If you're thinking about seeing Wright of Derby: From the Shadows at the National Gallery in London, be warned: There's not a huge amount to this show. The gallery describes it as "the first major exhibition dedicated to the British artist’s 'candlelight' paintings". Major? There are actually only 10 of Joseph Wright's oil paintings in this smallish display, and while they certainly include some of his finest, it's not a lot for your money. Especially as the star attraction is An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump , Wright's masterpiece of 1768, which you can usually see for free just yards away in another room in the gallery, in rather less cramped circumstances. Without a shadow of a doubt, it's an astonishing painting, somehow encapsulating the 18th-century Enlightenment -- the advance of reason and science -- in one image. Whenever we're in the National Gallery we almost always stop by to look at it for a minute or two. There is...
He was only 25 when he died in 1898, yet Aubrey Beardsley 's sensuous, subversive and often risqué drawings are among the most memorable images of the late Victorian era. An exhibition opening on March 4 at Tate Britain in London will be the largest to showcase his original works since the mid-1960s. It runs through until May 25. Over at Tate Modern, the doors open on March 12 on Andy Warhol . The show will feature more than 100 works from across Warhol's colourful career, with images from Marilyn Monroe to Lenin and Mao, not forgetting the odd can of Campbell's soup. On for not just 15 minutes, but almost six months, through to September 6. In the middle of the 16th century, King Philip II of Spain commissioned Titian to paint a series showing Classical myths. The six pictures, dubbed by Titian "poesie" because he saw them as the visual equivalents of poetry, are being reunited for the first time in 400 years for an exhibition at London's National Galler...