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Opening and Closing in January

Let's kick off the New Year with something a bit out of the ordinary: Brasil! Brasil! The Birth of Modernism at London's Royal Academy. This show features more than 130 works by 10 key 20th-century Brazilian artists, and most of them have never been on show in the UK before, providing a chance to look at modern art in a way that breaks from the European and North American perspective we're so used to. On from January 28 to April 21.   There are more familiar names at Bath's Holburne Museum: Francis Bacon, Peter Blake, Gerhard Richter and Andy Warhol among them. Iconic: Portraiture from Bacon to Warhol  focuses on the middle of the 20th century when many artists began to use photographs as sources for their paintings. The exhibition runs from January 24 to May 5.  From January 22, the Louvre in Paris offers the chance to take  A New Look at Cimabue: At the Origins of Italian Painting . Cimabue, one of the most important artists of the 13th century, was among the...
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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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