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Four Scotsmen Walk into an Art Gallery....

France had the Impressionists, Germany had the Expressionists, and Italy had the Futurists, but Scotland -- well, Scotland had the Colourists. Four of them, to be precise, creating quite distinctive, often very exuberant art in the first few decades of the 20th century, and you can see them right now in  Scottish Colourists: Radical Perspectives  at The Arc in Winchester.  We've featured the Colourists on this blog before , but you don't get the chance to see them in southern England that much, and this Winchester show (previously on at Dovecot Studios in Edinburgh) places them in context with some of their British and European contemporaries, some of whose work carries quite an impact. All in all, it's a very enjoyable exhibition.  The Colourists were JD Fergusson, SJ Peploe, FCB Cadell and Leslie Hunter. All influenced by developments in Post-Impressionist French art, and notably by the bold use of colour and line of the Fauvists , they didn't actually exhibit tog...
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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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