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New Exhibitions in June

Frida Kahlo: Now, there's a name to be reckoned with. More than just a painter, a global phenomenon, a superstar who died too young. And so coming to Tate Modern on June 25 we have  Frida: The Making of an Icon , surely set to be one of the most in-demand tickets in London this year. It's not so much a show about Frida, though, as about the cult of Frida: More than 30 of her works are accompanied by some 200 by contemporaries and those from later generations whom she inspired, and then there are over 200 objects exploring "Fridamania". The show had good reviews when it was on at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, and you've got until January 3 to catch it at the Tate.  While we're on the subject of mid 20th-century female icons whose candle burned out long before their legend ever did....  Marilyn Monroe: A Portrait  starts at the National Portrait Gallery on June 4. The Hollywood star would have been 100 years old this year, and this show, running until Sept...
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Opening and Closing in April

Even though more than half of adults in England have had a coronavirus jab, museums won't be welcoming visitors again before May. And with case numbers mounting in several European countries, who knows when they'll be reopening in France or the Netherlands. 

So let's concentrate on the few places in Europe where we have got confirmed dates for new exhibitions in April, starting in Madrid, where the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum is presenting a retrospective on Georgia O'Keeffe, one of the greatest names in 20th-century American art. A selection of around 80 works, providing a complete survey of O'Keeffe's career and including her famed flower paintings and images of New Mexico, opens on April 20 and runs until August 8. And assuming travel restrictions do ease at some point, if you can't see it in Madrid, this exhibition will be moving on to the Pompidou Centre in Paris and the Fondation Beyeler just outside Basel. 
Stockholm's National Museum reopens on April 6, with Zorn -- A Swedish Superstar the big attraction. This show is intended to mark last year's 100th anniversary of the death of Anders Zorn, arguably the biggest name in the history of Swedish painting and known for his naturalistic approach to recording rural life and his realistic nudes and portraiture. There will be about 150 works on display in the exhibition, which runs until August 29.

In Denmark, the National Gallery in Copenhagen reopens on April 21, with Kirchner and Nolde Up for Discussion. This show focuses on the inspiration found by the German Expressionists Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Emil Nolde in their travels through Africa and the Pacific in the period running up to and during World War I. How to reinterpret these works with their bold colours and brushwork but sometimes questionable subject matter in the light of modern attitudes? Nolde, part-Danish, pro-Nazi, presents a real challenge, as we know from a 2018 show in Edinburgh. 

Last chance to see....

It seems a very long time ago that we immersed ourselves in Olafur Eliasson: In Real Life at Tate Modern in London. Having been on and off at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao for more than a year, the show, which we don't recollect as being terribly suited to experiencing in a pandemic, finally closes there on April 11. A new Eliasson exhibition is due to open at the Fondation Beyeler in Basel in April, but there's no firm start date yet. 

Images

Georgia O'Keeffe, Series I--No.3, 1918, Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee. © Milwaukee Art Museum, VEGAP, Madrid, 2021
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Seated Nude with Fan, 1911, Museum Gunzenhauser, Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz
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