The Art Exhibitions Blog

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...

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. ...

He was only 25 when he died in 1898, yet Aubrey Beardsley 's sensuous, subversive and often risqué drawings are among the most memorable images of the late Victorian era. An exhibition opening on March 4 at Tate Britain in London will be the largest to showcase his original works since the mid-1960s. It runs through until May 25. Over at Tate Modern, the doors open on March 12 on Andy Warhol . The show will feature more than 100 works from across Warhol's colourful career, with images from Marilyn Monroe to Lenin and Mao, not forgetting the odd can of Campbell's soup. On for not just 15 minutes, but almost six months, through to September 6. In the middle of the 16th century, King Philip II of Spain commissioned Titian to paint a series showing Classical myths. The six pictures, dubbed by Titian "poesie" because he saw them as the visual equivalents of poetry, are being reunited for the first time in 400 years for an exhibition at London's National Galler...

In 2019 it was all Leonardo and Rembrandt. In 2020 it's the 500th anniversary of the death of Raphael, so he's one of the really big names on the exhibition calendar for the new year, along with Jan van Eyck. Here's a look at some of the key shows across Britain and Europe for your diary, in more or less chronological order.  January Edward Hopper 's landscapes and cityscapes are at the fore of an exhibition at the Fondation Beyeler near Basel starting on January 26. It's organised in conjunction with the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, which has the largest collection of Hopper's often enigmatic, mysterious works. Until May 17. The Kunstpalast in Dusseldorf is presenting a big show, running from January 30 to May 24, devoted to Angelica Kauffman , a rare exception in being a successful and respected woman artist in the late 18th century. The Swiss-born artist was one of only two women founder members of the Royal Academy in London, where th...

Renaissance nudes.... let's see what springs to mind. Well, there's Titian's Venus of Urbino , obviously, or maybe the Sleeping Venus started by Giorgione and finished by Titian. How about Botticelli's Birth of Venus , or Velázquez's Rokeby Venus , or one of those many Cranachs with Venus and Cupid ? And that's just the one Roman goddess, off the top of our heads. So, for an exhibition on the Renaissance Nude , at London's Royal Academy, organised in conjunction with the J Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, you might be expecting a bit of a blockbuster. But this show is a lot more low-key. There are some fine works of art, to be sure, with Raphael, Titian, Michelangelo and Leonardo represented, but it just all feels a wee bit flat. You see, as we left, we were thinking about what pictures might have given a bit of oomph to this exhibition, and one of the first we came up with was Jean Fouquet's Virgin and Child from the Royal Museum of Fine Arts ...

We all know what Charles I looked like, don't we? It was just how Anthony Van Dyck painted him: Van Dyck's triple portrait is the first image that catches your eye as you enter Charles I: King and Collector  at the Royal Academy in London, a terrific exhibition that's chock-full of great works of art. This show has at its centre two rooms of aggrandising pictures of Charles by his Flemish court painter, on horseback, with his family, in his robes of state. So it comes as somewhat of a surprise to find one or two portraits of the King by other artists that make him appear a little different. There's something slightly wrong with them, you feel, because you're so used to the Van Dyck look. Gerrit van Honthorst's Charles  seems somehow more boyish, less certain of himself, while a full-length view by Daniel Mytens captures some splendid tailoring but doesn't quite give us the self-confidence of a man who believed himself endowed with the divine righ...