The Snowman has become an integral part of the British Christmas, with its come-to-life hero taking a small dressing-gowned boy for an adventure Walking in the Air . It's a 20th-century equivalent of Charles Dickens's tale of Ebenezer Scrooge, Bob Cratchit and Tiny Tim. When The Snowman 's creator, Raymond Briggs, applied to go to art school at the age of 15, his interviewer was horrified to hear that he wanted to be a cartoonist. Today, he might be even more horrified to find out about Bloomin' Brilliant: The Life and Work of Raymond Briggs at the Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft in East Sussex. Briggs, who died two years ago, lived just a mile down the road from Ditchling, in the shadow of the South Downs. This joyful celebratory show looks back on a 60-year career that also gave us Fungus the Bogeyman , Father Christmas , When the Wind Blows and the story of his parents, Ethel and Ernest . Cartoons, picture books, graphic novels, for children perhaps, but actual
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 April 6, with Zorn -- A Swedish Superstar the big attraction. This show is intended to mark last year's 100th anniversary of the death of Anders Zorn, arguably the biggest name in the history of Swedish painting and known for his naturalistic approach to recording rural life and his realistic nudes and portraiture. There will be about 150 works on display in the exhibition, which runs until August 29.In Denmark, the National Gallery in Copenhagen reopens on April 21, with Kirchner and Nolde Up for Discussion. This show focuses on the inspiration found by the German Expressionists Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Emil Nolde in their travels through Africa and the Pacific in the period running up to and during World War I. How to reinterpret these works with their bold colours and brushwork but sometimes questionable subject matter in the light of modern attitudes? Nolde, part-Danish, pro-Nazi, presents a real challenge, as we know from a 2018 show in Edinburgh.
Last chance to see....
It seems a very long time ago that we immersed ourselves in Olafur Eliasson: In Real Life at Tate Modern in London. Having been on and off at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao for more than a year, the show, which we don't recollect as being terribly suited to experiencing in a pandemic, finally closes there on April 11. A new Eliasson exhibition is due to open at the Fondation Beyeler in Basel in April, but there's no firm start date yet.
Images
Georgia O'Keeffe, Series I--No.3, 1918, Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee. © Milwaukee Art Museum, VEGAP, Madrid, 2021Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Seated Nude with Fan, 1911, Museum Gunzenhauser, Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz
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