There's much to admire about Suzanne Valadon, a very individual, hard-to-categorise painter who truly blazed a trail for women artists in the first half of the 20th century. But could you live with her brutal, unrelenting works on your wall? One of the pictures that first greets you in the Suzanne Valadon retrospective at the Pompidou Centre in Paris is this one -- The Blue Room -- and it certainly slaps you in the face. Valadon takes the tradition of the odalisque and turns it on its head. You've seen those nude women stretched out on a couch painted by men -- by Titian , by Goya , by Ingres and by Manet , but what about Valadon's version? It's not erotic, by any means. Her model is a bit more solidly built than most, and she's wearing a pair of stripy pyjama bottoms. Fag in mouth, she's also got a yellow paperback novel on the go. Could you imagine a man painting this in the early part of the 20th century? Could you imagine an English woman artist like L...
There's a blockbuster of an exhibition about to open in London on November 2: Tutankhamun -- Treasures of the Golden Pharaoh at the Saatchi Gallery. Of more than 150 artefacts on show from the Egyptian king's tomb, unearthed almost a century ago, 60 are leaving Egypt for a first and final time on a world tour before they return to be displayed in a new Grand Egyptian Museum. The show's just been to Paris, where it drew almost 1.5 million visitors. It's on in London until May 3. Tickets are, as you might expect, not cheap. Five hundred years after the death of Leonardo da Vinci, the National Gallery is offering visitors an immersive exhibition designed to reveal the secrets of his painting The Virgin of the Rocks , taking you from inside the artist's mind (!) to how the picture might have looked in its original setting. Leonardo: Experience a Masterpiece opens on November 9 and runs until January 12. We'll be expecting something a little less hi-tech from ...