The Art Exhibitions Blog

There's so much Surrealist art in the sprawling  Surrealism  show at the Centre Pompidou in Paris that you're unable to take it all in. When you reel back out into the daylight of the tubular walkway on level 6, high above the square below, you'll struggle to recall everything you've seen. Like a half-remembered dream....  Yes, dreams, forests, monsters, alchemy, the occult, genesis, Alice in Wonderland, all those stimuli on which the Surrealists drew are examined in detail, in a show marking the 100th anniversary of the Surrealist Manifesto. It's overwhelming, an assault on the senses, right from the start. And it's crowded, even more so than the Caillebotte exhibition just across the Seine at the Musée d'Orsay, and that's saying something. We really can't pretend that we took in more than a fraction of the explanations as to why the Surrealists were moved to produce what they did, but what we do recollect are some astonishing works of art. Because...

If surrealist art is all about exploring the subconscious, well then, Dorothea Tanning seems to have had quite a lot of subconscious to explore. An exhibition looking back on her 70-year career at Tate Modern in London reveals an artist who came late to surrealism but who probably created more memorable and disturbing images than any other of the rare women who were able to gain a foothold in what was a rather male-dominated movement. Tanning was born in 1910 in Galesburg, a small town in Illinois, where, she said, "nothing happened but the wallpaper." She went to Chicago and New York in search of a career as an artist and came across surrealism in a New York exhibition in 1936. Just before World War II she travelled to Paris, but the outbreak of war forced her back across the Atlantic. In 1942, she met the German surrealist artist, Max Ernst , her future husband, who saw this picture on her easel on their first encounter. Ernst suggested the title, Birthday , to ma...

It's the 500th anniversary this year of the death of Leonardo da Vinci, and to mark the occasion 144 drawings from the Royal Collection are being exhibited simultaneously in 12 museums across the UK. Leonardo da Vinci: A Life in Drawing  starts on February 1, with 12 works each on show at the Ulster Museum in Belfast,  Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery , Bristol Museum & Art Gallery , the National Museum in Cardiff, Derby Museum & Art Gallery , Kelvingrove Museum in Glasgow, Leeds Art Gallery , the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, Manchester Art Gallery , the Millennium Gallery in Sheffield, Southampton City Art Gallery  and Sunderland Museum & Winter Gardens . Admission at most venues is free. Until May 6. All the drawings and more go on show at the Queen's Gallery in London starting in late May, with a selection at Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh from November. For something completely different, head for the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. Jeff Koons , ...