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A Meagre Serving of Derby's Finest

If you're thinking about seeing  Wright of Derby: From the Shadows  at the National Gallery in London, be warned: There's not a huge amount to this show. The gallery describes it as "the first major exhibition dedicated to the British artist’s 'candlelight' paintings". Major? There are actually only 10 of Joseph Wright's oil paintings in this smallish display, and while they certainly include some of his finest, it's not a lot for your money.   Especially as the star attraction is  An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump , Wright's masterpiece of 1768, which you can usually see for free just yards away in another room in the gallery, in rather less cramped circumstances. Without a shadow of a doubt, it's an astonishing painting, somehow encapsulating the 18th-century Enlightenment -- the advance of reason and science -- in one image. Whenever we're in the National Gallery we almost always stop by to look at it for a minute or two.  There is...
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Opening and Closing in December

"Here she comes/You better watch your step/She's going to break your heart in two/It's true." Lou Reed wrote the song; Now the Kunsthalle in Hamburg brings you the pictures. Femme Fatale: Gaze -- Power -- Gender looks at how painters in the late 19th and early 20th centuries -- Pre-Raphaelites, Symbolists and Impressionists among them -- developed the image, as well as how modern women artists have attempted to reinterpret it. With around 200 exhibits, it's on from December 9 to April 10. 
Our preview this month is very much centred on Germany as that is where most of the openings are this December. In Berlin, the Sammlung Scharf-Gerstenberg is looking back a full century to the premiere of the seminal horror movie with Phantoms of the Night: 100 Years of Nosferatu. The curators explore how FW Murnau's 1922 film drew on sources such as Goya and Caspar David Friedrich and how this silent movie went on to influence the Surrealists as well as popular culture down to the present day. This one runs from December 16 to April 23. 

What if German history had turned out differently? Not once but many times over the last two turbulent centuries. What if the 1961 standoff between Soviet and US forces at Checkpoint Charlie had turned violent? What if the East German leadership had used force against mass protests in 1989? These are among the questions being asked at the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin from December 9 in Roads Not Taken. And what if you can't make it in 2023? Don't worry, it doesn't close until.... November 24, 2024! 

One show outside Germany: Christmas Eve sees the start of an exhibition at the Kunsthal in Rotterdam featuring the work of Dutch women artists from the first half of the 20th century. Charley Toorop is perhaps the best-known of the 24 painters and sculptors in Women's Palette 1900-1950, which runs until April 9. 

Last chance to see....

The small free show rediscovering the fascinating story of the severely disabled 19th-century miniature painter Sarah Biffin, "Without Hands", can be seen at London's Philip Mould gallery until December 21 and is well worth a visit.  

Still on until December 23 at the Guildhall Art Gallery in the City of London is an exhibition devoted to art Inspired! by music, writing and the theatre; alas, it's by no means the best show we've seen at the venue.

Images

John William Waterhouse, Circe Offering the Cup to Ulysses, 1891. © Gallery Oldham
Sir Thomas Lawrence, John Philip Kemble as Coriolanus, 1798, Guildhall Art Gallery, City of London



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