Opening and Closing in May

Frida Kahlo: Now, there's a name to be reckoned with. More than just a painter, a global phenomenon, a superstar who died too young. And so coming to Tate Modern on June 25 we have Frida: The Making of an Icon , surely set to be one of the most in-demand tickets in London this year. It's not so much a show about Frida, though, as about the cult of Frida: More than 30 of her works are accompanied by some 200 by contemporaries and those from later generations whom she inspired, and then there are over 200 objects exploring "Fridamania". The show had good reviews when it was on at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, and you've got until January 3 to catch it at the Tate. While we're on the subject of mid 20th-century female icons whose candle burned out long before their legend ever did.... Marilyn Monroe: A Portrait starts at the National Portrait Gallery on June 4. The Hollywood star would have been 100 years old this year, and this show, running until Sept...

Opening and Closing in May

It's a motif that recurs in art down the centuries, going back to ancient times: a woman at a window. A new show at Dulwich Picture Gallery in south-east London builds an exhibition on the theme around its own Girl at a Window by Rembrandt with more than 40 works going right up to the present day, though don't expect Vermeer or Caspar David Friedrich. Reframed: The Woman in the Window runs from May 4 to September 4.

We've seen Edvard Munch in Oslo at the old Munch Museum and the old National Gallery, but we've never been to the significant Munch collection at KODE in Bergen, collected during the painter's lifetime by the industrialist Rasmus Meyer. Eighteen works from the collection, dating from the 1880s and 1890s, will be on show at the Courtauld Gallery from May 27 to September 4 in Edvard Munch: Masterpieces from Bergen. Will this be as popular as the Van Gogh Self-Portraits show at the Courtauld, which finishes on May 8 but is completely sold out?

A free exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge brings together more than 100 works from its own collection as well as from the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the Fondation Custodia in Paris for True to Nature: Open-Air Painting in Europe 1780-1870. Constable, Corot and Turner were among the artists who sought new ways of depicting the natural world as travel became easier and equipment more compact. On from May 3 to August 29.

The Tudors: Passion, Power and Politics at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool presents the five Tudor monarchs from Henry VII to Elizabeth I and the people around them -- some of the most recognisable characters in English history, including Thomas Cromwell and William Shakespeare -- through around 100 objects, many from the National Portrait Gallery. The exhibition runs from May 21 to August 29; a smaller version of this show has been on at the Holburne Museum in Bath.

The Pallant House Gallery in Chichester has the first major exhibition to feature British artist Glyn Philpot (1884-1937) in almost four decades. Glyn Philpot: Flesh and Spirit will show how the painter moved from society portraits in the Edwardian era to a more modernist style, including sensitive depictions of black sitters, among them the actor Paul Robeson. This one is on from May 14 to October 23.

From May 17, the Belgian pointillist Théo van Rysselberghe is the subject of a show at Singer Laren in the Netherlands. Théo van Rysselberghe: Painter of the Sun will encompass his society portraits, land- and seascapes and nudes. It runs until September 4.

At the Pompidou Centre in Paris, they're offering a comprehensive look at Weimar Germany, though with close to 900 artworks and documents on show it does sound a little overwhelming. Germany / 1920s / New Objectivity / August Sander features paintings and drawings by George Grosz, Otto Dix and Jeanne Mammen, among others, as well as August Sander's photographs of Germans of all classes in People of the 20th Century. In Paris from May 11 to September 5, and then the show moves on to the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art north of Copenhagen in October.

On in Denmark before then: Krøyer and Paris, starting on May 13 at the Skagens Museum at the northern tip of Jutland. This celebrates the work of one of the leading Skagen painters, P.S. Krøyer, alongside French art that inspired him, with Courbet, Caillebotte, Monet and Sisley among those represented, in a show that continues until September 18.

It's the 300th anniversary of the birth in Venice of Bernardo Bellotto, nephew of Canaletto and painter of many fine city views, particularly of Dresden, where he worked for Frederick August, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland. Enchantingly Real at the Zwinger in Dresden has Bellotto's cityscapes on display from May 21 to August 28.

Last chance to see....

There's no charge to get into a small display at the National Gallery in London to see what all the fuss was about over Thomas Gainsborough's Blue Boy, once the most expensive picture in the world. Until May 15, after which he flies back home to California.

The best art exhibition we've seen so far this year is Whistler's Woman in White: Joanna Hiffernan at the Royal Academy, which ends on May 22. Some gorgeous art, intelligently presented. Tickets are still available.

Images

Tom Hunter, Woman Reading Possession Order, 1997, from the series Persons Unknown, courtesy the artist

Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger, Queen Elizabeth I ('The Ditchley Portrait'), c. 1592. © National Portrait Gallery, London

Peder Severin Krøyer, Summer Evening on Skagen Sønderstrand, 1893, Skagens Kunstmuseer, Skagen, Denmark. © Skagens Kunstmuseer

James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Symphony in White, No 1: The White Girl, 1862, National Gallery of Art, Washington

What's On in 2026

Coming up in 2026: Lots more big exhibitions starring women artists, including Frida Kahlo, Leonor Fini, Leonora Carrington and Gwen John , as well as a host of names from the 17th-century Low Countries. And women almost certainly embroidered the Bayeux Tapestry, a contender for this year's hottest ticket in London. Here's a selection of shows that have caught our eye around Britain and Europe, in more or less chronological order; as ever, we make no claim to comprehensiveness, and our choice very much reflects our personal taste. January We'll start the year at the Fondation Beyeler on the outskirts of Basel, where they're devoting an exhibition to Paul Cezanne . Focusing on the artist's later years, the show will bring together some 80 oil paintings and watercolours. January 25 to May 25. February Two leading British women artists feature in exhibitions opening this month, with the National Museum in Cardiff honouring the best-known female painter Wales has pr...

The Highs and Lows of the Nahmad Collection

It's widely referred to as the world's most valuable private art collection : the one assembled over decades by the Nahmad brothers, dealers Ezra and David . Worth an estimated $3 billion or more, it's said to include hundreds of Picassos. Some 60 works from it are now on display at the Musée des impressionnismes in Giverny as The Nahmad Collection: From Monet to Picasso . Intended, apparently, to demonstrate how art developed from the early 19th century through Impressionism and on to the start of the modern era, towards the liberation of colour and form, this is an exhibition that ends up coming across as somewhat incoherent. We're not really told much about the Nahmads or their collecting choices -- and as you search the Internet, things become slightly mysterious: Is Ezra alive or dead? The art, presumably, is supposed to speak for itself, but it's a rather eclectic, if not confusing, selection; some of the works are fantastic, some are distinctly ho-hum. Let...

Carrington: You've Met Leonora, Now Discover Dora

Carrington: She only wanted to be known by her surname, unwittingly posing a conundrum for art historians, curators and the wider world a century later. Because it's another somewhat later Carrington, the long-lived Surrealist and totally unrelated, who's recently become Britain's most expensive woman artist. But today we're at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester to see an exhibition not about Leonora but about Dora Carrington. She hated that name Dora -- so Victorian -- but with Leonora so much in the limelight (and the subject of a recent show at Newlands House in Petworth, just a few miles up the road), the curators at the Pallant didn't have much option, so they've had to call their retrospective Dora Carrington: Beyond Bloomsbury . Leonora was a bit of a rebel, as we found out in Petworth. Dora too. But we ought to respect her wish. Carrington, then, has been a bit neglected recently; this is the first show of her works in three decades. And while ther...

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