Opening and Closing in June

An exhibition of early 20th-century Ukrainian art from museums in Kyiv has been touring Europe since late 2022, and now it's coming to London. In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900-1930s will be on at the Royal Academy from June 29 to October 13, bringing together about 65 works. Kazymyr Malevych, Sonia Delaunay, Alexandra Exter and El Lissitzky are perhaps the best-known names. 

Divorced, beheaded, died; divorced, beheaded, survived. Those are the fates of course of the Six Wives: The Stories of Henry VIII's Queens at the National Portrait Gallery from June 20 (a bonus point if you can name them in the correct order). This exhibition, running till September 8, will look back through the centuries from depictions of the six wives in contemporary art and popular culture to the Tudor period and the paintings of Hans Holbein the Younger. 

  

Next door, at the National Gallery, there's another in their series of free medium-sized exhibitions with a single work from the museum's collection as the centrepiece. This latest show looks at Edgar Degas's spectacular Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando, going deeper into the story of the trapeze artist, whose real name was Anna Albertine Olga Brown. Discover Degas & Miss La La is on from June 6 to September 1. 

The new show at the Dulwich Picture Gallery presents -- for the first time in Europe -- the story of the Yoshida artistic dynasty, starting with the work of Hiroshi Yoshida (1876-1950), one of Japan's most prominent artists, who travelled widely and recorded landscapes around the world in the traditional medium of woodblock prints. The majority of his works on show, from the Fukuoka Art Museum, have not been seen in the UK before. Yoshida: Three Generations of Japanese Printmaking also features his wife, sons, daughter-in-law and granddaughter, and it runs from June 19 to November 3. 

And featuring in one of our previews for the very first time, the Petersfield Museum and Art Gallery. Why? From June 15 to October 5, they're celebrating Peggy Guggenheim, the great patron and collector who, you might be surprised to learn, lived near the Hampshire town in the 1930s, a decade before she moved to Venice after World War II. Peggy Guggenheim: Petersfield to Palazzo will display some of the work she collected by the likes of Henry Moore, Jean Arp and Max Ernst, on loan from the Guggenheim Collection in Venice and major British museums. 

Over in Dublin, the National Gallery of Ireland showcases the four leading Women Impressionists: Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt, Eva Gonzalès and Marie Bracquemond. Coming 150 years after the Impressionists first showed their works in Paris, this exhibition comprises around 60 works from public and private collections across Europe and the US. It's on from June 27 to October 6. 

Starry, starry night.... no, not the one from MoMA that Don McLean sang about in Vincent, but the other one, the picture of a starry night over the River Rhône from the Musée d’Orsay, is returning to Arles in the south of France for the first time since van Gogh painted it there 136 years ago. Van Gogh and the Stars is the title of an exhibition at the Fondation Vincent van Gogh from June 1 to September 8 with 165 works by more than 70 artists, including Edvard Munch, Georgia O'Keeffe and Anselm Kiefer, looking at the fascination of the night sky. Don't leave it till the last couple of weeks, though: The Starry Night goes back to Paris after the doors close on August 25! 

To Berlin now, where at the Neue Nationalgalerie you can see Andy Warhol: Velvet Rage and Beauty from June 9 to October 6. This exhibition aims for a different take on Warhol's work, away from the consumer products and celebrities, looking at his career-long search to visualise (mostly male) beauty and create images of his desires. There will be more than 300 works of all sorts, many of which, the curators say, are little known to a wider public. 

As the exhibition about Isabel Quintanilla closes, another 20th-century Spanish woman figurative painter gets a retrospective at the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid. Around 30 paintings from the 1920s to the 1940s by Rosario de Velasco will be on show along with drawings and illustrations. While some of her works are in major Spanish museums, others are from private collections, including some only recently rediscovered. June 18 to September 15, and then again from November to February at the Museo de Bellas Artes in Valencia.

Last chance to see....

You've got until June 9 to encounter the superb portraiture of Frans Hals -- along with Rembrandt and Vermeer one of the three greatest painters of the Dutch Golden Age -- at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. We saw the London version of this show at the National Gallery last year; and Hals moves on to the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin in mid-July.

You can discover some fantastic pictures by unfamiliar women artists in Maestras at the Arp Museum in Remagen on the River Rhine in western Germany until June 16. Sadly, the minimalist presentation means you don't learn much at all about the artists themselves, rather undermining the premise of the show, to make them better known. 

And the tide will finally go out on Impressionism and the Sea at the Musée des impressionnismes in Giverny on June 30. Enjoy Monet, Manet, Gauguin and more in one of our favourite exhibition spaces.   

Images

Alexandra Exter (1882-1949), Three Female Figures, 1909-10, National Art Museum of Ukraine, Kyiv
Hiroshi Yoshida (1876-1950), Kumoi Cherry Trees, 1926. Courtesy Fukuoka Art Museum
Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890), The Starry Night, Arles, 1888, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. © Musée d’Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/Patrice Schmidt

Rosario de Velasco (1904-1991), Adam and Eve, 1932, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid. © Rosario de Velasco, VEGAP, Madrid, 2024. Photo: © Archivo Fotográfico Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía
Claude Monet (1840-1926), Low Tide at Petites Dalles, 1884, Hasso Plattner Collection, Museum Barberini, Potsdam