The Art Exhibitions Blog

Newly knighted Grayson Perry has one of the highest profiles in the art world, not just as a creator of pottery and tapestries, but as an author and television presenter, commenting on the big issues of our time. So no wonder the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh is staging the biggest ever exhibition of Perry's work over the summer, looking back at a 40-year career. Grayson Perry: Smash Hits is on from July 22 to November 12.  On a distinctly smaller scale, you can explore Victorian Virtual Reality at the Watts Gallery in Compton, near Guildford. It's a look at the 19th-century craze for stereoscopic photographs that allowed images to be viewed as if in three dimensions, and it contains more than 150 pictures from a collection built up over the decades by the Queen guitarist Brian May. This one runs from July 4 right through to February 25 next year.  Our next couple of shows are all about travels by the Impressionists, and our first stop is at the Musée des impressionism...

The mini skirt in the 60s, crinolines and corsets in the Victorian era, Tudor codpieces; fashion, clothing and how we dress has a lot to say about society, its values and the way people lived. In Style & Society: Dressing the Georgians at the Queen's Gallery in London, the curators give us an at times intimate insight into aspects of life under Georges I to IV, from 1714 to 1830. We also discover that fashion victims are nothing new, and who better to poke fun at those 18th-century foolish yet dedicated followers of fashion than the great Georgian caricaturist Thomas Rowlandson. Eagerly pursuing all the latest fads and trends, Rowlandson's somewhat portly gentleman is being manhandled by two tailors into a pair of the new tight-fitting soft-leather breeches that were all the rage among pleasure-seeking individuals in the mid-1780s. A contemporary account of the fitting process on the wall caption tells us that, like all the best satire, Rowlandson's was pretty close to...

The pace at which art developed at the end of the 19th and start of the 20th century was astonishing.  After Impressionism: Inventing Modern Art at the National Gallery in London provides a crash course in the new paths painters and sculptors across Europe were taking over the three decades from the final Impressionist exhibition in Paris in 1886 to the start of World War I. It's an absolutely absorbing, hugely enjoyable show. Much of what was new and shocking then is now very familiar, but this exhibition also manages to surprise at times; we certainly saw quite a bit of work we hadn't seen before.  If there was a father of modern art, it was perhaps Paul Cezanne. His Bathers (Les Grandes Baigneuses)  confronts you as you enter the show, its monumental figures flanked by an equally monumental plaster cast by Auguste Rodin for his Monument to Balzac , the great French novelist. But to appreciate just how different Cezanne was from what went before, look at this portrait ...