Opening and Closing in May

What will be the exhibition highlights of 2025 around Britain and Europe? At the end of the year, Tate Britain will be marking 250 years since the birth of JMW Turner and John Constable with a potential blockbuster. Meanwhile, the Swiss are making a big thing of the 100th anniversary of the death of Félix Vallotton (a real favourite of ours). Among women artists in the spotlight will be Anna Ancher, Ithell Colquhoun, Artemisia Gentileschi and Suzanne Valadon. Here's a selection of what's coming up, in more or less chronological order; as ever, we make no claim to comprehensiveness, and our choice very much reflects our personal taste. And in our search for the most interesting shows, we're visiting Ascona, Baden-Baden, Chemnitz and Winterthur, among other places. January We start off in Paris, at the Pompidou Centre; the 1970s inside-out building is showing its age and it'll be shut in the summer for a renovation programme scheduled to last until 2030. Bef...

Opening and Closing in May

It's a motif that recurs in art down the centuries, going back to ancient times: a woman at a window. A new show at Dulwich Picture Gallery in south-east London builds an exhibition on the theme around its own Girl at a Window by Rembrandt with more than 40 works going right up to the present day, though don't expect Vermeer or Caspar David Friedrich. Reframed: The Woman in the Window runs from May 4 to September 4.

We've seen Edvard Munch in Oslo at the old Munch Museum and the old National Gallery, but we've never been to the significant Munch collection at KODE in Bergen, collected during the painter's lifetime by the industrialist Rasmus Meyer. Eighteen works from the collection, dating from the 1880s and 1890s, will be on show at the Courtauld Gallery from May 27 to September 4 in Edvard Munch: Masterpieces from Bergen. Will this be as popular as the Van Gogh Self-Portraits show at the Courtauld, which finishes on May 8 but is completely sold out?

A free exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge brings together more than 100 works from its own collection as well as from the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the Fondation Custodia in Paris for True to Nature: Open-Air Painting in Europe 1780-1870. Constable, Corot and Turner were among the artists who sought new ways of depicting the natural world as travel became easier and equipment more compact. On from May 3 to August 29.

The Tudors: Passion, Power and Politics at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool presents the five Tudor monarchs from Henry VII to Elizabeth I and the people around them -- some of the most recognisable characters in English history, including Thomas Cromwell and William Shakespeare -- through around 100 objects, many from the National Portrait Gallery. The exhibition runs from May 21 to August 29; a smaller version of this show has been on at the Holburne Museum in Bath.

The Pallant House Gallery in Chichester has the first major exhibition to feature British artist Glyn Philpot (1884-1937) in almost four decades. Glyn Philpot: Flesh and Spirit will show how the painter moved from society portraits in the Edwardian era to a more modernist style, including sensitive depictions of black sitters, among them the actor Paul Robeson. This one is on from May 14 to October 23.

From May 17, the Belgian pointillist Théo van Rysselberghe is the subject of a show at Singer Laren in the Netherlands. Théo van Rysselberghe: Painter of the Sun will encompass his society portraits, land- and seascapes and nudes. It runs until September 4.

At the Pompidou Centre in Paris, they're offering a comprehensive look at Weimar Germany, though with close to 900 artworks and documents on show it does sound a little overwhelming. Germany / 1920s / New Objectivity / August Sander features paintings and drawings by George Grosz, Otto Dix and Jeanne Mammen, among others, as well as August Sander's photographs of Germans of all classes in People of the 20th Century. In Paris from May 11 to September 5, and then the show moves on to the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art north of Copenhagen in October.

On in Denmark before then: Krøyer and Paris, starting on May 13 at the Skagens Museum at the northern tip of Jutland. This celebrates the work of one of the leading Skagen painters, P.S. Krøyer, alongside French art that inspired him, with Courbet, Caillebotte, Monet and Sisley among those represented, in a show that continues until September 18.

It's the 300th anniversary of the birth in Venice of Bernardo Bellotto, nephew of Canaletto and painter of many fine city views, particularly of Dresden, where he worked for Frederick August, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland. Enchantingly Real at the Zwinger in Dresden has Bellotto's cityscapes on display from May 21 to August 28.

Last chance to see....

There's no charge to get into a small display at the National Gallery in London to see what all the fuss was about over Thomas Gainsborough's Blue Boy, once the most expensive picture in the world. Until May 15, after which he flies back home to California.

The best art exhibition we've seen so far this year is Whistler's Woman in White: Joanna Hiffernan at the Royal Academy, which ends on May 22. Some gorgeous art, intelligently presented. Tickets are still available.

Images

Tom Hunter, Woman Reading Possession Order, 1997, from the series Persons Unknown, courtesy the artist

Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger, Queen Elizabeth I ('The Ditchley Portrait'), c. 1592. © National Portrait Gallery, London

Peder Severin Krøyer, Summer Evening on Skagen Sønderstrand, 1893, Skagens Kunstmuseer, Skagen, Denmark. © Skagens Kunstmuseer

James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Symphony in White, No 1: The White Girl, 1862, National Gallery of Art, Washington

Opening and Closing in October

There's been a spate of exhibitions over the past few years aimed at redressing centuries of neglect of the work of women artists, and the Italian Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi is the latest to come into focus, at the National Gallery in London, starting on October 3. Most of the works have never been seen in Britain before, and they cover a lengthy career that features strong female figures in Biblical and classical scenes, as well as self-portraits. Until January 24. Also starting at the National on October 7 is a free exhibition that looks at Sin , as depicted by artists from Diego Velázquez and William Hogarth through to Tracey Emin, blurring the boundaries between the religious and the secular. This one runs until January 3. Tate Britain shows this winter how JMW Turner embraced the rapid industrial and technological advances at the start of the 19th century and recorded them in his work. Turner's Modern World , starting on October 28, will inclu...

The Thrill of Pleasure: Bridget Riley

Prepare yourself for some sensory overload. Curves, stripes, zig-zags, wavy lines, dots, in black and white or colour. Look at many of the paintings of Bridget Riley and you're unable to escape the eerie sensation that the picture in front of you is in motion, has its own inner three-dimensional life, is not just inert paint on flat canvas, panel or plaster. It's by no means unusual to see selections of Riley's paintings on display, but a blockbuster exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh brings together 70 years of her pictures in a dazzling extravaganza of abstraction, including a recreation of her only actual 3D work, which you walk into for a perspectival sensurround experience. It's "that thrill of pleasure which sight itself reveals," as Riley once said. It's a really terrific show, and the thrill of pleasure in the Scottish capital was enhanced by the unexpected lack of visitors on the day we went to see it, with huge empty sp...

Angelica Kauffman: Breaking Through the 18th-Century Glass Ceiling

In the late 18th century, Angelica Kauffman was famous throughout Europe, one of the leading international painters of the day. A success in London, Venice and Rome, she attracted commissions from Catherine the Great, the Emperor of Austria and the Pope. She was a close friend of Goethe, a founding member of Britain's Royal Academy. When she died in 1807, her lavish funeral in Rome drew enormous crowds. A far from ordinary life, then. And for an 18th-century woman in the male-dominated world of art, an utterly extraordinary one. She achieved equal pay, got women wearing trousers, drew male nudes and even had a pre-nup. It's a story that's arrestingly told in Angelica Kauffman: Artist, Superwoman, Influencer , a fine exhibition now on at the Kunstpalast in Dusseldorf that will be heading to London, and naturally the Royal Academy , this summer. Kauffman was born in Chur in eastern Switzerland in 1741 and was a child prodigy, not just as a painter but also as a singer...

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