The Art Exhibitions Blog

A lot of new shows to tell you about this month as the summer holidays end and autumn arrives, all across Europe, from medieval to digital. The big event at the National Gallery in London is  Radical Harmony: Helene Kröller-Müller's Neo-Impressionists , running from September 13 to February 8. Kröller-Müller was a major early collector of work by the likes of Signac, Seurat, van Gogh and van Rysselberghe, and the bulk of the exhibits here come from the museum she opened in 1938 in the eastern Netherlands.    The most fashionable queen in history? That'll be Marie Antoinette, according to the Victoria & Albert Museum. And from September 20 to March 22, you can see Marie Antoinette Style  at the V&A, exploring how she became a fashion icon whose influence has lasted for more than two centuries -- down to Dior, Chanel and Manolo Blahnik. The exhibition will have more than 250 objects, some of which have never been seen before outside Versailles.  There are ...

When the Louvre put on a huge retrospective of the genre of still life in 2022-23, there were only five works by British artists on show out of a total of nearly 170. Brits don't do still life? Wrong, as shown in  The Shape of Things: Still Life in Britain at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, with some 140 artworks. Some are beautiful, some are arresting, some are utterly surprising; one or two are downright weird. Boring? Not these still lifes.  The show starts off traditionally enough, with paintings from the 17th and 18th centuries, some the work of immigrant artists from the Low Countries, but some home-grown: Right here in Chichester, the three Smith Brothers were among the earliest English artists to specialise in still lifes, and here you can see the work of the eldest, William, with a choice array of fruit , and of George, with as English a theme as you could get, a joint of beef .  The second room takes us into the start of the 20th century, where the e...