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New Exhibitions in July

It's not opening until September 10, but tickets to see The Bayeux Tapestry at the British Museum go on sale at 1000 on July 1, so if you want to see it this year you'll probably need to get in early. Follow the link for details. Booking for the rest of the run, from January 1 through to July 11, 2027, will open later in 2026. If you've never seen this most astounding of historical artefacts in its natural habitat in Normandy, you'll want to seize the chance in London.  But what about this month? Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller (1793-1865) is regarded as one of Austria's finest 19th-century painters, and there's a free single-room show devoted to his views of the Alps, Vienna and Sicily from July 2 at the National Gallery. Waldmüller: Landscapes  is on till September 20.  Richard Dadd (1817-1886) was already known as a successful painter of Shakespearean fairy scenes before he began experiencing delusions, leading him to kill his father. Confined to Bethlem and Broa...
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Opening in July

Swiss-born Sophie Taeuber-Arp (1889-1943) was one of the leading abstract artists and designers of the early 20th century, working across a wide range of media from textiles through puppetry and painting, but she's never had a retrospective in the UK. That changes on July 15, when Tate Modern in London opens an exhibition that brings together her most important works from across Europe and the US, many of which have not been on display in Britain before. The show comes direct from the Kunstmuseum in Basel and is at the Tate until October 17, after which it moves on to MoMA in New York. 
If you're looking for something more cuddly than Germanic abstraction, you should head to the British Library for Paddington: The Story of a Bear, a family-friendly exhibition uncovering the inspiration behind the star of Michael Bond's classic children's books. There are first editions and original artwork for the grown-ups, and a marmalade trail to follow for the younger visitors. From July 9 to October 31, when it might just be cold enough for a duffel coat. 

A free Room 1 show at the National Gallery brings together for the first time in 250 years Bernardo Bellotto's 1750s views of the fortress of Königstein, standing high above the Elbe valley south-east of Dresden. The National recently acquired one of the paintings, made when Bellotto, the nephew of Canaletto, was court painter in Dresden to the Elector of Saxony, Augustus III, and it's joined by the four others, including one from Washington, for this display. Bellotto: The Königstein Views Reunited runs from July 22 to October 31.
The Tate is showing all its work by Lucian Freud at its Liverpool gallery from July 24 in what is the first major presentation of the portraitist's art in north-west England in more than 30 years. Lucian Freud: Real Lives will include pictures of some of Freud's favourite sitters including Sue Tilley and Leigh Bowery, as well as a selection of photographs of the painter. Until January 16.

The Hunterian Art Gallery in Glasgow has one of the largest collections of work by James McNeill Whistler, and you can discover why in a new show from July 9. Whistler: Art and Legacy will feature major paintings as well as rarely seen material, and admission is free. The show runs until October 31. 

Five hundred years ago, Albrecht Dürer travelled across Europe looking for inspiration and promoting his work. Among the places the painter from Nuremberg visited was Aachen, for the coronation of Emperor Charles V in 1520, an event now being marked belatedly, for obvious reasons, in a joint venture by London's National Gallery and the German city's Suermondt Ludwig Museum. Dürer Was Here opens in Aachen on July 18 and features about 90 works by the Renaissance master and a similar number by his contemporaries and followers, including Cranach and Holbein. Until October 24; the following month Dürer's Journeys will open at the National.   

We didn't get to see the recent Lynette Yiadom-Boakye show at Tate Britain, and it had mixed reviews. Some loved Yiadom's-Boakye's non-portraits of imagined characters, some found them monotonous. The exhibition's a collaboration with several continental European museums, and so Stockholm gets the chance to make up its mind about her work at Moderna Museet from July 3. Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Fly in League with the Night is on there until September 19, after which the show moves to the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Dusseldorf.

Images

Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Composition of Circles and Overlapping Angles, 1930, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photo: The Museum of Modern Art, Department of Imaging and Visual Resources. © 2019 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Bernardo Bellotto, The Fortress of Königstein from the North-West, 1756–58, National Gallery of Art, Washington. Courtesy National Gallery of Art
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Penny for Them, 2014. Private collection, Miami, Florida. © Lynette Yiadom-Boakye
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