The Art Exhibitions Blog

Which Japanese artist had the greatest influence on the West at the end of the 19th century? Perhaps not so much Katsushika Hokusai , despite The Great Wave ; maybe more Utagawa Hiroshige, four decades younger and the last great exponent of the ukiyo-e tradition, with his stunningly framed landscapes. From May 1, you have the chance at the British Museum in London to experience Horoshige's world, which ended just as Japan started to open up to the outside. Featuring a large body of work from a major US collection,  Hiroshige: Artist of the Open Road  is on until September 7. And also at the British Museum, a second new exhibition explores the origins of Hindu, Jain and Buddhist sacred art, going back at least 2,000 years. More than 180 objects from the museum's collection as well as items on loan will be on display.  Ancient India: Living Traditions  runs from May 22 to October 19.  If you enjoyed the colour and swagger of the John Singer Sargent show at Tate ...

There's much to admire about Suzanne Valadon, a very individual, hard-to-categorise painter who truly blazed a trail for women artists in the first half of the 20th century. But could you live with her brutal, unrelenting works on your wall?  One of the pictures that first greets you in the  Suzanne Valadon  retrospective at the Pompidou Centre in Paris is this one -- The Blue Room -- and it certainly slaps you in the face.  Valadon takes the tradition of the odalisque and turns it on its head. You've seen those nude women stretched out on a couch painted by men -- by Titian , by Goya , by Ingres and by Manet , but what about Valadon's version? It's not erotic, by any means. Her model is a bit more solidly built than most, and she's wearing a pair of stripy pyjama bottoms. Fag in mouth, she's also got a yellow paperback novel on the go. Could you imagine a man painting this in the early part of the 20th century? Could you imagine an English woman artist like L...

What will be the exhibition highlights of 2025 around Britain and Europe? At the end of the year, Tate Britain will be marking 250 years since the birth of JMW Turner and John Constable with a potential blockbuster. Meanwhile, the Swiss are  making a big thing  of the 100th anniversary of the death of Félix Vallotton  (a real favourite of ours). Among women artists in the spotlight will be Anna Ancher, Ithell Colquhoun, Artemisia Gentileschi and Suzanne Valadon. Here's a selection of what's coming up, in more or less chronological order; as ever, we make no claim to comprehensiveness, and our choice very much reflects our personal taste. And in our search for the most interesting shows, we're visiting Ascona, Baden-Baden, Chemnitz and Winterthur, among other places.  January  We start off in Paris, at the Pompidou Centre; the 1970s inside-out building is showing its age and it'll be shut in the summer for a renovation programme scheduled to last until 2030. Bef...

We're on the cusp of 2022, but the New Year has a 2021 ring to it as some galleries play catch-up, putting on Covid-cancelled exhibitions that we had already highlighted as this year's ones to look forward to. And a couple of shows mentioned below were also on the schedule for 2020. This round-up of some of what's caught our eye among the displays planned by museums and galleries around Europe for the next 12 months may not be definitive, but it is in chronological order as we publish. Watch out for our monthly What's On for precise dates nearer the time. Here goes, with fingers crossed now that museums in various countries are closed again....   February The Courtauld Gallery in London has just reopened after renovation, and its first big exhibition since then starts on February 3: Van Gogh Self-Portraits . It will bring together more than 15 pictures, around half of Vincent van Gogh's total output of self-portraits across his career, and is the first devoted to hi...