There's not a haystack, waterlily or cliff-face to be seen; you won't be gazing into the box at the theatre or contemplating steaming locomotives in the station, because we're not looking at the French Impressionists for a change; we've crossed the Rhine (literally; we flew into Strasbourg and took the train) to explore Impressionism in Germany: Max Liebermann and his Times at the Museum Frieder Burda in Baden-Baden. Yes, there are Caillebotte-like yachts and Renoir-style children, intimate interiors and cityscapes -- similar themes, though the treatment is often quite different -- but then there are also actors on the stage, Bible stories and views of orphanages, subjects the French never really tackled. Oh, and beer gardens. The three big names in this show are Max Slevogt, Lovis Corinth and above all Max Liebermann, the doyen of the German Impressionist movement. And a man with a passion for horticulture; Liebermann's garden on the outskirts of Berlin is as im...
The Dutch Golden Age wasn't just Rembrandt, Hals and Vermeer. A little further inland from the North Sea, the painters of Utrecht -- Dirck van Baburen, Hendrick ter Brugghen and Gerard van Honthorst -- pursued a very different course, echoing the drama and light effects pioneered in the far south of Europe by Caravaggio. That's the theme of Utrecht, Caravaggio and Europe at the Centraal Museum in Utrecht from December 16 to March 24, with 60 loans from across Europe and the US. Caravaggio's Entombment of Christ from the Vatican can be seen for the first four weeks of the exhibition. At the Petit Palais in Paris, there are two shows that are a little out of the ordinary. The strange dream-like images of late 19th-century Belgian Symbolist Fernand Khnopff are the subject of a major retrospective in an exhibition subtitled The Master of Enigma. Even odder are the drawings of Jean Jacques Lequeu , who died in poverty in 1826 having created his own architectural fantasy wo...