It might seem a bit odd travelling to Madrid to see an exhibition by a Scandinavian artist.... but the Swede Anders Zorn made the journey to Spain nine times in his career. He wasn't a painter we'd been familiar with, the Swedes lagging some way behind their Nordic neighbours in our art explorations; we'd been intrigued by the idea of seeing a retrospective of his work in Hamburg late last year but didn't make it, so we seized the chance to view the same show at the Mapfre Foundation in Madrid under the title Anders Zorn: Travelling the World, Remembering the Land . Zorn, who lived from 1860 to 1920, was a big name in his day, and it's easy to appreciate why from this exhibition. He had fantastic technique and worked in a broad range of genres, famed particularly for his portraiture. But he's quite difficult to pigeonhole, and as for some of his early subject matter, it really is rather sickly sweet. As the exhibition title spells out, Zorn explored the worl...
London's Courtauld Gallery has just reopened after renovation, and its first big exhibition, Van Gogh: Self-Portraits , starts on February 3. This show -- the first to cover the full range of Vincent van Gogh's self-portraiture -- will bring together around half those he created over his short career: 16 of them, from his time in Paris in 1886 to his stay in the asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in September 1889. It runs until May 8. At Tate Modern they're tackling another popular subject, surrealism, in the shape of Surrealism beyond Borders , which starts on February 24. The Tate says previous stories of surrealism have focused on Paris in the 20s -- not in our exhibition-going experience -- and that this one will rewrite the history of the genre, reaching across 50 years and looking at art in centres from Buenos Aires to Seoul. This show comes from the Met in New York; the New Yorker called it "deliriously entertaining", though the Wall Street Journal sai...