The Art Exhibitions Blog

Got any plans for the first month of 2021? Zoom call? Vaccination? An exhibition? Well, here's a few that are scheduled to open, if the authorities allow.  London's first big-name show of the year is at the Royal Academy. Francis Bacon: Man and Beast  looks at how the boundaries between humans and animals are so often distorted in Bacon's violent pictures. Bacon was fascinated by the subject of animal movement throughout his career. This exhibition is scheduled from January 30 to April 18.  The previous lockdown meant the curtain failed to go up in November on  Noël Coward: Art & Style  at the Guildhall Art Gallery, but the show is now slated to begin its run on January 14. The exhibition, including previously undisplayed material, is being staged to commemorate the centenary of Coward's West End debut as a 19-year-old playwright. The writer of  Brief Encounter  and  Mad Dogs and Englishmen  had a huge impact on fashion and culture in the...

There's been a recent flurry of exhibitions in London and elsewhere about the Russian revolution and Soviet art and design, but Russian art before 1900 isn't very well known in the West. So we seized the opportunity on a trip to Oslo this month to take in The Swan Princess at the Munch Museum, a show devoted to Russian art from 1880 to 1910 and mostly drawn from the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. It was a period when Nordic artists were looking to the past, to rural culture and to traditional myths and legends for inspiration. The Russians were doing something similar, many of them working from the artists' colony at Abramtsevo near Moscow. This show takes its title from one of the most famous artworks of the period. The Swan Princess by Mikhail Vrubel is drawn from a story by Pushkin, which was turned into an opera by Rimsky-Korsakov, and here is the swan transforming magically into a beautiful princess. It's a swirl of whites and greys with highlights in pink, to...