The Art Exhibitions Blog

Which Japanese artist had the greatest influence on the West at the end of the 19th century? Perhaps not so much Katsushika Hokusai , despite The Great Wave ; maybe more Utagawa Hiroshige, four decades younger and the last great exponent of the ukiyo-e tradition, with his stunningly framed landscapes. From May 1, you have the chance at the British Museum in London to experience Horoshige's world, which ended just as Japan started to open up to the outside. Featuring a large body of work from a major US collection,  Hiroshige: Artist of the Open Road  is on until September 7. And also at the British Museum, a second new exhibition explores the origins of Hindu, Jain and Buddhist sacred art, going back at least 2,000 years. More than 180 objects from the museum's collection as well as items on loan will be on display.  Ancient India: Living Traditions  runs from May 22 to October 19.  If you enjoyed the colour and swagger of the John Singer Sargent show at Tate ...

London's Courtauld Gallery is our first stop this month, for Goya to Impressionism: Masterpieces from the Oskar Reinhart Collection in the Swiss city of Winterthur. Cezanne, Manet, Monet, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec and van Gogh are among the artists featured in this show, which is taking place because the villa Am Römerholz, where the collection is usually housed, is being renovated this year. This exhibition is on from February 14 to May 26.  Think of Chelsea, and you may think of the annual flower show. The Saatchi Gallery, right on the King's Road, is picking up on that theme, playing host to some 500 artworks and objects in what looks to be a somewhat overwhelming exhibition entitled Flowers -- Flora in Contemporary Art & Culture . Dozens of artists are listed as being featured -- Pedro Almodóvar, Elizabeth Blackadder, Michael Craig-Martin and Damien Hirst, to name just a handful. It's on from February 12 until May 5. And with a younger audience in mind, Young V...

There are a tremendous number of exhibitions opening this month, starting in London with Paul Cezanne at Tate Modern. Cezanne's painting revolutionised art at the end of the 19th century, and the Tate is promising us a "once-in-a-generation" show, the first big retrospective in the UK for more than 25 years, with around 80 works, more than 20 of them never before seen in Britain. They include The Basket of Apples from the Chicago Institute of Art, where the previous version of this show earned rave reviews. Cezanne is on in London from October 5 to March 12.  It's certainly not once in a generation for an exhibition about Lucian Freud, but it is the 100th anniversary of his birth this year, and his seven-decade career is surveyed at the National Gallery. Lucian Freud: New Perspectives will have more than 60 paintings, from early, intimate works to his late monumental fleshy nudes. It runs from October 1 to January 22, before heading to the Thyssen-Bornemisza muse...

It's really drawing the crowds, fully sold out for the next few weeks:  Van Gogh Self-Portraits  at the Courtauld Gallery in London. Van Gogh exhibitions aren't exactly thin on the ground, so is this one worth booking for? The answer is yes, very much so, because it assembles in one place for the first time almost half of his self-portraits, providing an exceptional opportunity to trace the development of Vincent's style over his short career on the basis of a single motif.  There are 15 painted self-portraits on view; one is from the Courtauld itself, with four from the US and the rest from continental Europe. So for most of us, it's a chance to see paintings that you're possibly only vaguely familiar with, such as this one from Chicago, made in Paris in spring 1887. It's an attempt by van Gogh to put into practice the new pointillist technique developed by Georges Seurat.  Instead of rigorously following Seurat's use of dots of pure colour, though, van Gog...

London's Courtauld Gallery has just reopened after renovation, and its first big exhibition,  Van Gogh: Self-Portraits ,   starts on February 3. This show -- the first to cover the full range of Vincent van Gogh's self-portraiture -- will bring together around half those he created over his short career: 16 of them, from his time in Paris in 1886 to his stay in the asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in September 1889. It runs until May 8. At Tate Modern they're tackling another popular subject, surrealism, in the shape of  Surrealism beyond Borders , which starts on February 24. The Tate says previous stories of surrealism have focused on Paris in the 20s -- not in our exhibition-going experience -- and that this one will rewrite the history of the genre, reaching across 50 years and looking at art in centres from Buenos Aires to Seoul. This show comes from the Met in New York; the New Yorker called it "deliriously entertaining", though the Wall Street Journal sai...

We're on the cusp of 2022, but the New Year has a 2021 ring to it as some galleries play catch-up, putting on Covid-cancelled exhibitions that we had already highlighted as this year's ones to look forward to. And a couple of shows mentioned below were also on the schedule for 2020. This round-up of some of what's caught our eye among the displays planned by museums and galleries around Europe for the next 12 months may not be definitive, but it is in chronological order as we publish. Watch out for our monthly What's On for precise dates nearer the time. Here goes, with fingers crossed now that museums in various countries are closed again....   February The Courtauld Gallery in London has just reopened after renovation, and its first big exhibition since then starts on February 3: Van Gogh Self-Portraits . It will bring together more than 15 pictures, around half of Vincent van Gogh's total output of self-portraits across his career, and is the first devoted to hi...

Manet, Renoir, Van Gogh: Names now so mainstream that it's hard to comprehend how challenging their art was a century and more ago. One man and his deep pockets did perhaps more than anyone else to bring their work to Britain: Samuel Courtauld. His vision is being celebrated in the hugely enjoyable  Courtauld Impressionists  exhibition at London's National Gallery. Courtauld was a textile manufacturer who in the early part of the 20th century not only built up his own impressive collection of modern French art (subsequently forming the  gallery  that bears his name) but also helped fund and acquire similar works for the nation. With the Courtauld on the Strand closed for refurbishment for the next two years, there's a rare chance to admire both sets of paintings hung side by side in the National Gallery, including some of the most recognisable images in art history, revealing how much Britain is indebted to Courtauld's daring taste for the avant-garde. Cour...