It's surely an anniversary the Tate has long been counting down to: JMW Turner was born in 1775, John Constable in 1776. To mark the 250 years of two of the country's greatest painters, Turner and Constable is on at Tate Britain from November 27 to April 12. Rivals with very different approaches to landscape painting, they were both hugely influential. More than 170 works are promised, with Turner's Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons and Constable's White Horse coming home from the US for the show. Before those two were even born, Joseph Wright of Derby had already painted his most famous picture, An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump . It'll be part of Wright of Derby: From the Shadows at the National Gallery from November 7 to May 10, which is intended to challenge the view of Wright as just a painter of light and shade and to illustrate how he used the night to explore deeper and more sombre themes. Only 20 or so works, however, making it a disappo...
Got any plans for the first month of 2021? Zoom call? Vaccination? An exhibition? Well, here's a few that are scheduled to open, if the authorities allow.
London's first big-name show of the year is at the Royal Academy. Francis Bacon: Man and Beast looks at how the boundaries between humans and animals are so often distorted in Bacon's violent pictures. Bacon was fascinated by the subject of animal movement throughout his career. This exhibition is scheduled from January 30 to April 18.
The previous lockdown meant the curtain failed to go up in November on Noël Coward: Art & Style at the Guildhall Art Gallery, but the show is now slated to begin its run on January 14. The exhibition, including previously undisplayed material, is being staged to commemorate the centenary of Coward's West End debut as a 19-year-old playwright. The writer of Brief Encounter and Mad Dogs and Englishmen had a huge impact on fashion and culture in the mid-20th century, and his influence continues to this day.
Fancy sightseeing in Venice? Then Bath is the place to go. The Holburne Museum is displaying 23 paintings by Canaletto of the Italian city, which are leaving their home at Woburn Abbey in Bedfordshire (currently being refurbished) for the first time in 70 years. The pictures, the artist's largest set of Venetian views, were commissioned by the 4th Duke of Bedford and usually hang high up in the dining room at Woburn, so this is a rare chance to see them up close. Canaletto: Painting Venice is on from January 22, let us hope, to September 5.
The Danish painter Peder Severin Krøyer enjoyed much success in Paris in the 1880s, and a show of his works is scheduled to hit the Musée Marmottan Monet in the French capital from January 28 to July 25. The title of the exhibition, The Blue Hour of Peder Severin Krøyer, is a reference to the bluish twilight experienced in Skagen at Denmark's northern tip, where Krøyer was one of the founders of the turn-of-the-century artists' colony. A show at Skagen in 2022 will celebrate Krøyer's links with France.
German galleries have been closed for several weeks but some provisionally hope to reopen in mid-January. The start of Impressionism in Russia at the Museum Barberini in Potsdam, just outside Berlin, has been delayed, but you can visit the show online already. Many of the 80-plus works come from the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, including Ilya Repin's On the Field Boundary, a picture we remember from an encounter with late 19th-century Russian artists at the Munch Museum in Oslo in 2019. The Potsdam show is scheduled to run until February 14 before transferring to the Museum Frieder Burda in Baden-Baden in March.
And at the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin, an opportunity to immerse yourself in one of those scenes that helped define the Cold War. In August 1961, a young East German border guard leapt across the barbed-wire barrier dividing East and West Berlin in a dramatic escape captured by a photographer on the western side. The Leap -- 1961 will use virtual-reality headsets to take you back six decades to experience that crack in the Iron Curtain, from January 14, in theory, until April 5.
Last chance to see....
January 2 is the very last day at the Museum of Modern Art in New York for the wonderful show about Félix Fénéon, anarchist, art critic and collector, and promoter of Neo-Impressionism. We saw it at the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris in 2019.
And the really splendid overview of The Golden Age of Danish Painting at the Petit Palais in Paris is due to finish on January 17. We absolutely loved this exhibition when we went to the National Museum in Stockholm to see it nearly two years ago.
Images
Francis Bacon, Study for Bullfight No. 1, 1969, Private collection. © The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved, DACS/Artimage 2020. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates LtdIlya Repin, On the Field Boundary: Vera Repina with Her Children, 1879, The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow
Film still from The Leap -- 1961, 2020. © Boris Hars-Tschachotin
Christen Købke, One of the Small Towers on Frederiksborg Castle, 1834-35, Designmuseum Denmark, Copenhagen. Photo: Pernille Klemp
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