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Opening and Closing in August

Jean-François Millet -- one of the most influential artists of the 19th century with his depictions of toiling country folk -- is the subject of a free exhibition in just one room at London's National Gallery that opens on August 7. Millet: Life on the Land  mainly features work from British museums, but has a star attraction in the shape of  L’Angélus from the Musée d'Orsay. On until October 19.  In eastern Germany, Chemnitz is one of this year's European capitals of culture, and one of the major exhibitions on their programme starts on August 10. Edvard Munch -- Angst  in the Kunstsammlungen am Theaterplatz will recall, in part, a visit by Munch to Chemnitz 120 years ago. And, of course, there'll be a version of The Scream . Until November 2.  On the other side of the country, a rather different offering at the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn: an exhibition devoted to the German filmmaker Wim Wenders, creator of Wings of Desire and Paris, Texas , and marking his 8...

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Opening and Closing in January

The first big exhibition of 2023 in London gets under way at the Royal Academy on January 21, and it features paintings by El Greco, Velázquez, Goya and Joaquín Sorolla, as well as textiles, silverware and many other artworks from Spain and Latin America. There are more than 150 objects to discover from the Hispanic Society of America in New York, the most extensive collection of Spanish art outside its homeland. Spain and the Hispanic World: Treasures from the Hispanic Society Museum & Library is on until April 10. 
David Hockney has achieved the status of a British national treasure, and he's the opening attraction at a whizzy new venue in King's Cross, the Lightroom. From January 25 to April 23, the artist provides his own commentary for David Hockney: Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away). In a cycle of six chapters, Hockney takes us through his career and constant experimentation with ways of seeing. The immersive large-scale projection of his work, lasting 45-50 minutes, is accompanied by a specially composed musical score. This is clearly a show that's cost a lot of money to put on, and standard timed tickets start at £25 and appear to go up to as much as £37.50 on the opening weekend for slots with low availability (once in, you can stay as long as you like). 

The Singer Laren museum, near Hilversum in the Netherlands, is clearly also expecting a lot of visitors for its Kees van Dongen exhibition, because it's extended opening hours for the show to seven days a week. On from January 17 to May 7, it will feature 100 or so works, focusing on the early years of his career in Holland and his breakthrough in Paris shortly after 1900. Brash colours, thick brushstrokes and quite a lot of nudes will be found in these paintings, which include loans from major museums in the Netherlands and France and numerous private collections. 

If Hockney and van Dongen are all colour, the Belgian Léon Spilliaert is very much shades of grey. At the Hermitage in Lausanne from January 27 to May 29, Léon Spilliaert: Avec la mer du Nord will show around 100 works from across his career. We caught a Spilliaert show at the Royal Academy before lockdown struck at the start of 2020 and were quite taken with his ghostly images of the deserted streets and promenade of Ostend by night. 

Last chance to see....

On at the National Gallery in London until January 8 is Winslow Homer: Force of Nature, a show that we couldn't really get enthused about, despite Homer's status as one of the great names in American art. 

Closing on the same day at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam is an eye-opening exhibition showing how much Golden Boy Gustav Klimt drew his inspiration from a surprising range of other contemporary artists. It's on again at the Belvedere in Vienna from February 3 to May 29.
Also finishing in Holland on January 8, Newcomers, the story of artists of Flemish origin in Haarlem in the Golden Age, at the Frans Hals Museum in that city. Some rarely seen Hals paintings are among the highlights. 

You have until January 15 to get to the Mauritshuis in The Hague to see Manhattan Masters, a small but select loan of Dutch Golden Age paintings from the Frick Collection in New York. There's a Vermeer, a Hals and a Rembrandt, and it's beautifully presented.

Art meets social history in Clara the Rhinoceros at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, which also ends on January 15. The story of an 18th-century animal celebrity, it's a truly fascinating show. 

Closing at the National Gallery on January 15 is Discover Manet & Eva Gonzalès, an exhibition that not only introduces you to the art of Gonzalès, Manet's only formal pupil, but also traces self-portraiture by women artists down the centuries. There's no charge to see this surprisingly extensive display. 

We really enjoyed Hockney's Eye at the Teylers Museum in Haarlem, which ends on January 29, an intriguing exploration of the artist's attempts to work out alternative approaches to traditional western perspective. 

January 29 is also the last day at the Petit Palais in Paris for a fantastic retrospective of Walter Sickert. We saw the show at Tate Britain during the summer and were fascinated by Sickert's innovative music-hall paintings and by the way his late work in the 1920s and 30s presaged Pop Art.  

Images

Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez, Portrait of a Little Girl, c. 1638-42, The Hispanic Society of America, New York
Léon Spilliaert, Night, 1908, Property of the Belgian State, Collection of the Wallonia-Brussels Federation. Photo: Luc Schrobiltgen, Brussels
Gustav Klimt, Life is a Struggle (The Golden Knight), 1903, Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art, Nagoya
Walter Sickert, The P.S. Wings in the O.P. Mirror, c. 1888-89. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rouen

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