The Art Exhibitions Blog

There's so much Surrealist art in the sprawling  Surrealism  show at the Centre Pompidou in Paris that you're unable to take it all in. When you reel back out into the daylight of the tubular walkway on level 6, high above the square below, you'll struggle to recall everything you've seen. Like a half-remembered dream....  Yes, dreams, forests, monsters, alchemy, the occult, genesis, Alice in Wonderland, all those stimuli on which the Surrealists drew are examined in detail, in a show marking the 100th anniversary of the Surrealist Manifesto. It's overwhelming, an assault on the senses, right from the start. And it's crowded, even more so than the Caillebotte exhibition just across the Seine at the Musée d'Orsay, and that's saying something. We really can't pretend that we took in more than a fraction of the explanations as to why the Surrealists were moved to produce what they did, but what we do recollect are some astonishing works of art. Because...

We're starting in London this month with a double helping of Renaissance Italy: From November 9, the Royal Academy has Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael: Florence, c. 1504 , when the three briefly crossed paths in the Tuscan city. While sculpture and painting feature in this display of more than 40 works, the emphasis appears to be very much on creations on paper, as it is in Drawing   the Italian Renaissance at the King's Gallery, which opens on November 1. This show, which also includes Titian, promises the widest range of drawings dating from around 1450 to 1600 ever to be displayed in the UK, with about 160 by more than 80 artists. The RA exhibition closes February 16, that in the King's Gallery on March 9.  As the Renaissance in southern Europe was coming to an end, a new Golden Age was starting in India, that of the Mughal Emperors. The Great Mughals: Art, Architecture and Opulence at the Victoria and Albert Museum will display paintings, jewellery, clothing and more ...

Ever played the parlour game in which you have to name 10 famous Belgians? Art lovers shouldn't have too much trouble, as long as we're counting Flemish painters from the days before Belgium actually became a country in its own right in 1830. And there are dozens of artists on show in  Rare and Indispensable: Masterpieces from Flemish Collections at the Museum aan de Stroom in Antwerp. (There are some pieces by non-Belgians as well!) This exhibition brings together around 100 objects out of more than 1,000 designated by the Flemish regional government as being of major cultural significance -- snappily referred to as  topstukken in Dutch. Such works -- in museums in Bruges, Ghent, Antwerp and locations right across Flanders -- enjoy official protection as being "indispensable" and consequently can't be taken outside the region without permission. They started the list 20 years ago, hence this anniversary show in a modern museum that's assumed a certain cache...

Surrealism: It can be so full of wit and invention, so thought-provoking. At its worst, though, it can be mind-numbingly dull and repetitive. Exhibitions about Surrealism seem to oscillate between the two extremes as well. Having been to quite a few, we're delighted to say that  Objects of Desire: Surrealism and Design 1924-Today at the Design Museum in London is one of the best. This is a big and wide-ranging show, and we happily spent more than two hours seeing some objects that were very familiar, and some that weren't. We laughed out loud quite a bit. Think of Surrealist objects, and the chances are that Salvador Dalí's Lobster Telephone and Mae West Lips Sofa will come to mind, and of course they are here, right at the start of the exhibition, as eye-catching and intriguing as ever.   What a bizarre yet beautiful piece of furniture the sofa is. Dalí created it at the suggestion of his friend and patron, Edward James, for his Monkton House residence on the West Dean...

There are lots and lots of new exhibitions starting in September right across Europe. The big offering on our radar in London is at the Wallace Collection in the shape of Frans Hals: The Male Portrait . The Wallace's own  The Laughing Cavalier  will be joined by over a dozen of the Dutch painter's works from galleries in Britain, Europe and the US in the first ever show to focus on Hals's depictions of solo male sitters. On from September 22 to January 30.  One of the world's most recognisable artworks,  The Great Wave , by Katsushika Hokusai, will of course be part of an exhibition of work by this Japanese artist and printmaker starting on September 30 at the British Museum, but for once it's not the focus.  Hokusai: The Great Picture Book of Everything , which is on until January 30, puts on display for the first time ever 103 drawings he made in the early 19th century for an encyclopedia that was never published. The works were recently acquired by the m...