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...

The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford is reviving Pre-Raphaelites: Drawings & Watercolours , a show that closed after just five weeks last year due to the Covid pandemic. On from July 15 to November 27, this exhibition features more than 100 works from the museum's own outstanding Pre-Raphaelite collection; Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Holman Hunt and Millais are the big names.  There are two new exhibitions coming to the Lightbox in Woking, a venue we always enjoy visiting. Starting on July 9, Eric Ravilious and Edward Bawden are the stars of a collaboration with the Fry Art Gallery in Saffron Walden that looks at the story of the artists' colony at Great Bardfield in Essex; more than 30 paintings and drawings will be on display.  The Ingram Collection & the Fry Art Gallery: 'Bawden, Ravilious and the Art of Great Bardfield'  runs until October 9. The second show, beginning on July 16, sets 20 paintings, prints and drawings of Venice and England by Canaletto alongside ...

August is normally a thin month for new exhibitions, but as more and more museums and galleries open up again to the public, August 2020 will be rather busier than normal. In London, the Royal Academy gives a new lease of life to one show that was interrupted by the coronavirus lockdown and celebrates the delayed start of another. The interrupted show looks at  Léon Spilliaert , an artist whose finest work stems from his years at home in Ostend at the start of the 20th century, wandering the Belgian port city at night, haunted by insomnia and stomach troubles. It was the last exhibition we reviewed before lockdown, and Spilliaert really couldn't be a better symbol for social distancing, pictured alone in his studio or capturing the eeriness of deserted streets or beaches. August 5 to September 20. Two days after the Spilliaert show restarts, the RA welcomes Gauguin and the Impressionists: Masterpieces from the Ordrupgaard Collection in Denmark, which is currently undergoing...

British Baroque: Power and Illusion is the title of the new exhibition at Tate Britain in London, devoted to the period between the restoration of Charles II to the throne in 1660 and the death of Queen Anne in 1714 and focusing on the magnificence of the art and architecture of the time -- by names such as Peter Lely, Godfrey Kneller and James Thornhill -- to convey status and influence. Many works, some from stately homes, will be on public display for the first time in this show running from February 4 to April 19. And artworks from one very stately home, Woburn Abbey , which is being refurbished, will be going on show for almost a year at the Queen's House in Greenwich. Van Dyck, Gainsborough, Reynolds and Canaletto are all represented in Woburn Treasures at the Queen's House , which runs from February 13 to January 17, 2021. Also at the Queen's House, from February 13 to August 31, the three versions of the Armada portrait of Elizabeth I, one of them from Woburn, w...

So, fancy popping out for a drink at the caupona this evening? Or shall we stay in instead? Ask the neighbours round for a nice krater of Falernian wine, and get the slaves to whip up some of your favourite dishes? Glires for starters.... In Last Supper in Pompeii , at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, we find out how food and drink wasn't just a Roman love affair, it was a matter of life and death, and the afterlife too. Because, however advanced and sophisticated the Romans may have been in many respects, life expectancy was still short, and the grim reaper could be along to fetch you off in the morning. That's why this grinning skeleton embellished a mosaic floor panel in the dining room of a house in Pompeii, the Roman city that exemplifies the here-today-gone-tomorrow nature of life, buried as it was by volcanic ash when Mount Vesuvius exploded in 79 AD. But even as death walks towards you as you recline on your couch, he's got a wine jug in each hand.... So carpe...

Olafur Eliasson is one of the biggest names in contemporary art, and Tate Modern in London is staging the most comprehensive British exhibition of the Icelander's work to date starting on July 11. Of the more than 30 works on show, from paintings and sculptures to large-scale installations, only one has been seen in the UK before. Olafur Eliasson: In Real Life runs until January 5. Over at the Royal Academy, it's time to welcome another Nordic artist, but one you may never have heard of. The RA describes Helene Schjerfbeck  (1862-1946) as one of Finland's best-kept secrets, and the show will trace a career that moved from early naturalism to highly abstracted late self-portraits. It's the first show about her in Britain and runs from July 20 to October 27. The Moon is a popular exhibition subject this year, the 50th anniversary of the first manned landing on Earth's nearest neighbour. The new show at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich aims to chart th...

It must have been a disorienting era, the early 20th century in America, one of rapid change amid the onward march of the skyscraper and the automobile. That sense comes over clearly and strongly in America's Cool Modernism at the Ashmolean in Oxford. Here is art that is largely devoid of people, highlighting the strange new shapes of the technological revolution and the dislocation of the individual in a confusing new world. You'll discover names new to a European audience in a fascinating line-up of paintings, prints and photographs from the Met in New York and other American collections. Many of the works have never crossed the Atlantic. The familiar sunflower of the Impressionists takes on a new more abstracted form as we enter the show with Le Tournesol (The Sunflower) by Edward Steichen, from about 1920. It's a rare painting by an artist who destroyed most of his others and leaves you wondering what striking images he committed to canvas are lost. Plants and ...