The Art Exhibitions Blog

Georges Seurat devised the Neo-Impressionist painting technique popularly known as Pointillism. He didn't live long and left only a small body of work, of which seascapes were a recurring motif; a couple of dozen paintings and drawings from summers spent on the northern coast of France will be brought together for  Seurat and the Sea   at the Courtauld Gallery in London from February 13 to May 17. Lucian Freud gained recognition as one of the greatest of British portrait painters for his intensely observed works, often of nudes. From February 12 to May 4, the National Portrait Gallery is putting on  Lucian Freud: Drawing into Painting , which will be the first exhibition in Britain to focus on his creations on paper, some of which have never been on public display before.   Ramses and the Pharaoh's Gold  is a travelling exhibition of treasures from Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities: 180 of them, with the coffin of the long-lived Ramses II among highlig...

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...

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...

Frans Hals had 27 blacks in his paintbox, according to Vincent van Gogh. How many whites did James McNeill Whistler have in his? You can make your own judgement in  Whistler's Woman in White: Joanna Hiffernan  at the Royal Academy in London. Jo, the red-headed Irishwoman who modelled for the paintings at the heart of this excellent exhibition, was also Whistler's lover (and distinctly different from  Whistler's Mother ), and she was central to his early development as an artist.  As you enter this show, this is the picture of Jo you can see in the distance through the doorway to your right:  Symphony in White, No 1: The White Girl . Whistler started the painting in Paris late in 1861, posing Hiffernan for exhausting all-day sessions, and he submitted it to the Royal Academy's annual exhibition in London the following year.  "Some stupid painters don't understand it at all," Hiffernan wrote, adding that Whistler thought that "praps the old duffers may...

It's one of the most iconic of all German paintings, and it's one of the star attractions of a show in Berlin that's steeped in the Romanticism of the early 19th century. The picture is Caspar David Friedrich's  Wanderer above the Sea of Fog. A curly-haired man in a dark green suit is seen from behind, standing atop a rocky outcrop with his walking stick and gazing down into an eerie landscape in which mists swirl around mountain tops. The exhibition is Wanderlust: From Caspar David Friedrich to Auguste Renoir in Berlin's Alte Nationalgalerie, looking at the wanderer as a central theme in 19th-century art across Europe. The museum has a fine Friedrich collection itself, but the curators have pulled in some splendid paintings from across the continent. The  Wanderer above the Sea of Fog has made the short trip from Hamburg. The story starts with the discovery of nature, even at its wildest, as a phenomenon to be explored close up in the 18th century. In Jako...