The Art Exhibitions Blog

Everybody loves a bargain when they're out shopping, don't they? Here's a tip: Get over to Normandy this summer for a great-value exhibition at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Caen. And it's all about shopping:  Merchandise as Spectacle: Art and Retailing 1860-1914 . Because even if you're not a fan of trailing round the shops, this is a fascinating slice of art and social history packed with paintings, posters and film. And they're practically giving it away!  As cities took on a new shape in the 19th century, department stores were one of the modern wonders of the urban scene; along with railway stations they were the cathedrals of the Victorian age. And like cathedrals and railway stations, they were a motif that drew the modern artist. This is one of the great Parisian stores, Le Bon Marché, as seen by the Swiss-born  Félix Vallotton .   Obsequious mustachioed salesmen show off their fabrics to the choosy female customers. There's hardly room to squeeze your...

From The Angel of the North to Another Place , Antony Gormley 's sculptures provide some fantastic open-air art experiences. How about indoors, though? We'll find out when he takes over the main galleries at the Royal Academy in London from September 21 to December 3. Over at Tate Britain, the biggest exhibition in 20 years of the works of William Blake  opens on September 11. The show is designed to offer visitors the chance to sense how Blake's radical and rebellious art must have come across when first shown two centuries ago. Until February 2. It's curtain up at the Foundling Museum on September 20 on Two Last Nights! Show Business in Georgian Britain , an exhibition looking at how similar, and how different, theatre-going was then and now. Hogarth is, of course, involved. The fat lady sings on January 5. And for those of us in south-east England, there's a chance to get a bit better acquainted with the Fauvist-influenced post-Impressionism of the 192...

A couple of months ago, we had the pleasure of seeing Edouard Vuillard on a big, big scale, in the shape of his exuberant 1890s interior designs in the wonderful show on Les Nabis et le Décor in Paris. But Vuillard's rather better known for pictures of a more modest nature, and the place to go right now to marvel at the intimacy and subtlety of his painting is the Holburne Museum in Bath. Edouard Vuillard: The Poetry of the Everyday is, surprisingly, the most extensive show of the artist's work in Britain in 15 years. It's not enormous, by any means, but its 40 or so paintings and prints have been drawn from galleries around Britain and from private collections; some may be familiar but others will be new and fresh. As a founder member of the Nabis, the group inspired by Paul Gauguin, Vuillard was at the cutting edge of an art that was becoming more concerned with shapes and colours than with the accurate representation of things. Patterns on wallpapers and on fabrics...

What a riot of colour! An explosion of sheer outrageous exuberance! The exhibition is called Les Nabis et le Décor , it's on at the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris, and it celebrates a decade or so at the end of the 19th century when a group of young French painters broke down the boundaries between the fine and decorative arts to produce work that was completely original. Who were the Nabis? Artists such as Edouard Vuillard, Pierre Bonnard and Maurice Denis, who wanted to move on from Impressionism, which they saw as being too close to reality. Nabi is Hebrew for prophet, and the Nabis wanted to proclaim a new art. They were fascinated by the flatness of Japanese prints, by the post-Impressionism and innovative use of colour of Paul Gauguin, and they wanted to create contemporary interiors that were utterly at odds with the historical pastiche in vogue at the time. The aim of this exhibition is to recreate some of those interiors, now largely dispersed. And the curators have succ...