The Art Exhibitions Blog

What a lot of contradictions in Emil Nolde, and in his art. How could the painter who, more than any other, had his art denounced by the Nazis as degenerate actually be a member of the National Socialist Party? How could a man who professed his Christian values in religious art hold such anti-Semitic views? How could the artist who seemed so at home in the windy, flat farming and fishing country of the German-Danish borderlands be so drawn to the clubs and cabarets of Berlin? And how could the maker of such delicate watercolours also produce violently Expressionist works that were sometimes so crude, so grotesque? All these questions are raised by Emil Nolde: Colour is Life at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh. Some are answered, but by no means all. Nolde was born in 1867 as Emil Hansen to a German father and a Danish mother. Nolde is actually the name of the small place he came from, which was then in Germany but became Danish after a plebiscite followin...

There's an distinctive Englishness about Edward Bawden's art. Quirky, humorous and rather understated. So there's quite a lot to like in the  Edward Bawden  exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery, the biggest such retrospective since he died in 1989. Some of his linocuts and illustrations are masterful, but his watercolours, while nice, are a wee bit underwhelming. Dulwich's attempt to persuade you of the breadth and depth of his artistic achievement, in a show that brings together more than 150 works, doesn't totally succeed. At his best, Bawden could produce the sort of bold graphics that are instantly recognisable, and one of the six rooms in this show brings together a selection. It's Victoriana seen from the 1950s and 1960s, when, if not quite yet coming back into fashion, it was on the cusp of doing so -- unless it had already been lost to bombing or redevelopment. We get to enjoy  Liverpool Street Station ,  London Markets , and, in this example,  Brig...

"What a coarse rugged Way of Painting's here, Stroaks upon Stroaks, Dabbs upon Dabbs appear." So wrote the English author John Elsum in 1700, musing on An Old Man's Head , by Rembrant, as he spelled it. Those Stroaks and Dabbs have been fascinating the British for almost four centuries, as an enticing exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh demonstrates with a stunning array of canvases, drawings and etchings. So many of the works in Rembrandt: Britain's Discovery of the Master have a fascinating story to tell. You'll find anecdote, mystery and drama aplenty, with a touch of forgery and plagiarism thrown in along the way. It's excellently presented, with really informative wall descriptions and plenty of space to appreciate what's on display.  What about the Old Man's Head? Well, the verse accompanies this Portrait of an Elderly Man , painted by Rembrandt in 1667, a picture that spent centuries in Britain but is now back...

Even before the devastating second fire in Charles Rennie Mackintosh's Glasgow School of Art this summer, the city was making a big deal of its favourite son and perhaps its biggest tourist draw. The excellent show on Charles Rennie Mackintosh Making the Glasgow Style  at Kelvingrove Art Gallery was attracting lots of visitors from home and abroad -- the art-school blaze made international headlines -- when we saw it last week. And there's still a few weeks left to catch this exhibition, which provides an extremely detailed and fascinating overview, with about 250 artefacts, of the influences on the man and his circle, how he came to prominence, and the later years of decline. The reason for the show is to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Mackintosh's birth . He grew up in a Glasgow that was undergoing massive expansion economically and that was increasingly open to the world. As Mackintosh trained as a draughtsman and later studied at the School of Art, Japanese, ...

Some of the landscapes in Thomas Cole: Eden to Empire at the National Gallery in London are ravishing, but they carry more of a political subtext than you might expect, with messages that are still relevant today. Cole, the great American landscape artist of the early 19th century, was concerned by increasing urbanisation and industrialisation in a United States making rapid advances into its as yet largely unsettled interior. His paintings contain warnings about the ecological costs of unchecked development. Perhaps we should know more about Cole, because he was actually born in Bolton in 1801, spent his early years working in textile mills in Lancashire and emigrated to the US with his family while still in his teens. But his paintings are largely in American collections, and that's where the 58 works on show at the National mostly come from. Cole was a self-taught painter, and he enjoyed early artistic success with bold views of the Catskill Mountains in New York state in...

It's one of the most iconic of all German paintings, and it's one of the star attractions of a show in Berlin that's steeped in the Romanticism of the early 19th century. The picture is Caspar David Friedrich's  Wanderer above the Sea of Fog. A curly-haired man in a dark green suit is seen from behind, standing atop a rocky outcrop with his walking stick and gazing down into an eerie landscape in which mists swirl around mountain tops. The exhibition is Wanderlust: From Caspar David Friedrich to Auguste Renoir in Berlin's Alte Nationalgalerie, looking at the wanderer as a central theme in 19th-century art across Europe. The museum has a fine Friedrich collection itself, but the curators have pulled in some splendid paintings from across the continent. The  Wanderer above the Sea of Fog has made the short trip from Hamburg. The story starts with the discovery of nature, even at its wildest, as a phenomenon to be explored close up in the 18th century. In Jako...

Almost 2000 years on, the men and women of Roman London still have tales to tell. The place to learn some of their secrets, and to puzzle about many more, is the Museum of London Docklands, whose intriguing (and free)  Roman Dead exhibition peels back the centuries and uncovers a multi-ethnic metropolis marked by poor health, violence and inequality. Last year, a rare Roman sarcophagus was unearthed during preparations for building work in Southwark -- it's only the third to be found in the city since 1999. Around it, the museum has built an exhibition with about 250 objects to show how the Romans of London died and how they were buried or cremated. It sounds macabre -- and be warned, there are human skeletons on display, including those of babies -- but the details the curators have drawn out are fascinating. Let's start with the sarcophagus, because that's the focal point, though you don't actually see it until you're half way round. You're struck by it...

There are some harrowing images in Aftermath: Art in the Wake of World War I at Tate Britain: dead bodies, mutilated faces, mechanised slaughter. It's not exactly a feel-good exhibition. But it does contain a lot of uplifting art, some of it stunningly displayed, and it's well worth seeing. Millions died on each side between 1914 and 1918; millions more were wounded. At the start of this exhibition we see in a glass case three steel soldiers' helmets, from Britain, France and Germany, the three countries the show focuses on. The abandoned helmet was widely used to symbolise the death of an individual combatant, and William Orpen was among the painters to adopt the image in A Grave in a Trench . This, like many of the works early on in this exhibition, is from the Imperial War Museum.  More explicit images of death were not wanted by the military authorities. Christopher Nevinson's Paths of Glory was censored, but the artist defied the ruling by including it an...

It's not just about the art, it's about the event, the occasion. Seeing, yes, but being seen is perhaps for some just as important. That's clear right from the start of  The Great Spectacle: 250 Years of the Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy. There are lots of reasons for visiting this show: It's an enlightening history of a great British institution; it offers a potted run-through of 2 1/2 centuries of British art (admittedly, minus a couple of big names); and astonishingly, while the 250th Summer Exhibition itself elsewhere in the RA was drawing big crowds, this 10-room display was surprisingly empty, at least when we went, giving plenty of space for contemplation and enjoyment. And what you see first is the Summer Exhibition summed up by William Powell Frith, that great Victorian painter of crowd scenes, in  A Private View at the Royal Academy, 1881 . What a line-up of distinguished gallery-goers: William Gladstone, Anthony Trollope, Lillie Langtry, Ellen ...