The Art Exhibitions Blog

Paris -- there's always so much art to see, so many blockbuster shows of big-name artists in big-name museums. Sometimes, though, there's a lot of pleasure to be had from getting to know a less familiar painter in a much more intimate setting. Such as when we went to see  Maximilien Luce: The Instinct for Landscape at the Musée de Montmartre.  Luce painted light-filled landscapes in the 1890s following the Divisionist and Pointillist examples of Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, and these would be attractive enough on their own, but there's a lot more to discover in this quite extensive exhibition. There are pictures of men at work, building Paris, and of industry, producing the raw materials for the modern world. Some of these paintings of Belgium's Black Country are very dark indeed. And late on in his career, more light-bathed idylls of life in a riverside village in a rather different neo-Impressionist style.  Now, even though Luce was a Parisian (he lived and worked...

Cleopatra, David and Goliath, Judith and Holofernes. Drama, emotion, colour. Agony and ecstasy. It's all there in Artemisia: Heroine of Art at the Musée Jacquemart-André in Paris. Except they haven't got the space to do it justice. Because if we're going back in art herstory, there's really no bigger name than Artemisia Gentileschi.  This heroine of art draws big crowds, and her often quite sizeable canvases deserve a large stage on which to be properly appreciated. But there's next to no space in the Musée Jacquemart-André, which has some of the most cramped and crowded exhibition rooms we've been to anywhere in Europe. It's a bit like watching City play United -- or perhaps in this case Roma against Napoli -- in your back garden.  But that's enough whinging about the venue -- for a paragraph or two, at least -- because the art is spectacular. Artemisia Gentileschi was a prodigy, creating masterful -- mistressful? -- canvases at quite a young age. In a...

It's widely referred to as the world's most valuable private art collection : the one assembled over decades by the Nahmad brothers, dealers Ezra and David . Worth an estimated $3 billion or more, it's said to include hundreds of Picassos. Some 60 works from it are now on display at the Musée des impressionnismes in Giverny as  The Nahmad Collection: From Monet to Picasso . Intended, apparently, to demonstrate how art developed from the early 19th century through Impressionism and on to the start of the modern era, towards the liberation of colour and form, this is an exhibition that ends up coming across as somewhat incoherent. We're not really told much about the Nahmads or their collecting choices -- and as you search the Internet, things become slightly mysterious: Is Ezra alive or dead? The art, presumably, is supposed to speak for itself, but it's a rather eclectic, if not confusing, selection; some of the works are fantastic, some are distinctly ho-hum.  Let...

An advertising poster, you might think, is completely ephemeral -- just a sheet of paper that's here today, gone tomorrow, fading in the wind and rain and then pasted over by a newer, fresher advert. The most successful advertising, though, is anything but ephemeral. How many of those television commercials from your childhood still resonate today, for example? And as the advertising poster came into its own in late 19th-century Paris, it produced some of the most striking images in French art -- and became a collector's item in its own right.   Now those posters can be seen en masse at the Musée d'Orsay in  Art Is in the Street , a fun if somewhat bloated exhibition that gives due credit to the masters of the art: not just Alfons Mucha, Pierre Bonnard and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec , though they're here too, but also many others you've perhaps never heard of. This is a show that neatly brings together art and social history, often a winning formula in our eyes.  An...

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...

We'll start this month at the King's Gallery in London, where more than 300 artworks and other objects from the Royal Collection will be on display from April 11 for  The Edwardians: Age of Elegance . Illustrating the tastes of the period between the death of Victoria and World War I, the show features the work of John Singer Sargent , Edward Burne-Jones , William Morris and Carl Fabergé, among others. On to November 23. More Morris at, unsurprisingly, the William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow.  Morris Mania , which runs from April 5 to September 21, aims to show how his designs have continued to capture the imagination down the decades, popping up in films and on television, in every part of the home, on trainers, wellies, and even in nuclear submarines.... From much the same era, Guildhall Art Gallery in the City offers  Evelyn De Morgan: The Modern Painter in Victorian London  from April 4 to January 4. De Morgan's late Pre-Raphaelite work with its beautifull...