Skip to main content

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...

Subscribe to updates

Opening and Closing in February

It's the 500th anniversary this year of the death of Leonardo da Vinci, and to mark the occasion 144 drawings from the Royal Collection are being exhibited simultaneously in 12 museums across the UK. Leonardo da Vinci: A Life in Drawing starts on February 1, with 12 works each on show at the Ulster Museum in Belfast, Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, Bristol Museum & Art Gallery, the National Museum in Cardiff, Derby Museum & Art Gallery, Kelvingrove Museum in Glasgow, Leeds Art Gallery, the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, Manchester Art Gallery, the Millennium Gallery in Sheffield, Southampton City Art Gallery and Sunderland Museum & Winter Gardens. Admission at most venues is free. Until May 6. All the drawings and more go on show at the Queen's Gallery in London starting in late May, with a selection at Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh from November.
For something completely different, head for the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. Jeff Koons, one of the most divisive (and expensive) of contemporary artists, gets a show at the world's oldest public museum featuring his shiny, kitschy, blingy work covering periods from the 1980s to the present day. February 7 to June 9.

At the Holburne Museum in Bath, meanwhile, there's a rather more understated contemporary painter. George Shaw is known for his use of the sort of enamel paint you utilise for model aircraft and the like and focuses on the estate where he grew up in Coventry and its surroundings. George Shaw: A Corner of a Foreign Field runs from February 8 to May 6 and is a smaller version of a show that was well reviewed when it was on at the Yale Center for British Art in the US.

Harald Sohlberg, born 150 years ago, was a symbolist painter who was one of Norway's great landscape artists. He's never had a major exhibition outside Norway, but now his work is coming to the Dulwich Picture Gallery in south-east London. Harald Sohlberg: Painting Norway, which has just been on at the National Gallery in Oslo, starts in Dulwich on February 13 and closes on June 6.
Small is beautiful at the National Portrait Gallery starting February 21, when the attention is on Elizabethan Treasures, in the form of portrait miniatures by Nicholas Hilliard and Isaac Oliver. Not the easiest artworks for a crowded show, miniatures, so it will be interesting to see how it's done. Until May 19.

The American Surrealist Dorothea Tanning is the subject of the new show at Tate Modern, the first large-scale exhibition of her work for 25 years. Tanning, who died aged 101 only seven years ago, became more abstract as her long career went on and began making soft fabric sculptures in the era of Pop Art. February 27 to June 9.
At Tate Britain, it's a case of the very, very real, with a retrospective of the great British photojournalist Don McCullin, known above all for his pictures of war zones. February 5 to May 6.

At the National Gallery, a free display presents, for the first time in the UK, the sharply observed work of Louis-Leopold Boilly through the French revolution and its aftermath. Boilly: Scenes of Parisian Life is on from February 28 to May 19.

If you want to see Rembrandt, the place to go is the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, and especially so from February 15. For the 350th anniversary of Rembrandt's death, the gallery is showing All the Rembrandts it has -- 22 paintings, 60 drawings and more than 300 prints. The exhibition runs through to June 10.

The exhibitions at the Hermitage in Amsterdam, which draw on the collection of the Hermitage itself in St Petersburg, are always well worth seeing, and to mark their 10th anniversary they're putting on a show called Treasury! Masterpieces from the Hermitage, which will bring together a cross-section of 250 objects from the ancient world to Old Masters including Rembrandt. February 2 to August 25.

A terrific show at the National Gallery in London almost a decade ago introduced Britons to the early 19th-century Danish artist Christen Købke. He was perhaps the greatest painter of what is now recognised as The Danish Golden Age, an era when realism met romanticism. The period is the subject of a large-scale exhibition that will be seen in three European capitals over the next 12 months, starting at the newly refurbished National Museum in Stockholm from February 28 to July 21. It then goes on to Copenhagen and, early next year, to Paris.  
More than 20 works by Titian are among the highlights of the major new show at the Städel Museum in Frankfurt, Titian and the Renaissance in Venice, looking at how the city's artists used light and colour to make their mark. Lorenzo Lotto, Giovanni Bellini and Jacopo Palma il Vecchio are among the other painters featured from February 13 to May 26. 

Last chance to see....

