The Art Exhibitions Blog

Some of Britain's most prestigious museums and art galleries will be open again within weeks, although the visitor experience looks set to be very different. In London, the National Gallery and the Tate have just announced their plans, and it's the National Gallery that will be back in action first, on July 8. There will be timed tickets, limited visitor numbers, initially shorter opening hours, specific routes through the galleries, more efficient air-conditioning, and they'd like you to wear a face covering. Titian: Love, Desire, Death , the show of the reunited Titian series depicting classical myths that was open for just three days before lockdown, is now back on, extended until January 17. And continuing until September 20 is the free show about Rembrandt's pupil  Nicolaes Maes , the painter whose most memorable contribution to the Dutch Golden Age is the witty sub-genre depicting mistresses eavesdropping on their servants. We saw it last year in The Hague. ...

August is normally a quiet month for new shows, but there are two exhibitions moving on this month to fresh locations that really deserve to be highlighted. At the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin, the doors open on August 10 on Sorolla: Spanish Master of Light . Joaquín Sorolla is best known for his impressionistic light-filled paintings of the Spanish coast, but as the previous version of this show at the National Gallery in London demonstrated, he produced masterpieces of social realism and portraiture too. The Dublin show looks to be smaller than London's, with 50 or so works, but the best of Sorolla's work is remarkable. Until November 3. And if you're visiting Madrid at any point, Sorolla's atmospheric house and studio, now the Museo Sorolla , has a great selection of his paintings and is well worth a visit. Our tip, though, is to go somewhere less scorching in August. Copenhagen, for example. Because the best exhibition we've seen all year has f...

In the paintings of Joaquín Sorolla, you can feel the searing heat and the glaring sun of a Spanish summer. A century ago, Sorolla was Spain's greatest living painter, an artist who won many prizes and made a lot of money too, particularly in the United States. He didn't go down quite so well in Britain when he was alive, but now he's back, in a big and apparently very popular show at the National Gallery in London: Sorolla: Spanish Master of Light . There are several sides to Sorolla's work: He's perhaps best known for his impressionistic views of the Spanish coast and the people on it, though social realism also makes up a large part of his oeuvre, and he was a skilled portraitist. Sorolla was born in Valencia in 1863 and repeatedly returned to the coastal city, drawn by the motifs it offered. Sun, sea and sand are the ingredients of some of Sorolla's most striking paintings, exemplified by this 1909 snapshot (we're into the age of the Kodak camera h...

There's an impressive range of new art shows starting in both London and Paris in March. So before cross-Channel traffic grinds to a juddering halt.... The rediscovery of Greek and Roman art in the 15th and 16th centuries saw artists north and south of the Alps put the human body at the forefront of their painting and sculpture. That's the theme of The Renaissance Nude  from March 3 to June 2 at the Royal Academy in London. Titian, Raphael, Michelangelo, Leonardo, Bronzino, Dürer and Cranach are among those represented in an exhibition of around 90 works. Over at Tate Britain, the largest assembly of Vincent van Gogh's paintings in the UK for nearly a decade -- 45 of them -- is the big selling point of Van Gogh and Britain . The show   explores how he was inspired by British art and culture -- Constable, Millais and Dickens -- and in turn inspired British artists like Francis Bacon and David Bomberg. March 27 to August 11, with standard tickets costing £22, reflecti...

A couple of big anniversaries dominate the 2019 exhibition calendar: It's 500 years since Leonardo da Vinci's death, and 350 since Rembrandt's. Van Gogh is celebrated in two major shows, while Bridget Riley and Antony Gormley are among the leading contemporary artists in focus. Here's a look at some of the standout dates for the diary in 2019, in more or less chronological order. January The first big show of the New Year comes at Tate Modern in London, with Pierre Bonnard: The Colour of Memory opening on January 23. The Tate is promising 100 of Bonnard's greatest works from museums and private collections around the world. Until May 6. To mark Rembrandt Year in the Netherlands, the Mauritshuis in The Hague is putting on show all of the 18 paintings in its collection that are by Rembrandt or have been attributed to him. January 31 to September 15. February Leonardo da Vinci: A Life in Drawing will see drawings by Leonardo in the Royal Collection exhibite...