Near the top of our list of exhibitions we want to go and see: retrospectives of relatively neglected women artists. Also right up there: Nordic painters we would like to learn more about. So it's no surprise we were keen to explore Harriet Backer (1845-1932): The Music of Colours at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris. Backer was Norway's most renowned female painter of the 19th century, if little known outside her homeland. We must have seen her work in the past in the old National Museum in Oslo, but she'll have been one of many unfamiliar names. Now, though, she's getting the full retrospective treatment with a show that's already been seen in the Norwegian capital and in Stockholm. Backer's paintings are mostly intimate depictions of interiors, both domestic and church. There's a calmness to them, and often a very interesting treatment of light, with Impressionism showing an influence from time she spent in France. One or two of the pictures on show are
There's been a spate of exhibitions over the past few years aimed at redressing centuries of neglect of the work of women artists, and the Italian Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi is the latest to come into focus, at the National Gallery in London, starting on October 3. Most of the works have never been seen in Britain before, and they cover a lengthy career that features strong female figures in Biblical and classical scenes, as well as self-portraits. Until January 24.
Tate Britain shows this winter how JMW Turner embraced the rapid industrial and technological advances at the start of the 19th century and recorded them in his work. Turner's Modern World, starting on October 28, will include paintings such as Rain, Steam, and Speed. The exhibition is on till March 7.
At the British Museum, October 22 sees the start of Arctic: Culture and Climate, exploring the stories behind the peoples who have inhabited the polar region for 30,000 years and the pressure they're now under as a result of climate change. The show runs through the winter until February 21.
Luckily, it will still be T-shirt weather in Newcastle, where the summer season continues in the Art Deco by the Sea exhibition that opens on October 17 at the Laing Art Gallery. This show revealing how the Art Deco style transformed the British seaside in the 1920s and 30s was previously on at the Sainsbury Centre in Norwich. Unfortunately, we weren't able to get to see it in the flesh, but it looked really good in this short BBC video tour. The deckchairs will be out until February 27.
Two shows that were on in London transfer to the Musée d'Orsay in Paris from October 13. Aubrey Beardsley traces the career of the English graphic artist whose illustrations shocked late Victorian society and who produced such an astonishingly prolific and lastingly influential body of work before his death at just 25. We caught this very comprehensive and thoroughly absorbing exhibition at Tate Britain just before lockdown and can recommend it.
Also well worth seeing at the Musée d'Orsay is Léon Spilliaert: Light and Solitude. The Belgian artist was prone to insomnia and stomach problems, and there's a haunting and troubled feel to the pictures he produced of his home town of Ostend as he wandered the empty streets in the middle of the night. The Royal Academy show in London was our first encounter with Spilliaert. Both these exhibitions run in Paris until January 10.
The Pompidou Centre is marking the 150th anniversary of Henri Matisse's birth (actually, it was last year) with a massive exhibition entitled Matisse, Like a Novel. It brings together more than 230 works tracing the career of one of the most influential of all modern artists, with loans from across France and beyond, including 1911's Still Life with Aubergines from the Musée de Grenoble. Looks like one of those potentially overwhelming Parisian shows, though at least it shouldn't be crowded in current circumstances.... October 21 to February 22.
To the Netherlands next, where the autumn exhibition at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam is 'Your Loving Vincent': Van Gogh's Greatest Letters. The museum owns more than 800 of the artist's letters, but due to their fragility, they rarely go on display. From October 9 to January 10, some of the most important will be on show alongside paintings they reference, such as The Bedroom.
And at the Kunstmuseum in The Hague, something a little different: Anders Zorn -- The Swedish Idyll. Zorn (1860-1920) was a contemporary of Edvard Munch and Vilhelm Hammershøi, but his naturalist approach to recording rural Swedish life and his realistic nudes and portraiture make him a very different painter to the screaming Norwegian or the mysterious Dane. With about 150 works, this show is on from October 10 to January 31, after which it goes on to the National Museum in Stockholm.
The Bucerius Kunst Forum in Hamburg will play host to the first comprehensive overview in Germany of Georges Braque's work for three decades. Georges Braque -- Dance of Shapes, starting on October 10, will cover the full gamut of the artist's career, from Fauvism, through the development of Cubism, and on to his late almost abstract painting. Created in conjunction with the Pompidou Centre, it runs until January 24.
Who is the most romantic artist of them all? Caspar David Friedrich, quite possibly, and about 60 of his works will be on view in Caspar David Friedrich and the Dusseldorf Romanticists at the Kunstpalast in Dusseldorf from October 15 to February 7. The curators are contrasting Friedrich and his early 19th-century colleagues working around Dresden with their rather less well-known contemporaries from the Rhineland; the show moves to Leipzig's fine arts museum in March.
Dresden was the birthplace of one of the most renowned of all contemporary artists, and there's a Friedrich-like romanticism in some of his paintings. See for yourself in Gerhard Richter: Landscape at the Kunstforum in Vienna from October 1 to February 14. It's the first exhibition anywhere to focus so extensively on this genre in Richter's work.
It's been a full two months since we mentioned a Rembrandt exhibition, so it's high time for another. October 31 is the opening date for Rembrandt's Orient: West Meets East in Dutch Art of the 17th Century at the Kunstmuseum in Basel. In the melting pot that was Amsterdam, the imagination of Rembrandt and other artists was fired by exotic cultures and artefacts. After it closes on February 14, it will transfer to the Museum Barberini in Potsdam, just outside Berlin.
Opening times, booking arrangements and lots of other aspects of museum visits continue to be in a state of flux, so do double-check gallery websites for the latest details.
Last chance to see....
Britain's King George IV was a womanising, dissipated, self-aggrandising spendthrift with a taste for bling, but he did amass a sumptuous art collection, as you can discover at the Queen's Gallery in London until October 11.
You've got the entire month of October to make it to Young Rembrandt at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, if you haven't seen it already. It closes on November 1. We saw it in Leiden last year and judged it the best exhibition of 2019.
Images
Artemisia Gentileschi, Self-Portrait as a Lute Player, about 1615-17, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut. © Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of ArtJoseph Mallord William Turner, Rain, Steam, and Speed -- the Great Western Railway, exhibited 1844, National Gallery, London. © National Gallery
Aubrey Beardsley, The Fat Woman, 1894, Tate, London
Anders Zorn, Midnight, 1891, Zornmuseet, Mora, Sweden
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