The small but affecting Gainsborough's Family Album show at the National Portrait Gallery featuring Thomas Gainsborough's wonderful pictures of his young daughters closes on February 3. Finishing the same day, next door at the National Gallery, is the very interesting free display centred on Edwin Landseer's Monarch of the Glen. Another excellent free show at the National, Lorenzo Lotto Portraits, goes on until February 10.

You have until February 19 to get down to the British Library to view Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms, an exhibition with some absolutely fantastic objects, though a few too many manuscripts.

Four shows we've reviewed finish on February 24: At the British Museum, I Am Ashurbanipal, the story of the king who ruled Assyria more than 2,500 years ago, was one of the best exhibitions we saw in 2018. The Lost Treasures of Strawberry Hill, restoring some of the great 18th-century collection assembled by Horace Walpole to the pioneering neo-Gothic mansion he built, is the best show we've seen so far in 2019. Closing at Tate Britain is the undeniably beautiful though strangely uninvolving retrospective of Edward Burne-Jones, while finishing at the Lowry in Salford is the ultimately disappointing show that explored LS Lowry's love of the Pre-Raphaelites

Images

Leonardo da Vinci, The Head of Leda, c. 1505-08, Royal Collection Trust. © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2018
Harald Sohlberg, Street in Røros in Winter, 1903, The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Norway
Dorothea Tanning, Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, 1943, Tate. © DACS, 2018 
Christen Købke, A View of Lake Sortedam from Dosseringen Looking Towards the Suburb Nørrebro Outside Copenhagen, 1838, The National Gallery of Denmark.
Jacopo Palma il Vecchio, Young Woman in a Blue Dress with Fan, c. 1512–14, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. © KHM-Museumsverband

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Opening and Closing in October

There's been a spate of exhibitions over the past few years aimed at redressing centuries of neglect of the work of women artists, and the Italian Baroque painter  Artemisia Gentileschi is the latest to come into focus, at the National Gallery in London, starting on October 3. Most of the works have never been seen in Britain before, and they cover a lengthy career that features strong female figures in Biblical and classical scenes, as well as self-portraits. Until January 24.  Also starting at the National on October 7 is a free exhibition that looks at Sin , as depicted by artists from Diego Velázquez and William Hogarth through to Tracey Emin, blurring the boundaries between the religious and the secular. This one runs until January 3.   Tate Britain shows this winter how JMW Turner embraced the rapid industrial and technological advances at the start of the 19th century and recorded them in his work. Turner's Modern World , starting on October 28, will inclu...

What's On in 2025

What will be the exhibition highlights of 2025 around Britain and Europe? At the end of the year, Tate Britain will be marking 250 years since the birth of JMW Turner and John Constable with a potential blockbuster. Meanwhile, the Swiss are  making a big thing  of the 100th anniversary of the death of Félix Vallotton  (a real favourite of ours). Among women artists in the spotlight will be Anna Ancher, Ithell Colquhoun, Artemisia Gentileschi and Suzanne Valadon. Here's a selection of what's coming up, in more or less chronological order; as ever, we make no claim to comprehensiveness, and our choice very much reflects our personal taste. And in our search for the most interesting shows, we're visiting Ascona, Baden-Baden, Chemnitz and Winterthur, among other places.  January  We start off in Paris, at the Pompidou Centre; the 1970s inside-out building is showing its age and it'll be shut in the summer for a renovation programme scheduled to last until 2030. Bef...

The Thrill of Pleasure: Bridget Riley

Prepare yourself for some sensory overload. Curves, stripes, zig-zags, wavy lines, dots, in black and white or colour. Look at many of the paintings of Bridget Riley and you're unable to escape the eerie sensation that the picture in front of you is in motion, has its own inner three-dimensional life, is not just inert paint on flat canvas, panel or plaster. It's by no means unusual to see selections of Riley's paintings on display, but a blockbuster exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh brings together 70 years of her pictures in a dazzling extravaganza of abstraction, including a recreation of her only actual 3D work, which you walk into for a perspectival sensurround experience. It's "that thrill of pleasure which sight itself reveals," as Riley once said. It's a really terrific show, and the thrill of pleasure in the Scottish capital was enhanced by the unexpected lack of visitors on the day we went to see it, with huge empty sp...