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...
Here in England, you can visit a car showroom again from June 1, but if you're hoping to get out to see some art during the month, it looks like you'll need to be on the European mainland. Museums across the Netherlands are reopening at the start of June, and one exhibition we can thoroughly recommend is George Stubbs -- The Man, The Horse, The Obsession at the Mauritshuis in The Hague, which is being extended through to August 30. Find out how, in the 18th century, Stubbs was able to produce portraits of horses of unparalleled realism and get the chance to admire Whistlejacket , his most famous work and one of the jewels of London's National Gallery. We saw a bigger, broader version of this show last year at the MK Gallery in Milton Keynes and loved it . Dutch museums will initially be operating at reduced capacity to allow for social distancing, and you need to book online tickets in advance to visit, specifying a timeslot for entry, though there's no need to we...