The Art Exhibitions Blog

Let us take you by the hand and lead you through the streets of Ostend, in the company of an insomniac artist with stomach ulcers. Things appear odd at night, eerie lights down deserted streets and along the promenade, when everyone else in the Queen of Belgian seaside resorts has gone to bed. Welcome to the world of  Léon Spilliaert   at the Royal Academy in London, the latest in the RA's spate of exhibitions featuring European artists you've possibly barely heard of but who are rather big names in their home countries. Spilliaert was born in Ostend in 1881, and though he moved away to Bruges to study and later to Brussels and Paris, it's his home town that seems to have inspired his most intriguing pictures. He worked mostly using a wash of Indian ink, with occasional pastel and coloured pencil, to produce often haunting, otherworldly images. Here in  Dyke at Night, Reflected Lights , the town is asleep, apart of course from the solitary wandering artist. There...

This bust of Charles II in  British Baroque: Power and Illusion   at Tate Britain really does capture the essence of the Baroque -- extravagant, flamboyant, full of movement, full of drama. The Stuart King's head turns one way, his lace cravat swings in the other direction. Underneath, a swirl of drapery; on top, a wig that could almost be a coiled mass of snakes or a basketful of twisted pastries. It really is quite magnificent. This ostentatious concoction early on in the exhibition was the work of a sculptor for whom Charles never actually sat: French-born, Genoa-based Honoré Pelle. And indeed, though this is a show about how the largely Protestant British aristocracy dipped its toe into the very, very Catholic world of Baroque art in the late 17th and early 18th centuries over the reigns of the late Stuart monarchs, from Charles II to Anne, much of the work you'll see is by foreign artists, Italians, Germans and Dutch among them. And if there's one of those ruler...