Opening and Closing in July

A very eclectic mix of shows this month, and we're starting with an exhibition that's not art at all, but of vital interest to everyone. The Science Museum is investigating the Future of Food , looking at new advances in growing, making, cooking and eating it. On from July 24 to January 4, it's free, though you need to book. Oh, and you get to see this 3,500-year-old sourdough loaf..... At the Lowry in Salford, they're offering a double bill of Quentin Blake and Me & Modern Life: The LS Lowry Collection . The show about Blake, who's written or illustrated more than 500 books, looks aimed at a family audience, while the Lowry exhibition includes borrowed works, marking the Salford arts centre's 25th anniversary. On from July 19 to January 4, and entry is again free, though you need to book a timeslot. Another anniversary this year is the 250th of the birth of Jane Austen; among the exhibitions around the country is one in Winchester, the city where she died ...

Opening and Closing in July

A very eclectic mix of shows this month, and we're starting with an exhibition that's not art at all, but of vital interest to everyone. The Science Museum is investigating the Future of Food, looking at new advances in growing, making, cooking and eating it. On from July 24 to January 4, it's free, though you need to book. Oh, and you get to see this 3,500-year-old sourdough loaf.....

At the Lowry in Salford, they're offering a double bill of Quentin Blake and Me & Modern Life: The LS Lowry Collection. The show about Blake, who's written or illustrated more than 500 books, looks aimed at a family audience, while the Lowry exhibition includes borrowed works, marking the Salford arts centre's 25th anniversary. On from July 19 to January 4, and entry is again free, though you need to book a timeslot.

Another anniversary this year is the 250th of the birth of Jane Austen; among the exhibitions around the country is one in Winchester, the city where she died and is buried. It's taking a bit of an offbeat approach by going Beyond the Bonnets to look at working women in her novels and tracing the precarious lives of women in Georgian England. At the Arc in Winchester from July 26 to November 2. It then goes to the Willis Museum in Basingstoke later that month.

Opening at the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh on July 26 is Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty Years, celebrating the career of a contemporary British artist known for his use of natural materials. Featuring more than 200 works, including photographs, sculptures and installations, this show runs until November 2.

And a short walk across the city, something equally contemporary but rather more affordable for your home: a show of 180 fabrics created for IKEA over six decades. IKEA: Magical Patterns is on at Dovecot Studios from July 18 to January 17. Did you know there's a system to all those quirky IKEA product names? Textiles have women's names, as you can discover here. The Dovecot Cafe uses locally sourced ingredients, so we suspect those famous IKEA meatballs won't be on the menu.

In 1935, an awful lot of art in Germany was being dismissed by the Nazis as degenerate; in German-speaking Switzerland, though, the Kunstmuseum in Lucerne was marking its opening with a show that included some of the very latest art of the type banned across the border. And 90 years later, they're recreating the occasion at the same museum, looking back to a period of political, social and artistic upheaval. Kandinsky, Picasso, Miró et al: Back in Lucerne is on from July 5 to November 2.

And now we're taking you somewhere well off the beaten track: Museum Kunst der Westküste on the German island of Föhr in the North Sea. They've got a gorgeous-looking exhibition starting on July 6 called Midsummer! Atmospheric Landscapes of the North 1880-1920, showcasing around 70 works by the likes of Anna Ancher, Akseli Gallen-Kallela, Edvard Munch and Helene Schjerfbeck. Most are from the family art collection of German optical entrepreneur Günther Fielmann, who died last year, and have never been exhibited publicly. On till January 11.

Finally this month, it's the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Bordeaux, where you can experience Childhood through the Eyes of the Artist (1790-1850), an exhibition that brings together around 100 works from across France by Corot, Delacroix, Géricault, Ingres and many more lesser-known painters, sculptors and graphic artists. July 10 to November 3.

Last chance to see....

The excellent exhibition about how the advertising poster turned into an art form in late 19th-century France -- Art Is in the Street -- ends its run at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris on July 6. It's a wonderful slice of social history and a feast for the eyes.... just a bit too big to take in at one go.

Images

Ancient bread, found in the tomb of an Egyptian queen, c. 1500 BC. Image courtesy of Petrie Museum of Egyptian and Sudanese Archaeology, UCL; © Mary Hinkley 2025
Paul Cezanne (1839-1906), Boîte à lait et citron II, 1879-80, Sammlung Rosengart, Lucerne
Jeanne Elisabeth Chaudet-Husson (1767-1832), Enfant endormi dans un berceau sous la garde d’un chien courageux (Child Asleep in a Cradle Guarded by a Brave Dog), 1801, Musée du Louvre, Paris. © Musée du Louvre, RMN-GP; Photo: Adrien Didierjean

What's On in 2025

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...

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...

Caillebotte: This Is Modern Paris

You won't find a single work of art by Gustave Caillebotte in a British public collection. And yet he's one of the key figures in the Impressionist movement, whose 150th anniversary we're celebrating this year. But over in Paris, he's the subject of a big, big exhibition at the Musée d'Orsay; we jumped on the Eurostar to see it, and, even though Caillebotte: Painting Men was the most crowded show we'd been to in quite some time, we absolutely adored it. And let's start with perhaps the pièce de résistance. Even if you don't know Caillebotte at all, you may have seen this image before; there's something about it that encapsulates late 19th-century Paris, with its view of an intersection between the broad new streets pushed through by that radical city-planner, Baron Haussmann, lined by elegant new buildings. This was the modern city, the modern world. Paris Street; Rainy Day : a painting in which there's nothing really happening, and there...

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