The Art Exhibitions Blog

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...

She was a highly successful artist in 17th-century Brussels, creating the sort of paintings you might have seen from Rubens or Van Dyck, but then she vanished from art history. It's only very recently she's been rescued from obscurity, her pictures rightfully reattributed.  Michaelina Wautier  comes to the Royal Academy in London on March 27 from the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, offering the first opportunity to encounter her work on a large scale. On till June 21.  And while we're on the theme of new discoveries, we've made quite a few at the Dulwich Picture Gallery down the years. The latest arrival there is a completely unknown name to us, from the Baltic:  Konrad Mägi  (1878-1925), described as a pioneer of Estonian modernism. More than 60 of his works are being shown in the UK for the first time in an exhibition that runs from March 24 to July 12.  No introduction is needed for David Hockney, and he's taking over the Serpentine Gallery on March ...

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the death of Claude Monet, the Impressionist par excellence, and unsurprisingly there's no shortage of Monet-related exhibitions, particularly in France, to mark the occasion.  So if you want to fill 2026 with luminous, atmospheric landscapes and dreamy water lilies, we have some dates for your diary.  We'll take the big shows in chronological order, which means crossing the border into Germany for the first of them. We can vouch for it that  Monet on the Normandy Coast: The Discovery of Etretat  at the Städel Museum in Frankfurt is an excellent exhibition; we saw it in Lyon late last year. Monet was fascinated by the chalk cliffs around the fishing village of Etretat with their eroded formations -- creating bizarre doors and needles -- and he produced a series of pictures showing the light and weather effects on the land and sea. There are 24 works by him on display; Monet's the star, but you'll also find dozens mo...

The White Cliffs of Dover, Beachy Head and the Seven Sisters, the Needles and Durdle Door -- the southern English coastline has plenty of spectacular chalk and limestone features, but just across the Channel the French have got something equally if not more stunning: the chalk cliffs at Etretat.  Surrounding the bay of what was once a small fishing village, three natural arches and a 70-metre freestanding needle of chalk are a breathtaking sight (we were there a couple of years ago), and they're now a huge tourist attraction. But even before the tourists got there, some of the most famous names in French art had discovered a motif of which they rarely tired; as Normandy Tourism puts it: "Nature has carved unusual shapes out of the white cliffs in Etretat, and as a result, this picturesque spot attracted many Impressionist painters, who sought to capture the cliffs on canvas."  Etretat, Beyond the Cliffs: Courbet, Monet, Matisse  is devoted to those depictions of the white...

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...

An exhibition of early 20th-century Ukrainian art from museums in Kyiv has been touring Europe since late 2022, and now it's coming to London. In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900-1930s will be on at the Royal Academy from June 29 to October 13, bringing together about 65 works. Kazymyr Malevych, Sonia Delaunay, Alexandra Exter and El Lissitzky are perhaps the best-known names.  Divorced, beheaded, died; divorced, beheaded, survived. Those are the fates of course of the Six Wives: The Stories of Henry VIII's Queens at the National Portrait Gallery from June 20 (a bonus point if you can name them in the correct order). This exhibition, running till September 8, will look back through the centuries from depictions of the six wives in contemporary art and popular culture to the Tudor period and the paintings of  Hans Holbein the Younger .     Next door, at the National Gallery, there's another in their series of free medium-sized exhibiti...

What motif could be more Impressionist than a view of the cliffs or beaches of the Normandy coastline? And with this year marking the 150th anniversary of the first Impressionist exhibition, we've been to Normandy to take in a show focusing on that very subject.     Impressionism and the Sea  at the Musée des impressionnismes in Giverny sets the scene as you enter, with the cries of screeching seagulls and the sound of waves lapping on the beach. The curators bring you Claude Monet, Paul Gauguin, Camille Pissarro and other names you'll be expecting, but there are some lesser-known artists to conjure with too.  Partly, we assume, because there are so many other exhibitions about Impressionism going on this year, most of the pictures in Giverny have an unfamiliar feel. The stand-out Monet doesn't show the beach at Etretat , with its striking cliff formations, but the strand and cliffs at Les Petites Dalles, further east, beyond Fécamp.  Nevertheless, it's ver...