Opening in January, with Any Luck

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. 

Another Dane now: Vilhelm Hammershøi was born just over a decade after Krøyer and in the 1880s began to use photography as an artistic tool in collaboration with fellow artist Valdemar Schønheyder Møller, leading to unusual cropping and shading in his paintings. Emergences: Vilhelm Hammershøi, Valdemar Schønheyder Møller and Photography includes rarely seen works from private collections and is planned to be on at the Hirschsprung Collection in Copenhagen from January 20 to May 24. It can be seen at the Thiel Gallery in Stockholm afterwards. 

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. 

We never got to the Tate to see the Andy Warhol show there in 2020, and we almost certainly won't be able to travel to Cologne to see the next stop for this retrospective of the high priest of Pop Art, but if you're in the vicinity, Andy Warhol Now is due to be on at the Museum Ludwig until April 18 once it resumes operations. Marilyn Monroe, Campbell's Soup and more on the menu. 

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 Ltd
Ilya 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