The Art Exhibitions Blog

It may not have escaped you that it's 500 years since the death of Leonardo da Vinci, and the big exhibition in Britain to mark the anniversary opens on May 24 at the Queen's Gallery in London. Leonardo da Vinci: A Life in Drawing  brings together more than 200 drawings from the Royal Collection for the largest show of the work of the ultimate Renaissance man in more than 65 years. Running until October 13, the display includes 144 drawings that are still on show until May 6 in 12 galleries around the UK. For something completely different, head to the Museum of London Docklands for an exhibition entitled Secret Rivers , looking at the history and the art surrounding the tributaries of the Thames such as the Tyburn and the Walbrook. May 24 to October 27, and entry is free. Another significant anniversary this year: 200 years since the birth of that most influential art critic John Ruskin. Following on from the enlightening show at Two Temple Place in London, Sheffield...

It was by accident, not design, that we found ourselves viewing the art collection of a German-turned-Swiss arms manufacturer. On our recent trip to Paris, we were on our way to see the excellent show about the Nabis at the Musée du Luxembourg when we walked past the Musée Maillol, which was showing a loan exhibition from the Emil Bührle Collection in Zurich, with Monet, Manet, van Gogh and more. That looks interesting, we thought, let's pop in and see it on the way back. So we did, and it turned out to be very enjoyable. But back to the paintings in a minute. Because, as debate rages over the funding of art and museums, with the Sackler family now under attack for their pharmaceuticals company's role in the opioids drug-abuse crisis sweeping America, it's impossible not to acknowledge a certain degree of queasiness about the way this collection, one of the most prestigious in private hands in Europe, was built up. Emil Georg Bührle was a controversial figure who di...

The year is 1843. And the theme of this hard-hitting painting is slavery, in all its gory detail, as practised in France's West Indian colonies. Slavery, you say? What about liberté, égalité, fraternité? Ah yes, slavery was abolished in 1794, after the French Revolution. But, and this takes a bit of getting your head round, it was reestablished by Napoleon eight years later. By the 1840s there was a strong abolitionist movement going in France, and an effective way to spread the message was to shock the public with the visual truth of what slavery actually meant. This painting by Marcel Verdier,  Beating at Four Stakes in the Colonies , is perhaps the most searing image in a sprawling exhibition at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, Black Models: From Géricault to Matisse , focusing on the way black people have been depicted in French art over the past 200 years or so and taking in broader themes of black history along the way. In Verdier's picture, a black slave is stretched...

Renaissance nudes.... let's see what springs to mind. Well, there's Titian's Venus of Urbino , obviously, or maybe the Sleeping Venus started by Giorgione and finished by Titian. How about Botticelli's Birth of Venus , or Velázquez's Rokeby Venus , or one of those many Cranachs with Venus and Cupid ? And that's just the one Roman goddess, off the top of our heads. So, for an exhibition on the Renaissance Nude , at London's Royal Academy, organised in conjunction with the J Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, you might be expecting a bit of a blockbuster. But this show is a lot more low-key. There are some fine works of art, to be sure, with Raphael, Titian, Michelangelo and Leonardo represented, but it just all feels a wee bit flat. You see, as we left, we were thinking about what pictures might have given a bit of oomph to this exhibition, and one of the first we came up with was Jean Fouquet's Virgin and Child from the Royal Museum of Fine Arts ...

Painters are such liars. Well, some of them, anyway. Take Jean-Léon Gérôme, a French 19th-century artist who travelled extensively to Egypt and rendered on canvas the exoticism of the Orient for a western audience.  Snake Charmer is so lovingly detailed, so meticulously painted, it must be true. Except it's complete tosh, an utter fabrication. In a Muslim society, a small boy was never going to be performing naked in public. Why does he look like an antique statue, anyway? How has this motley audience come together in this rather splendid interior? And hang on, these turquoise tile panels are from Turkey, not Egypt.... from the Topkapi Palace in Constantinople, except that Gérôme has reassembled them in a completely different way. The picture is from Oriental Visions: From Dreams into Light , a fascinating exhibition at the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris that looks at how European (mostly French) painters were stimulated, initially by fantasies of the East, and then later b...

What a riot of colour! An explosion of sheer outrageous exuberance! The exhibition is called Les Nabis et le Décor , it's on at the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris, and it celebrates a decade or so at the end of the 19th century when a group of young French painters broke down the boundaries between the fine and decorative arts to produce work that was completely original. Who were the Nabis? Artists such as Edouard Vuillard, Pierre Bonnard and Maurice Denis, who wanted to move on from Impressionism, which they saw as being too close to reality. Nabi is Hebrew for prophet, and the Nabis wanted to proclaim a new art. They were fascinated by the flatness of Japanese prints, by the post-Impressionism and innovative use of colour of Paul Gauguin, and they wanted to create contemporary interiors that were utterly at odds with the historical pastiche in vogue at the time. The aim of this exhibition is to recreate some of those interiors, now largely dispersed. And the curators have succ...

He is one of the most enigmatic, the most seductive of artists. Vilhelm Hammershøi's subdued, restrained interiors are mysterious and haunting, yet at the same time somehow soothing and calming. He depicted rooms that were often empty, or in which a woman was seen from behind. Hammershøi's pictures give you the impression of time suspended. At the end of the 19th century, in Norway, Edvard Munch was painting  The Scream . In neighbouring Denmark, Hammershøi was taking a slow, deep breath and perhaps being an early practitioner of mindfulness, giving us the anti-scream. We're fans of Hammershøi and have seen a couple of memorable shows of his work in recent years, so we weren't going to miss the opportunity to get to Hammershøi, the Master of Danish Painting  at the Musée Jacquemart-André in Paris. It's a terrific exhibition, with quite a few paintings we hadn't seen before and opening new insights into Hammershøi's work. And it's also the second fantas...

If surrealist art is all about exploring the subconscious, well then, Dorothea Tanning seems to have had quite a lot of subconscious to explore. An exhibition looking back on her 70-year career at Tate Modern in London reveals an artist who came late to surrealism but who probably created more memorable and disturbing images than any other of the rare women who were able to gain a foothold in what was a rather male-dominated movement. Tanning was born in 1910 in Galesburg, a small town in Illinois, where, she said, "nothing happened but the wallpaper." She went to Chicago and New York in search of a career as an artist and came across surrealism in a New York exhibition in 1936. Just before World War II she travelled to Paris, but the outbreak of war forced her back across the Atlantic. In 1942, she met the German surrealist artist, Max Ernst , her future husband, who saw this picture on her easel on their first encounter. Ernst suggested the title, Birthday , to ma...