The Art Exhibitions Blog

Which exhibition are we most looking forward to this month? It has to be Frans Hals at the National Gallery in London, which starts on September 30. It's the first major retrospective of the great portraitist of the Dutch Golden Age in three decades, and it will assemble around 50 of his works, including a couple of his large-scale group portraits of militiamen from the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. A must-see, particularly if you missed the fantastic show focusing on Hals's male portraits at the Wallace Collection a couple of years back. All that swaggering loose -- or even louche -- brushwork is on display at the National Gallery until January 21, before transferring to the Rijksmuseum in February and then the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin in July.  Hals was originally from Antwerp, and it was in the Flemish port city that his close contemporary Peter Paul Rubens spent much of his life and career. The new exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery i...

Sometimes less is more, and conversely, more is quite often less. We'd been in  The Rossettis at Tate Britain for over an hour, when we realised with a sinking feeling that we weren't even half way through yet. This is a sprawling, confused, long hard slog of an exhibition, and in room 4 out of 9, we could already sense that many of our fellow visitors (and it was pretty packed in there) were flagging, overwhelmed by so much stuff.  There are essentially three of them in this show -- Christina the poet, her brother Dante Gabriel the painter-cum-poet, and his wife and muse Elizabeth/Lizzie (née Siddal), who also painted and drew, posed and composed, but died early. However, this was always going to be an exhibition focused on Gabriel, whose gorgeous paintings dominate the walls (once you get to them, which takes time). Most of Lizzie's artwork is really minuscule, and as for poetry.... well, presenting poetry is a bit challenging to the crowds flowing through a gallery.  ...

The Pre-Raphaelites -- their lives, their loves and their art -- have a lasting attraction, and The Rossettis at Tate Britain has got the blockbuster feel to it, with 150 paintings and drawings. It is, surprisingly, the first ever retrospective of poet and painter Dante Gabriel at the Tate, and the biggest show of his work in two decades. It's also the largest show in 30 years of art by his wife and model Lizzie Siddal and will in addition cover the life of Romantic poet Christina Rossetti and Dante's relationships with his muses Fanny Cornforth and Jane Morris. An immersive experience is promised, including spoken poetry. It's on from April 6 to September 24. There'll be some beautiful art to look at, even if we can't escape the feeling we've trodden similar ground a couple of times recently, here and there .  A very different experience will be on offer over at Tate Modern in the shape of Hilma af Klint & Piet Mondrian: Forms of Life . The Swede af Klint...

The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford is reviving Pre-Raphaelites: Drawings & Watercolours , a show that closed after just five weeks last year due to the Covid pandemic. On from July 15 to November 27, this exhibition features more than 100 works from the museum's own outstanding Pre-Raphaelite collection; Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Holman Hunt and Millais are the big names.  There are two new exhibitions coming to the Lightbox in Woking, a venue we always enjoy visiting. Starting on July 9, Eric Ravilious and Edward Bawden are the stars of a collaboration with the Fry Art Gallery in Saffron Walden that looks at the story of the artists' colony at Great Bardfield in Essex; more than 30 paintings and drawings will be on display.  The Ingram Collection & the Fry Art Gallery: 'Bawden, Ravilious and the Art of Great Bardfield'  runs until October 9. The second show, beginning on July 16, sets 20 paintings, prints and drawings of Venice and England by Canaletto alongside ...

The highest-profile opening in London this January? It might well be Francis Bacon: Man and Beast at the Royal Academy. Starting on January 29, this exhibition will focus on Bacon's fascination with animals, featuring pictures in which the boundaries between humans and animals are constantly blurred. Spanning his entire career, the show will include a trio of bullfight paintings never before exhibited together. If your New Year's resolution is to go vegetarian, this one may be a bit on the fleshy side. Until April 17.  For something perhaps a bit less unsettling, head to Room 1 at the National Gallery to see Gainsborough's Blue Boy . Thomas Gainsborough's full-length canvas of a child was exhibited at the National for three weeks in 1922 before sailing across the Atlantic to the Huntington Library in California. It's a painting that's long had a hold on the imagination; it's been frequently referenced in Hollywood movies, and now it's being loaned out b...

Rossetti's Portraits -- well, up to a point. There are some gorgeous paintings by Dante Gabriel Rossetti of his favourite sitters and his muses that are the star attractions of this show about the Pre-Raphaelite at the Holburne Museum in Bath.  But amid all the big hair and the pouting red lips, just how many really are portraits, giving you an insight into the characters of the women he's depicted? And how many are those idealised visions of enigmatic women Rossetti seemed to specialise in, those ladies of the town with the kiss of a snake that LS Lowry found so attractive.  For example, here's Alexa Wilding, one of Rossetti's most frequent models, though, for once, apparently not one of his love interests. She's posed as  Monna Vanna , the vain woman, a painting originally entitled Venus Veneta , representing the Venetian ideal of female beauty. Staring into the distance, resplendent in a billowing, ornate gown and fingering her fantastic fan and her coral neckl...

Pre-Raphaelite Sisters  doing it for themselves. That's the premise of the show at the National Portrait Gallery in London, an attempt to reclaim, to reassert the significance of the roles of women as models, wives, artists, muses in that most Victorian of art movements, one that's traditionally seen as being dominated by men with an abundance, nay, a profusion of facial hair. So a Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood to rival the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais? It's a neat conceit, isn't it, but it's not one that's really borne out by this rather uneven exhibition. Because some of the dozen women highlighted here were certainly quite impressive artists in their own right -- and there's a couple of surprise discoveries to be made as we go through -- but in some cases we're talking about women who were mainly active as models. And, err, muses. There's an apparently deliberate reluctance to tal...

LS Lowry's best-known pictures of grim northern townscapes and huddled masses of stick-like figures rushing from the mill or to the football ground make it hard to credit that he was a Pre-Raphaelite at heart. And yet Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Ford Madox Brown were Lowry's two favourite artists. Images of the Pre-Raphs' muses adorned the walls of his bedroom in his suburban home in Mottram on the outskirts of Manchester. He was president of the Rossetti Society. "I said to my father: 'I wish you'd buy me a Rossetti painting.' Now I've got about 12,'' Lowry said late in life. "I'm a Victorian all right, you know." Lowry and the Pre-Raphaelites , a free show at the Lowry in Salford, makes a stab at shedding more light on why these pictures meant so much to an artist whose own work was so very different. For us, it doesn't really succeed. Lowry was a very private man, and though we get to hear and read some of his own words...