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 and Closing in May -- From Leonardo to Goethe

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's Millennium Gallery is staging John Ruskin: Art & Wonder, exploring Ruskin's fascination with the natural world. May 29 to September 15, and this is another exhibition that's free of charge.

Over in Paris, the Pompidou Centre is going right back in time to the very origins of art to look at Prehistory and its influence on modern artists such as Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee and Max Ernst. Prehistory begins on May 8 and comes to an end on September 16.

Meanwhile, at the Petit Palais, swooning and sighing will be the order of the day for the story of Romantic Paris, 1815-1848, with 600 works from paintings to furniture intended to immerse the visitor in the cultural and political ferment of the age. This one runs from May 22 to September 15.

The MuMa art gallery in Le Havre is dramatically situated right by the entrance to the port, and this summer it's paying tribute to Raoul Dufy, who was born in the city in 1877 and painted it constantly. Raoul Dufy in Le Havre is on from May 18 to November 3 and features some 90 works, many on loan.
 
Danish art has provided two of our highlights of 2019 so far: the Golden Age exhibition in Stockholm and the Vilhelm Hammershøi show at the Musée Jacquemart-André in Paris. If you're in northern Germany over the summer, there's a fine opportunity to see more masterpieces from Denmark in the shape of paintings from the Ordrupgaard museum on the outskirts of Copenhagen, which is currently being renovated. In the Light of the North is on at the Kunsthalle in Hamburg from May 10 to September 22 and includes perhaps our favourite Hammershøi, those Dust Motes....
We started this month's preview with Leonardo, but we're finishing with another cultural colossus: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Germany's most famous writer, the author of Faust and The Sorrows of Young Werther, was astonishingly influential across Europe at the end of the 18th and start of the 19th century. The Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn is putting on the first major exhibition about Goethe's life and work in 25 years; Goethe: Transformation of the World runs from May 17 to September 15.

Last chance to see two shows in London....

You have until May 6 to get along to Tate Modern for Pierre Bonnard: The Colour of Memory. The best bits are great: some gorgeously colour-saturated views of the south of France and wonderful intimate interiors, though there's also a chunk of less thrilling murky splodge. The exhibition moves to the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen in June and then on to the Kunstforum in Vienna in October.
May 19 is the final day to see the superb Elizabethan Treasures show at the National Portrait Gallery, featuring miniatures by England's first great artists, Nicholas Hilliard and Isaac Oliver. Small, beautiful and absolutely stunning. 

Images

Leonardo da Vinci, A Standing Male Nude, c. 1504-6, Royal Collection Trust. © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2019
Vilhelm Hammershøi, Sunbeams or Sunlight, "Dust Motes Dancing in the Sunbeams", 1900, Ordrupgaard, Copenhagen. © Photo: Anders Sune Berg
Pierre Bonnard, Nude in an Interior, c. 1935, National Gallery of Art, Washington

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...