The Art Exhibitions Blog

We'll start off this month by going back to Tuscany in the early 14th century, to the beginnings of modern western European painting. Duccio and Simone Martini were among those in the city of Siena reinventing art. There are more than 100 exhibits in  Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300-1350 , which runs from March 8 to June 22 at the National Gallery in London. The show was previously on at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and reviews were generally very good. There's a second show opening later in the month at the National, and it's quite an exotic one, devoted to a 19th-century Mexican artist whose work has not been shown in Britain before.  José María Velasco: A View of Mexico , running from March 29 to August 17, features sweeping landscapes by a painter who was interested not only in the natural world but in the rapid modernisation of his country.  Just around the corner at the National Portrait Gallery, there's a rather more conventional draw:  Edvard Munch ...

Newly knighted Grayson Perry has one of the highest profiles in the art world, not just as a creator of pottery and tapestries, but as an author and television presenter, commenting on the big issues of our time. So no wonder the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh is staging the biggest ever exhibition of Perry's work over the summer, looking back at a 40-year career. Grayson Perry: Smash Hits is on from July 22 to November 12.  On a distinctly smaller scale, you can explore Victorian Virtual Reality at the Watts Gallery in Compton, near Guildford. It's a look at the 19th-century craze for stereoscopic photographs that allowed images to be viewed as if in three dimensions, and it contains more than 150 pictures from a collection built up over the decades by the Queen guitarist Brian May. This one runs from July 4 right through to February 25 next year.  Our next couple of shows are all about travels by the Impressionists, and our first stop is at the Musée des impressionism...

Let's get straight to the point -- Frans Hals: The Male Portrait at the Wallace Collection in London is easily the most satisfying exhibition we've seen in a very long while, since before you-know-what.   This is not a big blockbuster show; there are just 13 paintings to admire, widely spaced, but the presentation and the thought that's gone into the indispensable audio commentary that accompanies the display make for a truly stunning gallery-going experience. A range of experts take you beyond the art on the canvas into a deeper appreciation of the history, the social attitudes and fashion of the Dutch Golden Age, and of Hals's influence on later painters. It was Vincent van Gogh who said that Hals had 27 blacks in his repertoire, and they're all here, though this is by no means a monochrome show. Hals and Rembrandt were the two greatest portraitists of 17th-century Holland, and while there have been plenty of exhibitions celebrating those portraits in recent year...

It's not just about the art, it's about the event, the occasion. Seeing, yes, but being seen is perhaps for some just as important. That's clear right from the start of  The Great Spectacle: 250 Years of the Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy. There are lots of reasons for visiting this show: It's an enlightening history of a great British institution; it offers a potted run-through of 2 1/2 centuries of British art (admittedly, minus a couple of big names); and astonishingly, while the 250th Summer Exhibition itself elsewhere in the RA was drawing big crowds, this 10-room display was surprisingly empty, at least when we went, giving plenty of space for contemplation and enjoyment. And what you see first is the Summer Exhibition summed up by William Powell Frith, that great Victorian painter of crowd scenes, in  A Private View at the Royal Academy, 1881 . What a line-up of distinguished gallery-goers: William Gladstone, Anthony Trollope, Lillie Langtry, Ellen ...