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Very Rich Hours in Chantilly

It is a once-in-a-lifetime experience: the chance to see one of the greatest -- and most fragile -- works of European art before your very eyes. The illustrated manuscript known as the  Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry contains images that have shaped our view of the late Middle Ages, but it's normally kept under lock and key at the Château de Chantilly, north of Paris. It's only been exhibited twice in the past century. Now newly restored, the glowing pages of  Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry are on show to the public for just a few months. "Approche, approche," the Duke of Berry's usher tells the visitors to the great man's table for the feast that will mark the start of the New Year. It's also your invitation to examine closely the illustration for January, one of the 12 months from the calendar in this Book of Hours -- a collection of prayers and other religious texts -- that form the centrepiece of this exhibition in Chantilly.  It's su...
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Opening and Closing in January

Let's kick off the New Year with something a bit out of the ordinary: Brasil! Brasil! The Birth of Modernism at London's Royal Academy. This show features more than 130 works by 10 key 20th-century Brazilian artists, and most of them have never been on show in the UK before, providing a chance to look at modern art in a way that breaks from the European and North American perspective we're so used to. On from January 28 to April 21.  
There are more familiar names at Bath's Holburne Museum: Francis Bacon, Peter Blake, Gerhard Richter and Andy Warhol among them. Iconic: Portraiture from Bacon to Warhol focuses on the middle of the 20th century when many artists began to use photographs as sources for their paintings. The exhibition runs from January 24 to May 5. 

From January 22, the Louvre in Paris offers the chance to take A New Look at Cimabue: At the Origins of Italian Painting. Cimabue, one of the most important artists of the 13th century, was among the first to introduce a sense of naturalism into their art, and this show, with some 40 works, features newly acquired and recently restored pictures. It's on until May 12. 

Meanwhile, the Pompidou Centre is dedicating a major retrospective to Suzanne Valadon (1865-1938). Close to 200 works will be on show from January 15 to May 26 exploring the career of an artist who started out as a model in Montmartre before developing a very personal style of painting focused on the nude. 

Two close contemporaries of Valadon -- though very different to her in their output -- are on show at Singer Laren, near Hilversum in the Netherlands. The work of the neo-Impressionists Henri Martin & Henri Le Sidaner seems to exude an air of calm and other-worldliness. The exhibition runs from January 22 to May 11. 
And now an intriguing Dutch artist you may never have heard of: Jan Mankes (1889-1920). Another creator of rather dreamlike pictures, but the content of these appears much more in line with Symbolism. Jan Mankes: Expressions of Spiritual Life is on at Museum Belvédère in Heerenveen, Friesland, close to where Mankes lived from 1909 to 1915, and the other half of the exhibition is being held at Museum Arnhem, in the eastern Netherlands. From January 25 to June 22 at both venues. 

Even before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, works from the Museum of Western and Eastern Art in the port city of Odessa had been moved to safety in Berlin. Now 60 paintings are going on show at the Gemäldegalerie from January 24 to June 22, alongside 25 complementary pieces from the Berlin museum's own collection. Frans Hals is the standout name in From Odessa to Berlin: European Art of the 16th to 19th Century. 

You may have come across art from the Petit Palais in Geneva featured in exhibitions from time to time. The collection hasn't been on permanent display for a quarter of a century, but from January 24 to June 1 there's a chance to see Treasures of the Petit Palais Geneva not too far away from home at the Hermitage in Lausanne. Among the artists featured are Valadon, Tamara de Lempicka, Maximilien Luce and Gustave Caillebotte. 

The Fondation Beyeler, just outside Basel, has Northern Lights, an exhibition of around 70 landscape paintings created between 1880 and 1930 by artists from Scandinavia and Canada, with the regions' endless forests a key inspiration. On from January 26 to May 25, the show includes Tom Thomson, Emily Carr, Edvard Munch, Harald Sohlberg, Hilma af Klint and Akseli Gallen-Kallela. 
Could you name a painter from Slovenia? We certainly couldn't. But you can broaden your art education with Ivana Kobilca, Ivan Grohar, Matija Jama and others in The World in Colours: Slovenian Painting 1848-1918 at the Belvedere in Vienna from January 30 to May 25. At the time, Slovenia was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but as in many other parts of that sprawling territory, nationalist feelings were rising. This show is a co-production with the National Gallery in Ljubljana. 

Our final highlight this month takes us to the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, on the coast north of Copenhagen. From January 30 to June 1, you'll be able to explore the career of Alexej Jawlensky (1864-1941). Born in Russia, Jawlensky and his partner Marianne von Werefkin later moved to Bavaria, where he developed his Expressionist style, influenced by Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc.    

Last chance to see....

January 12 is the last day for Rembrandt--Hoogstraten: Colour and Illusion at Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum, an excellent exhibition about the great Dutch master and his pupil Samuel van Hoogstraten, a specialist in trompe l'oeil. Van Hoogstraten's work can then be seen at the Rembrandt House in Amsterdam from February 1 under the title of The Illusionist. 
Also closing on January 12 at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris is the retrospective of the work of Norwegian painter Harriet Backer (1845-1932). There's another chance to see the show at Kode in Bergen starting on February 20; it runs until August. 

The huge, somewhat overwhelming Surrealism exhibition at the Pompidou Centre in Paris ends on January 13. The show will be restaged -- in different, locally adapted versions -- at the Mapfre Foundation in Madrid starting on February 6 and then later in the year at the Kunsthalle in Hamburg and at Philadelphia Museum of Art. 

You can still get tickets for Gustave Caillebotte: Painting Men at the Musée d'Orsay, which ends on January 19. But online timeslots have sold out, so you'd have to buy a ticket on the door and queue. It's worth it; it's one of the best exhibitions we've seen in the past year. If you're in the US, you can see the show at the Getty Center in Los Angeles from February 25 and then at the Art Institute of Chicago from late June. 

Another of our top exhibitions of 2024 ends the same day, January 19 -- Van Gogh: Poets & Lovers at the National Gallery in London, which lived up to the advance hype (and we tend to be pretty sceptical). You can still get in to see the show by becoming a member of the gallery (£112 for an individual and a guest for a year, which is precisely the cost of two one-off tickets for the Harry Potter studio tour).
And just looking ahead, February 2 is the last day to see the stunning Finnish landscapes and sometimes mystifying Finnish mythological paintings of Akseli Gallen-Kallela at the Belvedere in Vienna. 

Images

Tarsila do Amaral (1886-1973), Lake, 1928, Collection of Hecilda and Sérgio Fadel. Photo: Jaime Acioli. ©️ Tarsila do Amaral S/A
Henri Le Sidaner (1862-1939), La Table bleue, Gerberoy, 1923, Singer Laren
Hilma af Klint (1862-1944), Sunrise (Preworks for Group III), 1907, By courtesy of the Hilma af Klint Foundation
Samuel van Hoogstraten (1627-1678), Old Man at a Window, 1653, Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna, Picture Gallery. © KHM-Museumsverband
Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890), The Stevedores, 1888, Private collection


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