that we enjoyed when we saw it at the Holburne Museum in Bath in the summer. It's since been to the Mauritshuis in The Hague and now you can see it at an actual National Trust country hous...

A couple of big anniversaries dominate the 2019 exhibition calendar: It's 500 years since Leonardo da Vinci's death, and 350 since Rembrandt's. Van Gogh is celebrated in two major shows, while Bridget Riley and Antony Gormley are among the leading contemporary artists in focus. Here's a look at some of the standout dates for the diary in 2019, in more or less chronological order. January The first big show of the New Year comes at Tate Modern in London, with Pierre Bonnard: The Colour of Memory opening on January 23. The Tate is promising 100 of Bonnard's greatest works from museums and private collections around the world. Until May 6. To mark Rembrandt Year in the Netherlands, the Mauritshuis in The Hague is putting on show all of the 18 paintings in its collection that are by Rembrandt or have been attributed to him. January 31 to September 15. February Leonardo da Vinci: A Life in Drawing will see drawings by Leonardo in the Royal Collection exhibite...

The Assyrians seem to have been remarkably ahead of their time. It was the 7th century BC; Ancient Rome had hardly got going, but Ashurbanipal, King of Assyria, expanded his empire to stretch across today's Middle East and into Egypt, and he was able to communicate with its farthest reaches in a few days by express mail along royal roads. He had a vast library and a cabinet of senior officials to help him govern (though they did tend to be eunuchs).  And then there's the art. There's a brilliant vibrancy and plasticity about many of the reliefs and sculptures in I Am Ashurbanipal, King of the World, King of Assyria in the British Museum, a stunning show that brings the Assyrian Empire to life. It illustrates how Assyria was a very sophisticated and civilised society. But it was also an extremely violent and warlike one, and the Assyrians didn't cover up their brutality; they recorded it in writing on clay and in pictures on stone.  To Assyrian eyes, it was the...

During and just after World War I, Fernand Léger seems to have been producing some very radical, cutting-edge art, and a number of the early works on display in the retrospective Fernand Léger: New Times, New Pleasures at Tate Liverpool convey a real sense of energy and modernity.  But as the years went on, that excitement seems to have faded from Léger's work. In this slightly bitty exhibition, we were left feeling that it would have been great to have had a little more of the early stuff and fewer pictures from his later, perhaps less enthralling period.   Léger, born in 1881, trained as an architect, and developed an artistic style heavily influenced by advertising and mechanisation. In The Disc from 1918, modern life is expressed in abstract forms and bright colours.  Léger had survived the war, but only just: He almost died in a mustard-gas attack in 1916, and a year later produced the painting that is perhaps the most striking in the entire ...

For a period in the 1950s, Cyril Mann developed a striking and distinctive style of painting that now looks to have been ahead of its time. The pictures that tell how a dark council flat in Islington produced a little bit of art history can be seen in The Solid Shadow Paintings  at the Piano Nobile gallery in west London. Mann , who was born in 1911, had previously explored the effects of natural light, but at the start of the 50s the local council rehoused him to a flat above a gold-bullion broker near Old Street. For insurance reasons, there were bars on the windows, and no natural light found its way in. So the artist turned on the light -- and started to explore the effects of the harsh shadows it cast, with boldly outlined, simplified objects in exaggerated colours. The shadows seem almost as solid as the objects themselves. In this Dish of Fruit , the eye is caught not only by the white highlights on the individual pieces of fruit, but by the way the shadow falls like a ...

Thomas Gainsborough painted more portraits of his family than any other British artist before him, at least as far as we know. Some of the 50 or so pictures in Gainsborough's Family Album , now on show at the National Portrait Gallery in London, are small in scale and dashed off with an economical use of paint, because a busy artist didn't want to use up too much time, energy or materials on a job to please the in-laws. Others are more polished, to show off his skills to a demanding clientele.  Gainsborough, one of the great names of the 18th-century golden age of British painting, really preferred landscapes, but as far as portraits are concerned he seems to have saved his best, his most endearing work for his favourite sitters, his daughters Mary and Margaret.  Here they are, pictured in 1756, when Mary would have been about six and Margaret a year younger. The elder girl restrains her sister to stop her pricking her finger as she reaches towards a butterfly per...

LS Lowry's best-known pictures of grim northern townscapes and huddled masses of stick-like figures rushing from the mill or to the football ground make it hard to credit that he was a Pre-Raphaelite at heart. And yet Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Ford Madox Brown were Lowry's two favourite artists. Images of the Pre-Raphs' muses adorned the walls of his bedroom in his suburban home in Mottram on the outskirts of Manchester. He was president of the Rossetti Society. "I said to my father: 'I wish you'd buy me a Rossetti painting.' Now I've got about 12,'' Lowry said late in life. "I'm a Victorian all right, you know." Lowry and the Pre-Raphaelites , a free show at the Lowry in Salford, makes a stab at shedding more light on why these pictures meant so much to an artist whose own work was so very different. For us, it doesn't really succeed. Lowry was a very private man, and though we get to hear and read some of his own words...