Art history? No, we're starting this month with an exhibition that we'll be tagging #artherstory on social media. Now You See Us: Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920 opens at Tate Britain in London on May 16, with the aim of charting the path of women to being recognised as professional artists over the centuries. More than 100 will be represented: relatively widely known names such as Artemisia Gentileschi, Angelica Kauffman , Gwen John and Laura Knight , as well as the more obscure or neglected -- Levina Teerlinc, Mary Beale and Sarah Biffin . It's on till October 13, and as we've just seen a show in Germany focused on women artists over much the same timescale, we'll be keen to compare and contrast. Let's stick with a female theme. A short stroll up Millbank and across Lambeth Bridge, and you're at the Garden Museum, where from May 15 to September 29 you can see Gardening Bohemia: Bloomsbury Women Outdoors . The show takes you around the gardens of Vane
Those government-designated hotbeds of coronavirus infection that are England's public museums are due to open again on May 17, and all those exhibitions that have been stuck behind closed doors for months now will suddenly be able to welcome the public. So there's a lot of new shows to get through this month....
When the first lockdowns hit Europe last year, David Hockney was at his home in Normandy, and he spent three months recording in drawings on his iPad how nature in his immediate surroundings evolved day by day. The results can be seen at London's Royal Academy from May 23 to September 26 in David Hockney: The Arrival of Spring, Normandy, 2020, which features 116 works. You'll be familiar with Hockney's iPad drawings if you saw A Bigger Picture, the exhibition of his landscapes at the RA in 2012 (astonishing to think it was that long ago). The Normandy show goes on to Bozar in Brussels in October.
Tate Modern also has a French theme, with the start on May 18 of The Making of Rodin, a look at the importance of the use of plaster in the work of Auguste Rodin as he upended the rules of classical sculpture more than a century ago. There will be over 200 works on display, many for the first time outside France, in a show created in collaboration with the Musée Rodin. To November 21.
Two big exhibitions for history fans are due to start at the British Museum. Nero: The Man behind the Myth begins on May 27, using the latest research to re-evaluate the Roman emperor famed for his cruelty, debauchery and madness. More than 200 objects from Rome, Pompeii and elsewhere in his sprawling empire invite you to judge if he had a bad press, and you've got until October 24 to do so.
Thomas Becket: Murder and the Making of a Saint gets under way on May 20. Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was once close to King Henry II, but the two men fell out and the prelate was murdered in his own cathedral in 1170, an event that sent shock waves through medieval Europe. The display include an entire stained-glass window from Canterbury, which visitors to the show get the rare chance to see up close at eye level. This one ends on August 22.
The Victoria & Albert Museum has brought together more than 300 artefacts for Epic Iran, an exploration of 5,000 years of the country's art and culture right up to the present day. Among them is this golden drinking vessel from the days of the Persian Empire. The exhibition is scheduled to run from May 29 to September 12.
Also opening at the V&A on May 22 is Alice: Curiouser and Curiouser. It's an immersive show charting how Lewis Carroll's story of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland grew into a global phenomenon over a century and a half, inspiring fashion, art, ballet and theatre. Until December 31.
May 28 brings Tudors to Windsors: British Royal Portraits to the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, a show originally scheduled for April last year. It will feature more than 150 portraits created over five centuries by artists ranging from Hans Holbein to Andy Warhol. Many are from the National Portrait Gallery, which is currently closed for redevelopment. Ends October 31.
Want to see one of Poland's most beloved artworks for free? Head to the National Gallery from May 21 to August 22 for Conversations with God: Jan Matejko's Copernicus. Matejko's Astronomer Copernicus is on loan from the Jagiellonian University in Krakow. It was painted in 1873 to mark the 400th anniversary of the birth of Nicolaus Copernicus, who proposed that it was the Sun rather than the Earth that was at the centre of the universe.
Many of us may be seeing more of the English seaside than usual this year, so it's perhaps appropriate that Turner's English Coasts is the new exhibition at Sandycombe Lodge in Twickenham, the house JMW Turner designed and lived in from 1813 to 1826. It features 11 watercolours and engravings from Turner's most commercially successful period and runs from May 22 to September 5.
From the sublime to the surreal at the Whitechapel Gallery, where May 19 sees the start of Eileen Agar: Angel of Anarchy, with 150 works the largest retrospective to date of an artist who moved from cubism to surrealism to abstraction over a long career. Opening the same day, Phantoms of Surrealism takes a broader view of the role of women in the surrealist movement in Britain in the 1930s. The Agar show runs until August 29, while the phantoms are on till December 12.
Down in Cornwall, Penlee House in Penzance is staging a retrospective of the work of Laura Knight, who in the 1930s became the first woman to be elected a full member of the RA since the Georgian era. Laura Knight: A Celebration will feature more than 60 works and will run from May 17 to September 16. Note that a bigger Laura Knight show will open at MK Gallery in Milton Keynes in October, and there's also more of her in Challenging Convention at the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle from May 17 to August 21, a show which brings together three other prominent British women artists of the early 20th century, Vanessa Bell, Dod Procter and Gwen John, and has loans from more than 40 public UK collections.
Meanwhile, Gwen's brother Augustus gets his own exhibition at the Lady Lever Art Gallery in Port Sunlight on the Wirral. There are more than 40 works on show in The Last Bohemian: Augustus John, which runs from May 17 to August 30. Among Wales's best-known painters, Augustus and Gwen are highlighted in the recent BBC series on The Story of Welsh Art.
Just down the coast from Eastbourne, Hastings Contemporary presents Seaside Modern: Art and Life on the Beach from May 27 to September 26, examining how artists, photographers and advertisers viewed the growing popularity of the seaside holiday in the first half of the 20th century. Paul Nash, LS Lowry and the ever-present Laura Knight all feature, as does Eileen Agar....
Back to the 19th century at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, which is creating a major exhibition showcasing its own collection of Pre-Raphaelites: Drawings & Watercolours (expect to see more of this sort of thing with museums and galleries strapped for cash for loans). Rossetti, Burne-Jones and Holman Hunt are among the artists featured from May 18 until June 20.
The largest exhibition of Barbara Hepworth's work since the sculptor died in 1975 opens on May 21 at the museum that bears her name in her home town of Wakefield. Barbara Hepworth: Art and Life will display some of her most celebrated sculptures, and there's plenty of time to catch this one, because it's on until February 27.
President Emmanuel Macron announced this week that museums in France can reopen on May 19 if conditions allow, and the Musée d'Orsay in Paris has already said it will be starting its Swiss Modernities (1890-1914) exhibition on that date. Running until July 25, it includes the work of painters such as Giovanni Giacometti and Félix Vallotton. Just across the river at the Musée de l'Orangerie, again from May 19, is Magritte/Renoir: Surrealism in Full Sunlight, This compares René Magritte's output from 1943 to 1947, when he found inspiration in Auguste Renoir, with the Impressionist's own masterpieces. Last day July 19.
There's one new show in Spain to mention. May 7 sees the opening at the Guggenheim in Bilbao of The Roaring Twenties, looking back a century to the rapid pace of change in cities like Berlin and Paris as people sought to leave memories of war and disease behind them. It's on until September 19.
Images
Marble bust of Nero, Italy, around 55 AD. Photo by Francesco Piras; © MiC
Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Cagliari
Rhyton, 500-330 BC, Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Joseph Mallord William Turner, Ramsgate, c. 1824. Photo © Tate
Christian Schad, Maika, 1929, Private collection. © Christian Schad Stiftung, Aschaffenburg, VEGAP, Bilbao, 2021William Rothenstein, Portrait of Augustus John, 1899. © National Museums Liverpool
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