The Art Exhibitions Blog

Let's start off this month with Hockney and Piero: A Longer Look at the National Gallery in London. This free one-room show, running from August 8, brings together two David Hockney paintings with a picture from the gallery, Piero della Francesca's The Baptism of Christ , that is depicted in both works. On until October 27. The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford's new exhibition is Money Talks: Art, Society & Power , starting on August 9. This show aims to look at art on currency, and currency in art, bringing together notes and coins from history as well as work by artists from Rembrandt to Andy Warhol and Grayson Perry. It runs until January 5.  Starting on August 24 is the last of the major exhibitions around Germany marking the 250th anniversary of the birth of Caspar David Friedrich . This one is on at the Albertinum and the Royal Palace in Dresden, where Friedrich lived and worked for more than 40 years. Caspar David Friedrich: Where It All Started is on until January 5...

It might be the anniversary year of the French Impressionists , but Tate Modern on London's South Bank has a different agenda, starting on April 25; they're taking a step on in time to explore the world of the avant-garde German  Expressionists: Kandinsky, Münter and the Blue Rider . The Tate has brought together more than 130 works from the likes of Wassily Kandinsky, Marianne von Werefkin, Franz Marc and Gabriele Münter, drawing to a large extent on the holdings of the Lenbachhaus in Munich. The show is on until October 20.  At the National Gallery, a free display from April 18 offers the chance to see The Last Caravaggio . The dramatically lit  Martyrdom of St Ursula  was painted in Naples in 1610, the year Caravaggio died in mysterious circumstances. Coming to London for the first time in 20 years, it'll be on show until July 21.  The Wallace Collection explores the life and times of Ranjit Singh (1780-1839), the first Maharaja of the Sikh Empire in Punjab,...

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...

Christmas is coming, and so maybe your thoughts are set on one of those German Christmas markets, your chilled hands warmed by a glass of mulled wine. Head to Hamburg, and you can take in a top-class exhibition as well.  Caspar David Friedrich: Art for a New Age  starts at the Kunsthalle on December 15, marking the 250th anniversary of the birth of the leading German Romantic painter, a major retrospective with more than 60 paintings looking at the new relationship between man and nature that Friedrich explored at the start of the 19th century. It's on until April 1. We're big Friedrich fans, and we've already enjoyed one exhibition of his work this year, in Schweinfurt in northern Bavaria.  But let's head back to London, stopping in first at the National Gallery for the first-ever exhibition dedicated to a neglected 15th-century Florentine painter. That's Francesco Pesellino: A Renaissance Master Revealed in a free show from December 7 to March 10. Pesellino work...

It's in the reign of King Henry VIII that English history seems to come to life, to become truly accessible. And part of that is down to the portraits of the royal family and the court by the German artist Hans Holbein the Younger, which retain an uncanny immediacy five centuries on. Holbein at the Tudor Court at the Queen's Gallery in London will display the largest group of Holbein's works from the Royal Collection in more than 30 years, including over 40 of his sublime portrait drawings, of sitters such as Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour and Thomas More. It's on from November 10 until April 14. More works on paper at the Royal Academy, but from well over 300 years later: Degas, Cezanne, Morisot , van Gogh, Monet and Toulouse-Lautrec are all represented in Impressionists on Paper , which assembles 77 exhibits to show how the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists transformed art through other media as well as painting. This one runs from November 25 to March 10. November ...

With the summer holidays in full swing, August is almost inevitably the quietest month of the year for new art shows, but we do have to highlight one absolutely superb exhibition that's opening, as well as another stunning show that's coming to an end. It's the 250th anniversary in 2024 of the birth of the great German Romantic landscape painter Caspar David Friedrich, and the next in a series of commemorative retrospectives gets under way at the Kunst Museum in the Swiss city of Winterthur on August 26. Caspar David Friedrich and the Harbingers of Romance  features some of the artist's most iconic pictures, including the Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog and Chalk Cliffs on Rügen , as well as taking a look at the landscape painters who went before him, such as Jacob van Ruisdael and Claude Lorrain. We got to see this show in Schweinfurt in northern Bavaria in the spring and absolutely lapped it up. It's on in Winterthur until November 19.   You only have until August...

He's the almost exact contemporary of JMW Turner and John Constable, and, like them, he's renowned for his atmospheric landscapes, but Caspar David Friedrich is a very different painter. One of the greatest artists of the Romantic movement, and one of the greatest from the German-speaking world, he's being celebrated in a series of exhibitions across Germany and beyond to mark the 250th anniversary of his birth next year.  We thought we should make an early start, and so we headed for Schweinfurt in northern Bavaria, where the Museum Georg Schäfer is hosting Caspar David Friedrich and the Harbingers of the Romantic . And before we go further, we have to tell you that it's a fantastic show -- one of the best we've been to over the past 12 months -- with some of Friedrich's finest pictures, beautifully presented.  Now Friedrich isn't that familiar to a British audience -- there's just one painting in London's National Gallery -- but in Germany he'...

What are the highlights of the exhibition calendar in Europe in 2023? How about the biggest Vermeer show ever? A Frans Hals blockbuster? Or a couple of exhibitions to mark the 250th birthday (in 2024) of the great German Romantic, Caspar David Friedrich? There's quite a bit of Klimt and Van Gogh, too. Here are some of our picks for the year ahead, in more or less chronological order.  January Opening the year at London's Royal Academy is the opportunity to experience some of the highlights of the most extensive collection of Spanish art outside Spain, from the Hispanic Society of America in New York. On show will be paintings by El Greco, Velázquez and Goya, as well as Joaquín Sorolla , along with much else besides.  Spain and the Hispanic World: Treasures from the Hispanic Society Museum & Library runs from January 21 to April 10.  There's a new venue opening in London on January 25: The Lightroom in King's Cross, and until April 23 it's showing David Hockney...