Skip to main content

New Exhibitions in June

Frida Kahlo: Now, there's a name to be reckoned with. More than just a painter, a global phenomenon, a superstar who died too young. And so coming to Tate Modern on June 25 we have  Frida: The Making of an Icon , surely set to be one of the most in-demand tickets in London this year. It's not so much a show about Frida, though, as about the cult of Frida: More than 30 of her works are accompanied by some 200 by contemporaries and those from later generations whom she inspired, and then there are over 200 objects exploring "Fridamania". The show had good reviews when it was on at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, and you've got until January 3 to catch it at the Tate.  While we're on the subject of mid 20th-century female icons whose candle burned out long before their legend ever did....  Marilyn Monroe: A Portrait  starts at the National Portrait Gallery on June 4. The Hollywood star would have been 100 years old this year, and this show, running until Sept...
Post a Comment

Subscribe to updates

Opening and Closing in July

Newly knighted Grayson Perry has one of the highest profiles in the art world, not just as a creator of pottery and tapestries, but as an author and television presenter, commenting on the big issues of our time. So no wonder the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh is staging the biggest ever exhibition of Perry's work over the summer, looking back at a 40-year career. Grayson Perry: Smash Hits is on from July 22 to November 12. 
On a distinctly smaller scale, you can explore Victorian Virtual Reality at the Watts Gallery in Compton, near Guildford. It's a look at the 19th-century craze for stereoscopic photographs that allowed images to be viewed as if in three dimensions, and it contains more than 150 pictures from a collection built up over the decades by the Queen guitarist Brian May. This one runs from July 4 right through to February 25 next year. 

Our next couple of shows are all about travels by the Impressionists, and our first stop is at the Musée des impressionismes in Giverny, north-west of Paris, where they are marking the 140th anniversary of a month-long stay on Guernsey by Pierre-Auguste Renoir. He made about 15 paintings during his time on the Channel Island. From July 14 to September 10, his trip will be the focus of Renoir in Guernsey, 1883, an exhibition that is then due to travel on to the Guernsey Museum in St Peter Port at the end of the month. 

But now let's leave the English Channel and head to the Mediterranean. At the Grimaldi Forum in Monaco from July 8 to September 3 you can find out how another leading Impressionist, Claude Monet, discovered new colours and new ways of capturing light on a series of trips to the French Riviera in the 1880s. Monet in Full Light will bring together nearly 100 paintings from across his career, centred on 23 pictures from his time on the Riviera. Monaco, you might think, bound to cost a fortune. Tickets are 14 euros; you pay £14.95 with Gift Aid at the Watts Gallery....

As we're in Provence, let's take the train along the coast from Monte Carlo to Cannes for another promising-looking exhibition at the Musée Bonnard in Le Cannet. This summer's show there investigates how artists in the rapidly changing society of the Belle Epoque period, from 1890 to World War I, treated the subjects of leisure and entertainment, with pictures of nightclubs, theatres, circuses, the seaside and more. There's work by Pierre Bonnard, Georges Seurat, Toulouse-Lautrec and others. On sort! (We're Going Out!) is on from July 1 to November 5 and tickets will set you back all of 7 euros. 
Over in Germany, the Museum Barberini in Potsdam has gathered around 100 pictures by 40 artists for Clouds and Light: Impressionism in Holland. Vincent van Gogh, Piet Mondrian and the painters of the Hague School are among those showing how the Dutch found new inspiration from developments in French art towards the end of the 19th century. It can be seen from July 8 to October 22. 

Last chance to see....

There are extended opening hours at the Museum Georg Schäfer in Schweinfurt this weekend for the final days of the splendid Caspar David Friedrich exhibition, with some iconic pictures by the greatest painter of the German Romantic movement. It closes on July 2, but there's another opportunity to catch the show when it reopens on August 26 at the Kunst Museum in the Swiss city of Winterthur. 

You have until July 23 to enjoy Museum Wiesbaden's fascinating and surprising exhibition about the little-known Oskar Zwintscher, who worked in and around Dresden in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and created some memorable portraits and landscapes. 

Images

Grayson Perry (born 1960), The Upper Class at Bay, 2012. © Grayson Perry. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro
Louis Anquetin (1861-1932), Intérieur chez Bruant (Interior at Bruant's), 1886-87, Private collection. © Fotoatelier Peter Schälchli, Zurich
Oskar Zwintscher (1870-1916), Portrait of the Artist's Wife, 1901. © Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau, Munich

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What's On in 2026

Coming up in 2026: Lots more big exhibitions starring women artists, including Frida Kahlo, Leonor Fini, Leonora Carrington and Gwen John , as well as a host of names from the 17th-century Low Countries. And women almost certainly embroidered the Bayeux Tapestry, a contender for this year's hottest ticket in London.   Here's a selection of shows that have caught our eye around Britain and Europe, in more or less chronological order; as ever, we make no claim to comprehensiveness, and our choice very much reflects our personal taste. January We'll start the year at the Fondation Beyeler on the outskirts of Basel, where they're devoting an exhibition to Paul Cezanne . Focusing on the artist's later years, the show will bring together some 80 oil paintings and watercolours. January 25 to May 25.  February Two leading British women artists feature in exhibitions opening this month, with the National Museum in Cardiff honouring the best-known female painter Wales has pr...
1 comment
Read more

The Highs and Lows of the Nahmad Collection

It's widely referred to as the world's most valuable private art collection : the one assembled over decades by the Nahmad brothers, dealers Ezra and David . Worth an estimated $3 billion or more, it's said to include hundreds of Picassos. Some 60 works from it are now on display at the Musée des impressionnismes in Giverny as  The Nahmad Collection: From Monet to Picasso . Intended, apparently, to demonstrate how art developed from the early 19th century through Impressionism and on to the start of the modern era, towards the liberation of colour and form, this is an exhibition that ends up coming across as somewhat incoherent. We're not really told much about the Nahmads or their collecting choices -- and as you search the Internet, things become slightly mysterious: Is Ezra alive or dead? The art, presumably, is supposed to speak for itself, but it's a rather eclectic, if not confusing, selection; some of the works are fantastic, some are distinctly ho-hum.  Let...
Post a Comment
Read more

Carrington: You've Met Leonora, Now Discover Dora

Carrington: She only wanted to be known by her surname, unwittingly posing a conundrum for art historians, curators and the wider world a century later.  Because it's another somewhat later Carrington, the long-lived Surrealist and totally unrelated, who's recently become Britain's most expensive woman artist. But today we're at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester to see an exhibition not about Leonora but about Dora Carrington. She hated that name Dora -- so Victorian -- but with Leonora so much in the limelight (and the subject of a  recent show at Newlands House in Petworth, just a few miles up the road), the curators at the Pallant didn't have much option, so they've had to call their retrospective  Dora Carrington: Beyond Bloomsbury .  Leonora was a bit of a rebel, as we found out in Petworth. Dora too. But we ought to respect her wish. Carrington, then, has been a bit neglected recently; this is the first show of her works in three decades. And while ther...
Post a Comment
Read more