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...

Vincent van Gogh wasn't an easy man to get along with.  "Few could put up with him and his fanatic fierceness," recalled Anthon van Rappard, who became friends and started painting with him in 1880 in Brussels. "Our relations lasted five years, and if I hadn't stayed calm during his outbursts, they wouldn't have endured so long."  Van Gogh's Inner Circle , an exhibition at the Noordbrabants Museum in Den Bosch in the southern Netherlands, takes us through a history of Vincent's relationships -- blazing rows and simmering confrontations with his family and with fellow artists, as well as his deepest, most durable friendship with his younger brother Theo.  It's a fascinating topic, but a rather underwhelming show. There are a lot of letters in glass cases, which is perhaps not surprising in an exhibition about friendships and working partnerships. But ultimately, particularly when we get to the late blossoming of van Gogh's car...

What seems to be the hottest exhibition ticket in the Netherlands at the moment? Rembrandt, Van Gogh? No, it's Design of the Third Reich  at the Design Museum in Den Bosch. Surprised? Don't be. It's superbly done, well explained and really engrossing.  The Nazis didn't achieve power in Germany without making themselves and their message attractive to millions of people, and the design of their emblems, electoral posters, the very styling of Adolf Hitler contributed to that. And those efforts didn't stop once they'd taken over. This show doesn't make any attempt to downplay the evils of Nazism, the horrors of the concentration camps and of World War II -- this is, after all, the 75th anniversary of the liberation of parts of the southern Netherlands, including Den Bosch, from German occupation -- but the aim is to try and understand the role design played in it all -- even if that role wasn't always a very coherent one.  The decision to stage thi...

From The Angel of the North to Another Place , Antony Gormley 's sculptures provide some fantastic open-air art experiences. How about indoors, though? We'll find out when he takes over the main galleries at the Royal Academy in London from September 21 to December 3. Over at Tate Britain, the biggest exhibition in 20 years of the works of William Blake  opens on September 11. The show is designed to offer visitors the chance to sense how Blake's radical and rebellious art must have come across when first shown two centuries ago. Until February 2. It's curtain up at the Foundling Museum on September 20 on Two Last Nights! Show Business in Georgian Britain , an exhibition looking at how similar, and how different, theatre-going was then and now. Hogarth is, of course, involved. The fat lady sings on January 5. And for those of us in south-east England, there's a chance to get a bit better acquainted with the Fauvist-influenced post-Impressionism of the 192...