Opening and Closing in May

We start off in London this month with two new exhibitions at the British Museum. The first, opening on May 4, takes us back to the ancient history of the region round the eastern Mediterranean and an examination of Luxury and Power: Persia to Greece. It aims to uncover how the Persian Empire spread ideas of elegance and craftsmanship across neighbouring lands around 500 BC. Featuring items from the museum's own collection as well as international loans, the show runs until August 13. 

We head further east for the second exhibition, exploring China's Hidden Century. On from May 18 to October 8, this show looks at life in 19th-century China through art, fashion and everyday objects, seeking to show how decades of violence and turmoil that ended with the deposing of the emperor in 1912 were also a period of significant creativity. 

The National Gallery is staging the first ever exhibition in the UK to be devoted to Saint Francis of Assisi. Looking at how the saint's commitment to the poor and love of nature has appealed to artists down generations and across continents, it includes loans from artists as diverse as Caravaggio, Stanley Spencer and Antony Gormley. With free entry, it runs from May 6 to July 30. 

You will rarely be disappointed by an exhibition at the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, and their new show, starting on May 13, is all about Gwen John, known above all for her portraits of women and quiet interiors, but whose output has often been overshadowed by that of her brother Augustus. Gwen John: Art and Life in London and Paris will bring together more than 120 works for the first major retrospective in more than 20 years. It runs until October 8 before a version of the show goes on to the Holburne Museum in Bath -- it'll presumably be significantly smaller given the Holburne's limited exhibition space.

But before then, the Holburne is offering us the excellently titled Painted Love: Renaissance Marriage Portraits. With loans from major British collections, this show takes a look at the role portraiture played in the marriage process in Renaissance Europe.... you have only to think of Henry VIII commissioning Hans Holbein to paint prospective brides. Described as "lavish" by the Holburne, the exhibition runs from May 26 to October 1. 

At the Arc in Winchester, you can see Constable: The Dark Side, starting on May 26. The exhibition examines John Constable's obsession with the contrast between light and shadow in his depictions of nature and will bring together works from the Tate, Royal Academy and V&A. It's on until August 16. 

The Barbara Hepworth: Art & Life exhibition that's been to Wakefield, Edinburgh and St Ives arrives in Eastbourne at the Towner Gallery -- one of our favourite venues -- on May 27. It runs until September 3, displaying some of her most celebrated sculptures. 

The Bolognese Renaissance painter Lavinia Fontana is considered to have been the first woman artist to achieve success beyond the confines of a court or a convent; she was the first woman to paint public altarpieces and female nudes. Her story gets the exhibition treatment at the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin from May 6 to August 27 in Lavinia Fontana: Trailblazer, Rule-Breaker. It's the first show devoted solely to her work in over two decades.

Vincent van Gogh spent the last two-and-a-bit months of his life in 1890 in Auvers-sur-Oise, to the north-west of Paris. It was a hugely productive period, and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam has assembled more than 50 paintings from around the world for Van Gogh in Auvers-sur-Oise, which runs from May 12 to September 3. The show moves on to the Musée d'Orsay in Paris in October. 

Just a stone's throw from the Van Gogh Museum is the Stedelijk Museum, and they've got more Van Gogh there in a wide-ranging exhibition starting on May 18. With more than 300 works by 200 artists and designers, Modern will also feature Gerrit Rietveld, Fernand Léger, Suzanne Valadon and Jan Toorop, among many others from the late 19th and early 20th century, looking at styles from Dada to Bauhaus, Arts & Crafts to Art Nouveau. This one is on until September 24. 

A few months ago, we saw at the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem how that city's art had been enriched by refugees from the southern Netherlands in the early 17th century. There's more on the same theme from May 14 at the Museum Catharijneconvent in Utrecht in Ode to Antwerp, which brings together 80 works by Flemish and Dutch artists -- including Hals and Rembrandt -- to show the influence migrants from the Flemish port city had on the development of Dutch painting. On until September 17. 

The half-Jewish German painter Lotte Laserstein quit her homeland for Sweden in 1937 and then lapsed into obscurity for many years. A number of recent exhibitions have restored her position as a leading light of the New Objectivity movement, and Lotte Laserstein: A Divided Life at Moderna Museet in Malmo aims to look at her entire career, including her half a century in exile in Sweden. On from May 6 to October 1, after which the show transfers to Moderna Museet in Stockholm. 

Georgia's most famous artist is Niko Pirosmani (1862-1918), whose work at first sight has a lot in common with French Primitive or Naïve painters such as Henri Rousseau. The Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, north of Copenhagen, is showing around 50 of Pirosmani's pictures from the Georgian National Museum, for the largest exhibition of his work in northern Europe. Niko Pirosmani runs in Denmark from May 4 to August 20, before moving to the Fondation Beyeler, just outside Basel. 

Last chance to see....

You've got until May 29 to find out about the Dutch Golden Age's intriguing mystery painter of puzzling interiors, Jacobus Vrel, Forerunner of Vermeer, at the Mauritshuis in The Hague. 

And May 29 is also the final day at the Belvedere in Vienna for Klimt: Inspired by Van Gogh, Rodin, Matisse...., the show that demonstrates that Gustav Klimt wasn't quite as original an artist as you might think, borrowing ideas from here, there and everywhere. We saw this fascinating exhibition at the Van Gogh Museum late last year. 

Images

Greek lion-head drinking cup attributed to Douris, 500 BC-470 BC. © The Trustees of the British Museum, London
Alesso Baldovinetti (c. 1426-1499), Portrait of a Lady, c. 1465, National Gallery, London
Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890), Augustine Roulin, La berceuse, 1889, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam

Lotte Laserstein (1898-1993), Self-Portrait at the Easel, 1938. Photo: © Lotte-Laserstein-Archiv Krausse, Berlin
Jacobus Vrel, A Seated Woman Looking at a Child through a Window, after 1656, Fondation Custodia, Frits Lugt Collection, Paris