The Art Exhibitions Blog

There's an impressive range of new art shows starting in both London and Paris in March. So before cross-Channel traffic grinds to a juddering halt.... The rediscovery of Greek and Roman art in the 15th and 16th centuries saw artists north and south of the Alps put the human body at the forefront of their painting and sculpture. That's the theme of The Renaissance Nude  from March 3 to June 2 at the Royal Academy in London. Titian, Raphael, Michelangelo, Leonardo, Bronzino, Dürer and Cranach are among those represented in an exhibition of around 90 works. Over at Tate Britain, the largest assembly of Vincent van Gogh's paintings in the UK for nearly a decade -- 45 of them -- is the big selling point of Van Gogh and Britain . The show   explores how he was inspired by British art and culture -- Constable, Millais and Dickens -- and in turn inspired British artists like Francis Bacon and David Bomberg. March 27 to August 11, with standard tickets costing £22, reflecti...

There's a really rather good exhibition of paintings by Doreen Fletcher on at the Nunnery Gallery. Who's Doreen Fletcher, you ask? And where's the Nunnery Gallery? We're in Bow in east London, and we're looking at townscapes, virtually all of them of the local area. This is Doreen Fletcher: A Retrospective , and this weekday lunchtime it's quite full of visitors, many of them from the East End, and clearly delighting in recognising landmarks that in some cases are now just history. Doreen Fletcher has been painting the streets of east London since the 1980s, though she stopped working in the early 2000s for lack of recognition before resuming a couple of years ago after being rediscovered. And justifiably so. She paints in a fairly precise documentary style that's full of detailed observation. Her pictures are by no means devoid of people, but they certainly don't play a central role. They might be in a car or at a bus stop, rarely taking cen...

There's no denying the attraction of the light and warmth of the south. Just look at Pierre Bonnard at Tate Modern: all those gorgeous yellows and oranges and ochres. Granted, the weather's rather less congenial in northern Europe, but when the sun or the moon is right, or there's snow on the ground, that northern light can be just as bright and fascinating for the artist, just as seductive, as the Mediterranean. Not convinced? Get down to Dulwich Picture Gallery and discover Harald Sohlberg: Painting Norway . Because Norwegian painting isn't just The Scream . Edvard Munch's world-famous image isn't the painting that defines the nation. That picture is by Sohlberg; it's called Winter Night in the Mountains , and it forms the climax of this superb exhibition in south-east London. There won't have been many Britons who will have known anything at all about Sohlberg before learning of this show. After all, who in continental Europe knows about LS Lowry...

The exhibitions of Leonardo da Vinci drawings from the Royal Collection at 12 galleries around the UK are drawing such crowds that they are set to break attendance records. The show marking the 500th anniversary of Leonardo's death at the Millennium Gallery in Sheffield has produced a "fantastic response", Museums Sheffield said this week. "In the first 19 days since we opened we’ve welcomed over 25,000 visitors through the doors, which sets it on track to become the Millennium Gallery’s most popular exhibition ever." Glasgow's Kelvingrove Art Gallery reported the highest daily attendance figures of the eight museums that responded to our inquiries. It saw 18,408 visitors in the first 12 days after the displays opened simultaneously around the country on February 1. Liverpool's Walker Art Gallery  also reported more than 1,150 visitors a day, with a cumulative total of 19,603 by February 17. The Ulster Museum in Belfast reported 16,576 visitor...