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 ...

Let's kick off the New Year with something a bit out of the ordinary: Brasil! Brasil! The Birth of Modernism at London's Royal Academy. This show features more than 130 works by 10 key 20th-century Brazilian artists, and most of them have never been on show in the UK before, providing a chance to look at modern art in a way that breaks from the European and North American perspective we're so used to. On from January 28 to April 21.   There are more familiar names at Bath's Holburne Museum: Francis Bacon, Peter Blake, Gerhard Richter and Andy Warhol among them. Iconic: Portraiture from Bacon to Warhol  focuses on the middle of the 20th century when many artists began to use photographs as sources for their paintings. The exhibition runs from January 24 to May 5.  From January 22, the Louvre in Paris offers the chance to take  A New Look at Cimabue: At the Origins of Italian Painting . Cimabue, one of the most important artists of the 13th century, was among the...

It takes a split second these days to create an image, and how many millions are recorded daily on mobile phones, possibly never to be looked at again? You can see it all happening in the palatial surroundings of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, definitely one of those tick-off destinations on many travellers' bucket lists, where those in search of instant pictorial satisfaction throng the imposing statue-lined staircase for a selfie or pout for a photo in the café under the spectacular cupola. But we're not in Vienna for a quick fix, we're at the KHM to admire something more enduring in the shape of art produced almost 500 years ago by Rembrandt and his pupil Samuel van Hoogstraten that was intended to mislead your eyes into seeing the real in the unreal. Artistic deception is the story at the centre of  Rembrandt--Hoogstraten: Colour and Illusion , one of the most engrossing and best-staged exhibitions we've seen this year. And, somewhat surprisingly, a show wi...

The headline new exhibition in London in October is Francis Bacon: Human Presence at the National Portrait Gallery, which assembles more than 55 works to examine Bacon's far-from-traditional approach to portraiture from the 1950s onwards. Among the sitters: Lucian Freud. The show runs from October 10 to January 19.  Those in search of something less visceral might prefer to Discover Constable &  The Hay Wain  at the National Gallery. This is the latest in a series of relatively small free shows at the gallery looking at a single picture in depth; we've found them very enjoyable so far. Constable's painting is now seen as presenting a traditional view of the countryside; when it was made, though, it was regarded as rather radical. On from October 17 to February 2.   More than five years ago, we went to the Nunnery Gallery in Bow in east London to see an exhibition of paintings of the local area by Doreen Fletcher . Those modern cityscapes could be seen as fo...

October's another big month for new exhibitions, with Titian, Rembrandt and Goya among the artists on the agenda in mainland Europe. In London, though, the Royal Academy is staying British with a look at the final 12 years of the career of John Constable, from 1825 to 1837. Late Constable is characterised by expressive brushwork and features paintings and sketches of the British countryside and studies of the weather, in locations such as Hampstead Heath and Brighton seafront. On from October 30 to February 13.  At the National Gallery, Poussin and the Dance is intended to show the French painter in a new light, illustrating how he tackled the challenges of capturing movement and bodily expression. Running from October 9 to January 2, it includes not only the Wallace Collection's A Dance to the Music of Time  but also more than 20 paintings and drawings from public and private collections around Europe and the US. The show moves to the Getty Center in Los Angeles in Februar...

All human life is here -- and death too. The reaper is coming to get you. In Pieter Bruegel the Elder's Triumph of Death , there is no hope. From the king in the bottom left-hand corner, to the mother and child, the pilgrim, the soldiers, even the lovers on the bottom right: They're all doomed. A man dressed in red, his mouth agape, tries to draw his sword to fight back, but it looks to be stuck in its scabbard. Armies of skeletons are on the march. Resistance is useless. There's so much detail in Bruegel's apocalyptic vision in paint that you could spend a long time trying to take it all in. And there are a couple of dozen paintings on this scale in the Bruegel exhibition at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, as well as intriguing drawings and engravings -- the first ever comprehensive show about the greatest Netherlandish painter of the 16th century, so give yourself a few hours; this is not a show to be rushed. The Triumph of Death has travelled from Madr...