So the question to ask about the Michaelina Wautier exhibition at the Royal Academy in London must be: Is the hype about this recently rediscovered 17th-century woman painter justified? The answer: Yes, absolutely. She really does merit acknowledgement -- and not just because we recognise a woman working in a man's world. Her art shows she was extremely talented, producing superb canvases covering a diverse range of subject matter. What's more, she painted very large pictures featuring male nudes, such as Bacchus, despite her contemporaries thinking that was not the sort of thing a female artist could do. And her portraits are wonderfully lively and lifelike. This is Martino Martini, an Italian Jesuit missionary who travelled to China in the 1640s. It was painted in 1654, when Michaelina was around 40. Martini, who was staying at the Jesuit College in Brussels, is depicted wearing traditional Chinese silk court attire and a hat of fur and feathers. A rather substantial...
Even though more than half of adults in England have had a coronavirus jab, museums won't be welcoming visitors again before May. And with case numbers mounting in several European countries, who knows when they'll be reopening in France or the Netherlands. So let's concentrate on the few places in Europe where we have got confirmed dates for new exhibitions in April, starting in Madrid, where the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum is presenting a retrospective on Georgia O'Keeffe , one of the greatest names in 20th-century American art. A selection of around 80 works, providing a complete survey of O'Keeffe's career and including her famed flower paintings and images of New Mexico, opens on April 20 and runs until August 8. And assuming travel restrictions do ease at some point, if you can't see it in Madrid, this exhibition will be moving on to the Pompidou Centre in Paris and the Fondation Beyeler just outside Basel. Stockholm's National Museum reopens on Ap...