The Art Exhibitions Blog

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...

A couple of weeks ago, we found ourselves getting increasingly exasperated by a late Victorian painting superstar, Edward Burne-Jones , in a show at Tate Britain that was full of knights in shining armour and damsels in distress. But British art was getting more modern. In the 1870s, James McNeill Whistler was already "flinging a pot of paint in the public's face." And then a couple of years later, William Stott of Oldham came along. William Stott? Not exactly a household name, but he did paint one rather influential picture that's seen as key in the move to Impressionism and naturalism in British art in the 1880s. It's called Le Passeur (The Ferryman) , and it was bought by the Tate last year for £1.5 million. This beautiful work is now touring the country, and it's currently at Southampton City Art Gallery in a small but very well done (and free) exhibition called Beneath the Surface . It's well worth seeing. Confusingly, there seem to have been th...

There are many ways to express opposition to those who run things. Armed rebellion; strikes; protest marches; or maybe something a little more subtle, less in your face. Hmm, maybe those aren't quite the right words.... ah, that's it, something a bit more pungent. I Object: Ian Hislop's Search for Dissent at the British Museum in London is the result of a trawl by the editor of the satirical magazine Private Eye through the museum's collection to find 100 or so objects that exemplify the sometimes rather obscure ways that people from artists to artisans have challenged authority down the ages and around the globe. Some of it, as you would expect, is rather entertaining; some of it doesn't quite hit the spot. A bit like the average edition of Private Eye, then.... This show starts off with a collection of Hislop's five favourite exhibits, and let's face it, the British can't keep a good fart joke down. Richard Newton's print from 1798 shows Joh...

The Dark Ages weren't so very dark after all, and the people who inhabited the country that came to be known as England had deep cultural, religious and trading links with their neighbours across Britain and Europe. That's the message (and perhaps it's a bit of an anti-Brexit one in these troubled political times) from Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms: Art, Word, War at the British Library in London. This is, it has to be said, quite an intense and amazingly comprehensive exhibition. The bulk of the 180 exhibits are manuscripts, so there's a lot of bending over, peering at fairly indecipherable texts in glass cases, and a certain amount of shuffling along to get a view. To be honest, only the most enthusiastic of visitors will not think that the curators might have trimmed it down a little. We were certainly flagging somewhat after half-way, and we definitely weren't the only ones. But the highlights of this show are breathtaking. Books, manuscripts, jewellery and sculptur...

Lorenzo Lotto: With a name like that he should have been one of life's winners. But no -- " Art did not earn me what I spent," he wrote in his will. There was no justice, then, in Renaissance Italy, because Lorenzo Lotto Portraits at London's National Gallery shows him to have been an insightful, inventive and hugely skilled painter. This is a smallish but excellent exhibition, and what's more, there's no admission charge. Lotto's not a big name, so let's start off with a little potted biography. Born in Venice in about 1480, he travelled widely and worked in various parts of Italy, notably in Treviso and Bergamo, in the first quarter of the 16th century before returning to his home city. He concentrated on portraits and religious works and finally retired in 1552 to become a lay brother in Loreto in the Marche, dying a few years later. His work was neglected for several hundred years before starting to be reappreciated at the end of the 19th centur...

Edward Burne-Jones was a terrific draughtsman and a highly accomplished painter. So why is this new exhibition of his work at Tate Britain so remarkably dissatisfying? Perhaps because it seems almost impossible to relate to his pictures, certainly from a modern perspective. There are religious works and the odd portrait, but most of what Burne-Jones was painting and designing in the second half of the 19th century was his own interpretation of classical antiquity, medieval chivalry or fairy tales. Clearly, the Pre-Raphaelites, of whom Burne-Jones was the last major figure, and William Morris's Arts & Crafts movement, with which he was closely associated, took the view that the Victorian industrial age was a terrible thing, and they wanted to hark back to what they saw as a purer, gentler, more enlightened era. But Burne-Jones was born in 1833, a year after Manet and a year before Whistler and Degas. They took on the modern world. Burne-Jones just seems to have retreated into...

Manet, Renoir, Van Gogh: Names now so mainstream that it's hard to comprehend how challenging their art was a century and more ago. One man and his deep pockets did perhaps more than anyone else to bring their work to Britain: Samuel Courtauld. His vision is being celebrated in the hugely enjoyable  Courtauld Impressionists  exhibition at London's National Gallery. Courtauld was a textile manufacturer who in the early part of the 20th century not only built up his own impressive collection of modern French art (subsequently forming the  gallery  that bears his name) but also helped fund and acquire similar works for the nation. With the Courtauld on the Strand closed for refurbishment for the next two years, there's a rare chance to admire both sets of paintings hung side by side in the National Gallery, including some of the most recognisable images in art history, revealing how much Britain is indebted to Courtauld's daring taste for the avant-garde. Cour...