Opening and Closing in September

There are lots and lots of new exhibitions starting in September right across Europe. The big offering on our radar in London is at the Wallace Collection in the shape of Frans Hals: The Male Portrait. The Wallace's own The Laughing Cavalier will be joined by over a dozen of the Dutch painter's works from galleries in Britain, Europe and the US in the first ever show to focus on Hals's depictions of solo male sitters. On from September 22 to January 30. 

One of the world's most recognisable artworks, The Great Wave, by Katsushika Hokusai, will of course be part of an exhibition of work by this Japanese artist and printmaker starting on September 30 at the British Museum, but for once it's not the focus. Hokusai: The Great Picture Book of Everything, which is on until January 30, puts on display for the first time ever 103 drawings he made in the early 19th century for an encyclopedia that was never published. The works were recently acquired by the museum after being forgotten for many decades. Sounds like something of a coup. 

Two British artists to consider now: The first ever show devoted to Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Portraits opens at the Holburne Museum in Bath on September 24. Featuring paintings, drawings and photography from across Rossetti's career, including portrayals of models such as Lizzie Siddal, Fanny Cornforth and Jane Morris, it will run until January 9. 

Rossetti died in 1882, just as a very different painter, Walter Sickert, was beginning his career. Sickert: A Life in Art at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool is the largest retrospective of the artist's work to have been staged in the UK in 30 years, with about 100 loaned paintings and 200 drawings. Influenced by Whistler and Degas, Sickert's work was raw and sometimes shocking for early 20th-century audiences. This one is on from September 18 to February 27. 

Indisputably Britain's greatest ever woodcarver, Grinling Gibbons died 300 years ago this year. We marvelled at the detail in his work, spotlit and highlighted for you to examine close up, in a show at Bonhams in London just a couple of weeks ago, and that exhibition reopens at Compton Verney in Warwickshire on September 25. Grinling Gibbons: Centuries in the Making is on until January 30, including this astonishing imitation lace cravat, carved in limewood.

And now gold, Bronze Age gold to be precise. Two hauls of it! First, the Shropshire version, a sun pendant known as a bulla discovered in the county in May 2018 by a metal detectorist. Described as one of the most significant pieces of metalwork from the period ever found in Britain, it goes on public display for the first time at Shrewsbury Museum from September 10 to December 12, on loan from the British Museum. Entry is free.

Gold of the Great Steppe at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge presents objects from the burial mounds of the Saka people who lived in what is now eastern Kazakhstan. Their culture, which flourished from the 8th to the 3rd century BC, is hardly known outside the Central Asian country but their craftsmen produced intricate gold artefacts. This exhibition is also free to visit and runs from September 28 to January 30. 

After Shrewsbury Museum, here's another unexpected venue: the Wiltshire Museum in Devizes is putting on Eric Ravilious: Downland Man from September 25 to January 30, a show exploring the artist's fascination with the chalk downlands of Wiltshire and Sussex. It's curated by James Russell, who put together the retrospective of Ravilious watercolours at Dulwich a few years ago as well as the enjoyable Seaside Modern show currently on in Hastings. More than 20 works from major British museums will be on view, as well as loans from private collections. 

On to Germany, and the big show opening at the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister in Dresden is Johannes Vermeer -- On Reflection. The exhibition centres on the gallery's Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window, whose recent restoration has revealed the presence on the back wall of a painting within a painting that was later covered up. Nine other Vermeers are reason enough for a visit, but around 50 more Golden Age genre paintings will provide context on the environment in which Vermeer worked. Opening on September 10, this one is on until January 2. 

The Gropius Bau in Berlin marks 30 years since the collapse of the Soviet Union with The Cool and the Cold, a show bringing together some 165 works by more than 100 Soviet and American artists made between 1960 and 1990 from the collection of Peter and Irene Ludwig that are held in six international museums. How did artists on both sides of the Cold War respond to the pressing questions of the age? Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein are among the standout names. September 24 to January 9. 

So we've got Hals in London this autumn, Vermeer in Dresden; for Sandro Botticelli it has to be Paris. Botticelli: Artist and Designer at the Musée Jacquemart-André will bring together some 40 works in a show that will examine the stylistic development of this master of the Florentine Renaissance, the role of his workshop and his influence on fellow artists. There are loans from Italy, the Vatican and other major European museums, and it's bound to attract huge interest. This one runs from September 10 to January 24. 

An even bigger draw in Paris may be The Morozov Collection: Icons of Modern Art, which opens at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in the Bois de Boulogne on September 22. This whopper of a show contains 200 works from the treasure trove of French and Russian art amassed at the end of the 19th and start of the 20th centuries by the Morozov brothers, heirs to a textile-manufacturing fortune. It's the first time this collection has been shown outside Russia. You'll be able to see Van Gogh, Monet, Denis, Renoir, Bonnard and many others, including top Russian names such as Ilya Repin. On until February 22. 

Just as the Morozovs were assembling their collection, the movie business was getting started. The new show at the Musée d'Orsay looks at the early years of the cinema in France and how the arts including painting reacted at the same time to subjects such as city life that fascinated filmmakers. Bonnard, Rodin and Caillebotte are among the artists featured in Bring on the Cinema! (link in French, as virtually all foreign-language content seems to have been removed from the Musée d'Orsay website) from September 28 to January 16.

And let's not forget that from September 18 until October 3, Parisians and visitors will be able to admire The Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped according to the plans of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, a project the couple never lived to see realised. The scheme will use 25,000 square metres of silvery blue fabric and 3,000 metres of red rope, all made of recyclable polypropylene. Inevitably, it's going to get more visitors than Botticelli or the Morozov Collection.... 

There's a certain surrealism to wrapping a building, but if you want real surrealism, as it were, the place to go will be Madrid, and the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza for The Magritte Machine. On from September 14 to January 30, this show with more than 100 paintings will focus on the way themes and motifs constantly reappear throughout Magritte's work. From Madrid, the exhibition will move on to the CaixaForum in Barcelona.

Amedeo Modigliani died 100 years ago last year, and the Albertina museum in Vienna had planned a centenary exhibition. You know what happened next to cause it to be delayed. Modigliani: The Primitivist Revolution finally opens on September 17, featuring around 130 works from three continents. On view until January 9. 

The last stop on our tour of Europe this month is in Switzerland, where Camille Pissarro: The Studio of Modernism opens at the Kunstmuseum Basel on September 4. The show will provide an overview of the Impressionist's output and look at his links with artists such as Monet, Degas and Gauguin, some of whose works will also feature. The exhibition runs until January 23.

Last chance to see....

We've not been to see too many exhibitions so far this year, but the outstanding show of those we have got to has been the John Nash retrospective at Towner Eastbourne, with a series of wonderful landscapes and his paintings evoking the horror of World War I. It closes on September 26 but will be moving on to Compton Verney in Warwickshire in late October.  

Images

Frans Hals, Willem Coymans, 1645. Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington

Grinling Gibbons, carved limewood cravat, c. 1690. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Johannes Vermeer, Woman Holding a Balance, 1662-65. © National Gallery of Art, Washington

Sandro Botticelli, Idealised Portrait of a Lady (Portrait of Simonetta Vespucci as Nymph), c. 1480, Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main

René Magritte, The Masterpiece or the Mysteries of the Horizon, 1955, Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation, Los Angeles. © VEGAP, Madrid, 2021

Camille Pissarro, Still Life with Apples and Pitcher, 1872, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Photo: bpk/The Metropolitan Museum of Art

John Nash, The Cornfield, 1918, Tate