Skip to main content

New Exhibitions in September

The Bayeux Tapestry  exhibition at the British Museum starts on September 10; it's already sold out for this year but booking for the rest of the run, from January 1 through to July 11, will open on October 21. If you've never seen this most breathtaking of historical artefacts, you may want to seize the chance before it leaves London next year for its permanent home in Normandy, which will have been renovated during its absence. At Southampton City Art Gallery, we're promised an extensive exhibition of British art from the first half of the 20th century, drawing on the museum's own substantial holdings and those of the Ingram Collection . Running from September 26 to February 21,  Art Then! British Painting, Sculpture and Drawing, 1910-1960  will feature artists including Barbara Hepworth, Gwen John , Paul Nash and Eric Ravilious.   There might not be much new on in London this month, but we'll always have Paris. Starting at the Musée Jacquemart-André with Time...

Subscribe to updates

Opening in December: Colchester to St Moritz

Christmas is coming, and so maybe your thoughts are set on one of those German Christmas markets, your chilled hands warmed by a glass of mulled wine. Head to Hamburg, and you can take in a top-class exhibition as well. Caspar David Friedrich: Art for a New Age starts at the Kunsthalle on December 15, marking the 250th anniversary of the birth of the leading German Romantic painter, a major retrospective with more than 60 paintings looking at the new relationship between man and nature that Friedrich explored at the start of the 19th century. It's on until April 1. We're big Friedrich fans, and we've already enjoyed one exhibition of his work this year, in Schweinfurt in northern Bavaria. 
But let's head back to London, stopping in first at the National Gallery for the first-ever exhibition dedicated to a neglected 15th-century Florentine painter. That's Francesco Pesellino: A Renaissance Master Revealed in a free show from December 7 to March 10. Pesellino worked with contemporaries including Fra Filippo Lippi and obtained commissions from the Medici family, but died at the early age of 35. The show aims to shed light on this little-known artist as a story-teller who filled his work with splendid detail. 

Pop Art isn't really known for its female practitioners, but one of the few who did make a mark in a very male genre was Pauline Boty. She died, however, from cancer in 1966 at the age of only 28. A show at Gazelli Art House in central London, Pauline Boty: A Portrait from December 1 to February 24, is the first retrospective of her work in a decade. 
At Firstsite in Colchester, there'll be the first major exhibition since 1975 of the work of Lucy Harwood (1893-1972), who studied at Cedric Morris's East Anglian School of Printing and Drawing. Partially paralysed after a botched operation, Harwood abandoned the promise of a career as a pianist to switch to painting, developing a Post-Impressionist style. With over 100 works, Lucy Harwood: Bold Impressions is a free show running from December 2 to April 14. 

North of the border, the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh is showcasing The Printmaker's Art: Rembrandt to Rego from December 2 to February 25. Also starring in this exploration of 500 years of prints are Dürer, Goya, Hokusai, Picasso and Warhol. 

One of the greatest of Italian Renaissance portrait painters is Giovanni Battista Moroni, and there's a major retrospective of his output on at the Gallerie d'Italia in Milan from December 6 to April 1. Moroni (1521-1580): A Portrait of His Time will have loans from major Italian and international collections and show the artist's pictures alongside those of his contemporaries, including Titian, Veronese and Lorenzo Lotto

At the Palazzo Zabarella in Padua, you can see From Monet to Matisse: French Moderns 1850-1950, a selection of around 60 works from the Brooklyn Museum in New York. This show has been touring in Asia and North America but now appears to be in Europe for the first time. Cezanne, Millet, Morisot and Sisley are among the other artists featured from December 16 to May 12. 
We've been to a few of those places Monet painted along the Normandy coast, and they're pretty spectacular, but do they measure up to the Engadine in south-eastern Switzerland? Gerhard Richter has taken holidays in the area for a quarter of a century, and more than 70 works from museums and private collections recording his fascination with the Alpine landscape will be on show there across three venues from December 16 to April 13. Gerhard Richter: Engadin can be seen at Hauser & Wirth and the Segantini Museum in St Moritz, as well as at the Nietzsche House in Sils Maria.  

Images

Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840), Moonrise over the Sea, 1822, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Alte Nationalgalerie. © bpk/Nationalgalerie, SMB/Jörg P Anders
Pauline Boty (1938-1966), Colour Her Gone, 1962, Wolverhampton Art Gallery
Claude Monet (1840-1926), Rising Tide at Pourville (Marée montante à Pourville), 1882, Brooklyn Museum, New York. Photo: Brooklyn Museum

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

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...

Two Years in Provence

Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers at the National Gallery in London -- heavily hyped and certainly extremely popular. So is it worth the fairly hefty ticket price? Very much so. This is a beautifully put-together illustrated narrative of the two years Vincent spent in Provence, the peak period of his short career, from early 1888 to spring 1890. There are major paintings from galleries far and wide, and pictures you may never have seen before from private collections. It's not a big show -- only 61 works, just under a quarter of which are on paper -- but it is gorgeous.  From the National's description of the exhibition, with its reference to "bringing together your most loved of Van Gogh’s paintings from across the globe," you might be expecting an all-encompassing retrospective. But there are no pictures from the start of Vincent's artistic life in the Netherlands, from his time in Paris, or from his last few weeks in Auvers-sur-Oise before he died of self-inflicted g...