Opening in January, with Any Luck

It takes a split second these days to create an image, and how many millions are recorded daily on mobile phones, possibly never to be looked at again? You can see it all happening in the palatial surroundings of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, definitely one of those tick-off destinations on many travellers' bucket lists, where those in search of instant pictorial satisfaction throng the imposing statue-lined staircase for a selfie or pout for a photo in the café under the spectacular cupola. But we're not in Vienna for a quick fix, we're at the KHM to admire something more enduring in the shape of art produced almost 500 years ago by Rembrandt and his pupil Samuel van Hoogstraten that was intended to mislead your eyes into seeing the real in the unreal. Artistic deception is the story at the centre of Rembrandt--Hoogstraten: Colour and Illusion , one of the most engrossing and best-staged exhibitions we've seen this year. And, somewhat surprisingly, a show wi...

Opening in January, with Any Luck

Got any plans for the first month of 2021? Zoom call? Vaccination? An exhibition? Well, here's a few that are scheduled to open, if the authorities allow.

London's first big-name show of the year is at the Royal Academy. Francis Bacon: Man and Beast looks at how the boundaries between humans and animals are so often distorted in Bacon's violent pictures. Bacon was fascinated by the subject of animal movement throughout his career. This exhibition is scheduled from January 30 to April 18.

The previous lockdown meant the curtain failed to go up in November on Noël Coward: Art & Style at the Guildhall Art Gallery, but the show is now slated to begin its run on January 14. The exhibition, including previously undisplayed material, is being staged to commemorate the centenary of Coward's West End debut as a 19-year-old playwright. The writer of Brief Encounter and Mad Dogs and Englishmen had a huge impact on fashion and culture in the mid-20th century, and his influence continues to this day.

Fancy sightseeing in Venice? Then Bath is the place to go. The Holburne Museum is displaying 23 paintings by Canaletto of the Italian city, which are leaving their home at Woburn Abbey in Bedfordshire (currently being refurbished) for the first time in 70 years. The pictures, the artist's largest set of Venetian views, were commissioned by the 4th Duke of Bedford and usually hang high up in the dining room at Woburn, so this is a rare chance to see them up close. Canaletto: Painting Venice is on from January 22, let us hope, to September 5.

The Danish painter Peder Severin Krøyer enjoyed much success in Paris in the 1880s, and a show of his works is scheduled to hit the Musée Marmottan Monet in the French capital from January 28 to July 25. The title of the exhibition, The Blue Hour of Peder Severin Krøyer, is a reference to the bluish twilight experienced in Skagen at Denmark's northern tip, where Krøyer was one of the founders of the turn-of-the-century artists' colony. A show at Skagen in 2022 will celebrate Krøyer's links with France.

Another Dane now: Vilhelm Hammershøi was born just over a decade after Krøyer and in the 1880s began to use photography as an artistic tool in collaboration with fellow artist Valdemar Schønheyder Møller, leading to unusual cropping and shading in his paintings. Emergences: Vilhelm Hammershøi, Valdemar Schønheyder Møller and Photography includes rarely seen works from private collections and is planned to be on at the Hirschsprung Collection in Copenhagen from January 20 to May 24. It can be seen at the Thiel Gallery in Stockholm afterwards.

German galleries have been closed for several weeks but some provisionally hope to reopen in mid-January. The start of Impressionism in Russia at the Museum Barberini in Potsdam, just outside Berlin, has been delayed, but you can visit the show online already. Many of the 80-plus works come from the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, including Ilya Repin's On the Field Boundary, a picture we remember from an encounter with late 19th-century Russian artists at the Munch Museum in Oslo in 2019. The Potsdam show is scheduled to run until February 14 before transferring to the Museum Frieder Burda in Baden-Baden in March.

We never got to the Tate to see the Andy Warhol show there in 2020, and we almost certainly won't be able to travel to Cologne to see the next stop for this retrospective of the high priest of Pop Art, but if you're in the vicinity, Andy Warhol Now is due to be on at the Museum Ludwig until April 18 once it resumes operations. Marilyn Monroe, Campbell's Soup and more on the menu.

And at the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin, an opportunity to immerse yourself in one of those scenes that helped define the Cold War. In August 1961, a young East German border guard leapt across the barbed-wire barrier dividing East and West Berlin in a dramatic escape captured by a photographer on the western side. The Leap -- 1961 will use virtual-reality headsets to take you back six decades to experience that crack in the Iron Curtain, from January 14, in theory, until April 5.

Last chance to see....

January 2 is the very last day at the Museum of Modern Art in New York for the wonderful show about Félix Fénéon, anarchist, art critic and collector, and promoter of Neo-Impressionism. We saw it at the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris in 2019.

And the really splendid overview of The Golden Age of Danish Painting at the Petit Palais in Paris is due to finish on January 17. We absolutely loved this exhibition when we went to the National Museum in Stockholm to see it nearly two years ago.

Images

Francis Bacon, Study for Bullfight No. 1, 1969, Private collection. © The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved, DACS/Artimage 2020. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd
Ilya Repin, On the Field Boundary: Vera Repina with Her Children, 1879, The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow
Film still from The Leap -- 1961, 2020. © Boris Hars-Tschachotin
Christen Købke, One of the Small Towers on Frederiksborg Castle, 1834-35, Designmuseum Denmark, Copenhagen. Photo: Pernille Klemp

Opening and Closing in October

There's been a spate of exhibitions over the past few years aimed at redressing centuries of neglect of the work of women artists, and the Italian Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi is the latest to come into focus, at the National Gallery in London, starting on October 3. Most of the works have never been seen in Britain before, and they cover a lengthy career that features strong female figures in Biblical and classical scenes, as well as self-portraits. Until January 24. Also starting at the National on October 7 is a free exhibition that looks at Sin , as depicted by artists from Diego Velázquez and William Hogarth through to Tracey Emin, blurring the boundaries between the religious and the secular. This one runs until January 3. Tate Britain shows this winter how JMW Turner embraced the rapid industrial and technological advances at the start of the 19th century and recorded them in his work. Turner's Modern World , starting on October 28, will inclu...

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...

Angelica Kauffman: Breaking Through the 18th-Century Glass Ceiling

In the late 18th century, Angelica Kauffman was famous throughout Europe, one of the leading international painters of the day. A success in London, Venice and Rome, she attracted commissions from Catherine the Great, the Emperor of Austria and the Pope. She was a close friend of Goethe, a founding member of Britain's Royal Academy. When she died in 1807, her lavish funeral in Rome drew enormous crowds. A far from ordinary life, then. And for an 18th-century woman in the male-dominated world of art, an utterly extraordinary one. She achieved equal pay, got women wearing trousers, drew male nudes and even had a pre-nup. It's a story that's arrestingly told in Angelica Kauffman: Artist, Superwoman, Influencer , a fine exhibition now on at the Kunstpalast in Dusseldorf that will be heading to London, and naturally the Royal Academy , this summer. Kauffman was born in Chur in eastern Switzerland in 1741 and was a child prodigy, not just as a painter but also as a singer...

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Rembrandt & van Hoogstraten: The Art of Illusion

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