Opening and Reopening in August

A very eclectic mix of shows this month, and we're starting with an exhibition that's not art at all, but of vital interest to everyone. The Science Museum is investigating the Future of Food , looking at new advances in growing, making, cooking and eating it. On from July 24 to January 4, it's free, though you need to book. Oh, and you get to see this 3,500-year-old sourdough loaf..... At the Lowry in Salford, they're offering a double bill of Quentin Blake and Me & Modern Life: The LS Lowry Collection . The show about Blake, who's written or illustrated more than 500 books, looks aimed at a family audience, while the Lowry exhibition includes borrowed works, marking the Salford arts centre's 25th anniversary. On from July 19 to January 4, and entry is again free, though you need to book a timeslot. Another anniversary this year is the 250th of the birth of Jane Austen; among the exhibitions around the country is one in Winchester, the city where she died ...

Opening and Reopening in August

August is normally a thin month for new exhibitions, but as more and more museums and galleries open up again to the public, August 2020 will be rather busier than normal.

In London, the Royal Academy gives a new lease of life to one show that was interrupted by the coronavirus lockdown and celebrates the delayed start of another.

The interrupted show looks at Léon Spilliaert, an artist whose finest work stems from his years at home in Ostend at the start of the 20th century, wandering the Belgian port city at night, haunted by insomnia and stomach troubles. It was the last exhibition we reviewed before lockdown, and Spilliaert really couldn't be a better symbol for social distancing, pictured alone in his studio or capturing the eeriness of deserted streets or beaches. August 5 to September 20.

Two days after the Spilliaert show restarts, the RA welcomes Gauguin and the Impressionists: Masterpieces from the Ordrupgaard Collection in Denmark, which is currently undergoing renovation. There are 60 works on show, with Monet, Manet, Degas, Renoir, Pissarro and Morisot among the other artists represented. This exhibition runs until October 18. Royal Academy opening hours are currently severely restricted, and with the number of visitors allowed in per hour limited, tickets for both these shows will be scarce.

On August 10, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford will be reopening, with limited tickets available for Young Rembrandt, the story of how an initially not particularly brilliant young artist from Leiden worked his way to the very top. Seeing Rembrandt blossom into one of the greatest painters of all time makes for an absolutely absorbing exhibition; we thought it was the best thing we saw in all of 2019 when we caught it in Leiden in the autumn. The run in Oxford will continue until November 1.

At the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, the doors open to the public again on August 5, allowing for the resumption of Barnett Freedman: Designs for Modern Britain, a look at one of the most prominent commercial designers of the middle of the 20th century. Freedman worked on posters, stamps and book covers, and this is the first major retrospective for more than 60 years, running till November 1.

One of the most striking works of art produced in 1920s Germany is Ernst Barlach's Floating Angel, a mesmerising bronze sculpture that we were lucky enough to see in the Tate's show on the Aftermath of World War I a couple of years ago. Now the Albertinum in Dresden is staging the first ever comprehensive overview of Ernst Barlach on the 150th Anniversary of his Birth, with a focus on his wood carving. It's on from August 8 to January 10.

From the Albertinum in Dresden to the Albertina in Vienna, where the curtain goes up on August 27 on Van Gogh, Cézanne, Matisse: The Hahnloser Collection, featuring about 120 works from one of the most important private assemblies of late 19th- and early 20th-century French art. The renovation of the collection's normal home in Winterthur in Switzerland offers the Austrian capital a chance to admire paintings by the likes of Vuillard and Bonnard as well as outstanding Swiss painters such as Ferdinand Hodler and Félix Vallotton. The Vienna show runs until November 15.

Of course, you may be asking yourself, is it safe to actually go and see an exhibition? Maybe you're better off just going for a drive. The Dutch have the answer: a pop-up show in Rotterdam, the Boijmans Ahoy Drive-Thru Museum. The venue is the Ahoy conference and event centre (site of this year's cancelled Eurovision Song Contest), the art is from the Boijmans van Beuningen museum, currently undergoing a makeover. You book a timeslot in an electric car and drive at minimal speed round a vast exhibition hall to see around 50 artworks, with Oskar Kokoschka and Anselm Kiefer among those featuring. August 1-23.

Last chance to see....

Still on at the Mauritshuis in The Hague until August 30: George Stubbs -- The Man, the Horse, the Obsession, showing how Stubbs became the most celebrated painter of horseflesh in England and featuring the first ever appearance of his masterpiece, Whistlejacket, in mainland Europe. This is a smaller version of the hugely impressive show we saw in Milton Keynes last year.

Do check museum websites for booking details, opening times and conditions of entry, as these vary greatly.

Images

Rembrandt van Rijn, Self-Portrait in a Cap, Open-Mouthed, 1630, Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford

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...

Caillebotte: This Is Modern Paris

You won't find a single work of art by Gustave Caillebotte in a British public collection. And yet he's one of the key figures in the Impressionist movement, whose 150th anniversary we're celebrating this year. But over in Paris, he's the subject of a big, big exhibition at the Musée d'Orsay; we jumped on the Eurostar to see it, and, even though Caillebotte: Painting Men was the most crowded show we'd been to in quite some time, we absolutely adored it. And let's start with perhaps the pièce de résistance. Even if you don't know Caillebotte at all, you may have seen this image before; there's something about it that encapsulates late 19th-century Paris, with its view of an intersection between the broad new streets pushed through by that radical city-planner, Baron Haussmann, lined by elegant new buildings. This was the modern city, the modern world. Paris Street; Rainy Day : a painting in which there's nothing really happening, and there...

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Opening and Closing in July

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