So the question to ask about the Michaelina Wautier exhibition at the Royal Academy in London must be: Is the hype about this recently rediscovered 17th-century woman painter justified? The answer: Yes, absolutely. She really does merit acknowledgement -- and not just because we recognise a woman working in a man's world. Her art shows she was extremely talented, producing superb canvases covering a diverse range of subject matter. What's more, she painted very large pictures featuring male nudes, such as Bacchus, despite her contemporaries thinking that was not the sort of thing a female artist could do. And her portraits are wonderfully lively and lifelike. This is Martino Martini, an Italian Jesuit missionary who travelled to China in the 1640s. It was painted in 1654, when Michaelina was around 40. Martini, who was staying at the Jesuit College in Brussels, is depicted wearing traditional Chinese silk court attire and a hat of fur and feathers. A rather substantial...
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...