The Art Exhibitions Blog

Are you ready? London's National Gallery says you're going to "be blown away by Van Gogh's most spectacular paintings in our once-in-a-century exhibition", Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers , which is on from September 14 to January 19. The show brings together "your most loved of Van Gogh’s paintings from across the globe, some of which are rarely seen in public," according to the museum. Given Vincent's prolific output and the plethora of Van Gogh shows, such hype may be a little overblown. Note that tickets are already selling well, and standard admission costs £28 before Gift Aid.  Still, the Van Gogh show may provide more bang for your buck than Monet and London -- Views of the Thames in the rather small exhibition space of the Courtauld Gallery (for which standard tickets are £16). Claude Monet stayed in London three times from 1899 to 1901, painting the Houses of Parliament, Charing Cross Bridge and Waterloo Bridge. He showed the pictures in Paris, ...

You can go to any number of exhibitions of late 19th-century Western artists -- Whistler , van Gogh , Vuillard  to name just three -- and see how their work was significantly influenced by Japanese prints, which presented a radically different way of looking at things from a country that had just opened up to the outside world. But don't imagine that the traffic was only one-way.  Japanese artists came West, and you can see some of the results of the fusion in  Yoshida: Three Generations of Japanese Printmaking at Dulwich Picture Gallery in south-east London.   The story starts in 1900, when Hiroshi Yoshida and a fellow Japanese artist were in London during a lengthy tour of America and Europe. The first time they attempted to visit the Dulwich gallery, on May 24, a policeman told them it didn't exist. They finally made it at their third attempt five days later, though Hiroshi had to leave his camera at the entrance, and their names are recorded in the visitor'...