The Art Exhibitions Blog

Pan-European art superstar Angelica Kauffman comes to the Royal Academy in London on March 1. Feted in London, Venice and Rome in the late 18th century, and indeed a founding member of the RA, she was one of the few women to smash through the glass ceiling of the male-dominated art world. Known above all for her celebrity portraits, she also created history paintings with a female slant. Kauffman was originally due a retrospective at the RA in 2020 before Covid struck, and we saw that show at the Kunstpalast in Dusseldorf. Her story is a fascinating one though, to be frank, we found the history more intriguing than some of her art. You can see Kauffman at the RA until June 30.   Two more women at Charleston in Lewes, but a very different tale.  Dorothy Hepworth and Patricia Preece: An Untold Story  from March 27 to September 8 relates how, over decades, the couple fooled the art world: The shy Hepworth created widely praised paintings that she signed not in he...

In 2024, we'll be marking the 150th anniversary of the first Impressionist exhibition and the 100th anniversary of the Surrealist Manifesto. There'll be lots more shows focused on women artists. It's 250 years since the birth of the great German Romantic, Caspar David Friedrich, and Roy Lichtenstein was born 100 years ago. We've picked out some of the exhibitions coming up over the next 12 months that have caught our eye, and here they are, in more or less chronological order.  February Let's start at Ordrupgaard on the outskirts of Copenhagen with Impressionism and Its Overlooked Women , described by the gallery as a "magnificent exhibition featuring works from across the world". The show focuses on five female artists, including Berthe Morisot , Mary Cassatt and Eva Gonzalès , as well as some of the models who featured in the most iconic Impressionist paintings. The exhibition is on in Denmark from February 9 to May 20, after which it transfers to the Na...

It turns out that the free exhibition at the National Gallery in London offering you the chance to Discover Manet & Eva Gonzalès provides you with the opportunity to discover a whole lot more besides; there are portraits and self-portraits going back to the late 18th century in a display that puts women artists and the challenges they faced at the forefront. Eva Gonzalès was Edouard Manet's only formal pupil, and his fairly monumental portrait of her, nearly 2 metres high, is a rather strange picture at first sight. She's working on an already framed painting; she seems to be sitting, awkwardly posed, rather too far away from the canvas, the floor is carpeted, and she's wearing a most unsuitable snowy white dress; you wouldn't want to get any paint on her clothes or the carpet. It wasn't an easy painting for Manet to get right; there were apparently numerous sittings and a lot of reworking. You might assume that the elegantly clad young woman dabbing at a pictu...

In the late 18th century, Angelica Kauffman was famous throughout Europe, one of the leading international painters of the day. A success in London, Venice and Rome, she attracted commissions from Catherine the Great, the Emperor of Austria and the Pope. She was a close friend of Goethe, a founding member of Britain's Royal Academy. When she died in 1807, her lavish funeral in Rome drew enormous crowds. A far from ordinary life, then. And for an 18th-century woman in the male-dominated world of art, an utterly extraordinary one. She achieved equal pay, got women wearing trousers, drew male nudes and even had a pre-nup. It's a story that's arrestingly told in  Angelica Kauffman: Artist, Superwoman, Influencer , a fine exhibition now on at the Kunstpalast in Dusseldorf that will be heading to London, and naturally the  Royal Academy , this summer. Kauffman was born in Chur in eastern Switzerland in 1741 and was a child prodigy, not just as a painter but also as a singer...

In 2019 it was all Leonardo and Rembrandt. In 2020 it's the 500th anniversary of the death of Raphael, so he's one of the really big names on the exhibition calendar for the new year, along with Jan van Eyck. Here's a look at some of the key shows across Britain and Europe for your diary, in more or less chronological order.  January Edward Hopper 's landscapes and cityscapes are at the fore of an exhibition at the Fondation Beyeler near Basel starting on January 26. It's organised in conjunction with the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, which has the largest collection of Hopper's often enigmatic, mysterious works. Until May 17. The Kunstpalast in Dusseldorf is presenting a big show, running from January 30 to May 24, devoted to Angelica Kauffman , a rare exception in being a successful and respected woman artist in the late 18th century. The Swiss-born artist was one of only two women founder members of the Royal Academy in London, where th...