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Opening and Closing in January

Let's kick off the New Year with something a bit out of the ordinary: Brasil! Brasil! The Birth of Modernism at London's Royal Academy. This show features more than 130 works by 10 key 20th-century Brazilian artists, and most of them have never been on show in the UK before, providing a chance to look at modern art in a way that breaks from the European and North American perspective we're so used to. On from January 28 to April 21.   There are more familiar names at Bath's Holburne Museum: Francis Bacon, Peter Blake, Gerhard Richter and Andy Warhol among them. Iconic: Portraiture from Bacon to Warhol  focuses on the middle of the 20th century when many artists began to use photographs as sources for their paintings. The exhibition runs from January 24 to May 5.  From January 22, the Louvre in Paris offers the chance to take  A New Look at Cimabue: At the Origins of Italian Painting . Cimabue, one of the most important artists of the 13th century, was among the...
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Opening in December

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 world. Both shows start on December 11 and run to March 17.

Vienna's Leopold Museum reopens on December 6 after a month of rebuilding with the excellent Egon Schiele show still on and a couple of new exhibitions starting that day as well. Most notably, Gustav Klimt and the other great Viennese Jugendstil exponent Koloman Moser feature along with pioneering Expressionist Richard Gerstl in Klimt Moser Gerstl until March 10.

Meanwhile, another Austrian Expressionist, Oskar Kokoschka, one of the most important artists of the 20th century, gets a retrospective at Zurich's Kunsthaus. This show, which is being staged in collaboration with the Leopold in Vienna, runs from December 14 to March 10 and will have some 200 exhibits, covering every stage of Kokoschka's long career.
Not many openings in December; normal service resumes in the New Year.

Images

Caravaggio, The Entombment of Christ, 1602-03. © Pinacoteca Vaticana, Vatican City
Oskar Kokoschka, Self-Portrait with Crossed Arms, 1923, Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz. Photo: © Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz/PUNCTUM /Bertram Kober © Fondation Oskar Kokoschka/2018 ProLitteris, Zurich
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