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'Too Bold to Have Been Painted by a Woman'

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...
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Opening in March -- in a Few Places

So museums and galleries in Britain won't be welcoming art-lovers back for a while yet (not until mid-May in England, according to Boris Johnson's current timetable), but they're open in Austria, Belgium and Spain and will be unbolting their doors again in Switzerland from the start of March.  

That means we do have a few exhibitions to tell you about this month, and let's start in Switzerland, because the new show at the Kunstmuseum in Basel is scheduled to be making its way to London and New York before too long, assuming there are no more lockdowns.... Sophie Taeuber-Arp: Living Abstraction from March 20 to June 20 celebrates one of the most influential avant-garde artists of the 20th century. She's perhaps better-known in German-speaking countries (her face is on the Swiss 50-franc note) for her geometric designs across a wide range of media, including textiles, sculpture and painting. The exhibition is due at Tate Modern in July and then MoMA in November.

Meanwhile, in Madrid, there are two exhibitions to highlight at the Prado. Mythological Passions: Titian, Veronese, Allori, Rubens, Ribera, Poussin, Van Dyck, Velázquez starts on March 2 and brings together the six mythological paintings made by Titian for King Philip II of Spain, reunited for the first time in centuries and now back in Spain after initially being on show together at London's National Gallery. At the Prado, they're displayed as part of a total of 29 pictures of mythological love by great Renaissance and Baroque masters, 13 of them on loan. The exhibition runs until July 4.   

Opening on March 9 is the first ever exhibition dedicated to Marinus van Reymerswale. You may not recognise the name of this early 16th-century Netherlandish painter, but if you're interested in the art of this period, you're bound to have seen some of his pictures of money-changers and tax collectors, often with extravagant headgear, counting out their perhaps ill-gotten gains. Marinus: Painter from Reymerswale is on at the Prado until June 13. 
And in Milan, there's a celebration of often largely neglected women artists from the 16th and 17th centuries at the Palazzo Reale. Artemisia Gentileschi, Sofonisba Anguissola and Lavinia Fontana are the most celebrated of the 30-odd names represented by more than 130 works from around Italy and beyond in Le Signore d'Arte, which runs from March 2 to July 25. Some of the pictures will be on public display for the first time. 

Images

Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Composition à cercles et demi-cercles, 1938, Arp Museum Bahnhof Rolandseck, Remagen, Germany
Marinus van Reymerswale, The Moneychanger and his Wife, 1539, Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. © Museo Nacional del Prado
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