The Art Exhibitions Blog

Hogarth and Europe : It's an intriguing-sounding exhibition at Tate Britain; the chance to see that great chronicler of 18th-century London life, William Hogarth, compared with his contemporaries in Paris, Venice and Amsterdam. Hogarth "was not alone," the Tate tells us on its website. "Across Europe, artists were creating vivid images of contemporary life and social commentary." So we went along in the expectation that we were going to see Hogarth's story-telling and insight reflected in similar scenes from across the continent.  Alas no. Somewhere between the conception and the execution, another idea seems to have taken hold. For one thing, few of the pictures on show here from French, Italian or Dutch artists are a patch on Hogarth, and they don't really live up to the billing of vivid social commentary. And there also appears to be a determined attempt to present Hogarth as an ingrained misogynist and racist, failing to live up to 21st-century value...

Laura Knight's paintings are full of strong women -- in many senses of the word. And though to us in the early 21st century, many of her pictures may appear at first glance somewhat conventional, Knight was an artist who 100 or so years ago not only broke sharply with convention, including in her subject matter, but who also broke through the glass ceiling to reach the very top of her male-dominated profession.  Laura Knight: A Panoramic View  at the MK Gallery in Milton Keynes is a splendid, thoroughly enjoyable, often surprising and rather uplifting exhibition. The curators have brought together more than 160 works from all corners of the country -- from Bolton and Blackpool, Perth and Dundee, Falmouth and Canterbury, from some towns that we didn't even realise had art galleries.  Knight was born in 1877, and when she trained as an artist, she wasn't allowed to join life-drawing classes because she was a woman. But change was rapid in the 20th century, and in the mid-19...

Google The Great Wave , surely the most widely known, the most easily identifiable image in Japanese art, and, in less than a second, you'll get more than 1 billion results, some of which might even tell you something about its creator, the great painter and printmaker Katsushika Hokusai.  Of course, in the days before the Internet and search engines, you'd have needed to get some sort of reference book off the shelf to find out about something like that. Where to turn first? An encyclopedia, possibly.  The Great Picture Book of Everything : that sounds perfect.... let's see; it's got depictions of plants and animals, distant lands and distant peoples, myths and gods, inventions. Who's created the illustrations? Wow, Hokusai himself.... Hokusai: The Great Picture Book of Everything at the British Museum in London puts on public display for the first time more than 100 drawings Hokusai made in the 1820s to 1840s for an encyclopedia that was never actually published....

Let's get straight to the point -- Frans Hals: The Male Portrait at the Wallace Collection in London is easily the most satisfying exhibition we've seen in a very long while, since before you-know-what.   This is not a big blockbuster show; there are just 13 paintings to admire, widely spaced, but the presentation and the thought that's gone into the indispensable audio commentary that accompanies the display make for a truly stunning gallery-going experience. A range of experts take you beyond the art on the canvas into a deeper appreciation of the history, the social attitudes and fashion of the Dutch Golden Age, and of Hals's influence on later painters. It was Vincent van Gogh who said that Hals had 27 blacks in his repertoire, and they're all here, though this is by no means a monochrome show. Hals and Rembrandt were the two greatest portraitists of 17th-century Holland, and while there have been plenty of exhibitions celebrating those portraits in recent year...