The Art Exhibitions Blog

When we visit the Netherlands or come across the Dutch abroad, we always feel they know how to relax and enjoy life. Visit Museum De Lakenhal in Leiden and you'll see in their latest exhibition that this joie de vivre has a long tradition. The gallery is looking back 400 years to the birth in the city of Jan Steen, who frequently painted his countrymen having a good time. And yes, on occasion, perhaps just a little bit too much of a good time.  In this show,  At Home with Jan Steen -- 400 Years of Merrymaking , you will discover why the Dutch use the expression "a Jan Steen household" for a home where, well, things are maybe just a bit too free and easy. This is the painting that sums it up: What a jolly time everyone is having in The Merry Family . To the accompaniment of music, they are indeed making merry: singing, drinking and smoking. All are taking part; the old, the young, and even a baby wielding a spoon. The baby's not partaking of the alcohol or tobacco, adm...

How was it that all but a few women artists became excised from art history? It wasn't as if there weren't plenty of them around, making stunning paintings, and lots of money, particularly in the Low Countries in the 17th and 18th century. Art history is of course now being rewritten, to rescue the forgotten from oblivion. To find out what happened and how the record is being put right, you should go to Ghent to see Unforgettable: Women Artists from Antwerp to Amsterdam, 1600-1750 at the Museum of Fine Arts.  Michaelina Wautier is a case in point: a woman who could compete on her own terms with the Baroque masters of the southern Netherlands, but whose work was disregarded or attributed to men until the last couple of decades. Wautier may well be the biggest rediscovery among forgotten women painters in recent years -- she's got an exhibition of her own on now at the Royal Academy in London -- and one of her pictures is among the stand-out works at this show in the heart ...

It takes a split second these days to create an image, and how many millions are recorded daily on mobile phones, possibly never to be looked at again? You can see it all happening in the palatial surroundings of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, definitely one of those tick-off destinations on many travellers' bucket lists, where those in search of instant pictorial satisfaction throng the imposing statue-lined staircase for a selfie or pout for a photo in the café under the spectacular cupola. But we're not in Vienna for a quick fix, we're at the KHM to admire something more enduring in the shape of art produced almost 500 years ago by Rembrandt and his pupil Samuel van Hoogstraten that was intended to mislead your eyes into seeing the real in the unreal. Artistic deception is the story at the centre of  Rembrandt--Hoogstraten: Colour and Illusion , one of the most engrossing and best-staged exhibitions we've seen this year. And, somewhat surprisingly, a show wi...

Let's start the New Year in Edinburgh, with two of the biggest names in Pop Art.  Eduardo Paolozzi, perhaps the pioneer of the genre with his collages from the late 1940s, was born in the Scottish capital a century ago, and you can see a retrospective of his varied work from January 27 in National Galleries Scotland's Modern Two building. Paolozzi at 100 is on until April 21.  Meanwhile, in Edinburgh's Old Town, Dovecot Studios will be presenting an exhibition of Andy Warhol's colourful commercial textile designs, dating back to the 1950s, before he found fame in New York. Andy Warhol: The Textiles is on from January 26 to May 18, when it might just be warm enough for you to enjoy an ice-cream sundae, if your tastebuds have been tickled by Warhol's fabric.  Rembrandt's earliest known works from the time when he was starting out as a painter in Leiden are pictures depicting four of the senses, and they're brought together at the city's Lakenhal museum f...

Come out of  Turning Heads at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp and you'll start looking at the people of Belgium's second city in an entirely different way. You'll encounter living examples of the faces you have just seen on wood or canvas in the exhibition galleries, painted four or five hundred years ago by Peter Bruegel the Elder , Peter Paul Rubens and Jacob Jordaens. And realise that they're not that different.... This is such a fun show at Antwerp's newly renovated main art gallery, and an enlightening one. Alongside the great Flemish masters, there are pictures by the stars of the Dutch Golden Age -- Rembrandt , Hals and Vermeer -- and a lot more, exploring a genre that plays a big role in the painting of the Low Countries: the study of heads, both as preliminary sketches for spectacular group pictures and then as works of art in their own right.  Such paintings are known in Dutch as  tronies  -- portraits that aren't really portraits but chara...

Frans Hals is one of the three greatest artists of the Dutch Golden Age, along with Rembrandt and Vermeer, and if you go along to  Frans Hals  at the National Gallery in London, you'll understand why, hopefully. He was a master portraitist, who appears to have been able to apply paint to canvas almost without effort and to dazzling effect. That loose brushwork was a huge influence on artists in late 19th-century France. There are about 50 paintings in this exhibition, the first Hals retrospective for several decades, and they're mostly terrific.  And yet.... we found this show oddly underwhelming, surprisingly flat. The pictures are glorious, but the presentation seemed curiously contextless. Nowhere do you get a feel for the society in Holland and Hals's home city of Haarlem that allowed this upsurge in artistic creativity at the start of the 17th century, the bourgeoning capitalism, expanding middle class and economic growth that permitted all these men in up-to-the-min...