The Art Exhibitions Blog

Does this image seem vaguely familiar? There's a very similar painting in the National Gallery in London. It's by the Finnish artist Akseli Gallen-Kallela, and it depicts  Lake Keitele in the centre of the country at the start of the 20th century; an apparently peaceful and isolated midsummer scene, seemingly devoid of the impact of man. He made several versions of this picture.  But as so often in art, a painting can be more than it appears at first glance, as we were to find out in  Akseli Gallen-Kallela: Picturing Finland  at the Belvedere in Vienna. Those zigzag lines on the water are a natural phenomenon created by the wind and the currents, but the artist uses them to give his work a far deeper meaning. When he painted this, Finland was still a Russian possession, and Gallen-Kallela was heavily involved in the Finnish nationalist movement. For him, those stripes represented the traces left by the boat rowed across the lake by the old sage, Väinämöinen, in the F...

The big new show in London this month is Donatello: Sculpting the Renaissance at the Victoria & Albert Museum, starting on February 11. Donatello created a revolution in sculpture in 15th-century Florence, and this show, with some 130 objects, includes much work that has never been seen in the UK before. It's the last in a series of interlinked exhibitions following shows in Florence and Berlin that were highly praised. On until June 11.  The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford takes us to ancient Crete beginning on February 10 for Labyrinth: Knossos, Myth & Reality . The palace of Knossos was the centre of the Bronze Age Minoan civilization, and legend had it that an enormous labyrinth was built there to hold the Minotaur, a creature half-man, half-bull. This exhibition includes more than 100 objects that have never left Greece before as well as two immersive experiences. It runs until July 30. Curiously, the new show at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge is also about the a...

While we're sitting here in Britain waiting for any indications of an easing in the coronavirus lockdown that might allow museums and galleries to reopen, some countries on the European mainland are moving, albeit cautiously, towards letting the public back in. So yes, if you're in the right place, you may be able to get out to enjoy an exhibition in May. And that's important, because however much art you might be able to access online, it's never going to be the same as getting up close to the real thing. Austria and Germany look to be leading the way. In Vienna, there's a last chance at the Belvedere from May 15 to June 1 to catch Into the Night , a look at the role played by clubs and cabarets around the world in the story of modern art -- the antithesis of social distancing. Late 19th-century Paris, Harlem in the 1920s, Weimar-era Berlin: It's a great subject, and there's some fascinating art on show (especially Toulouse-Lautrec's almost abstract...

There are some outstanding exhibitions on in Vienna at the moment ( Bruegel and Schiele , to name but two). Unfortunately, Gustav Klimt: Artist of the Century at the Leopold Museum isn't up to the same standard. For a stunning Klimt experience, far better to head to the Belvedere, where you can see not just The Kiss , but a lot of other great paintings too. The Leopold is marking the 100th anniversary of the deaths of both Klimt and Schiele this year, but unlike the Schiele show in the basement, the Klimt retrospective is a bit muddled and not very well laid-out. If, like us, you know a bit but not a lot about Klimt, you'll find it somewhat confusing and irritating. And much of the really good stuff has stayed in the Belvedere, which has the biggest collection of Klimt works in oil. In the first room, the curators give you a detailed biography of the artist, a man who loved a lot of women and fathered quite a lot of children. It's a bit of a shock to learn that Consue...