The Art Exhibitions Blog

You have to suffer for your art. At least, you do when you go to see Leonardo da Vinci at the Louvre in Paris, possibly the most hyped exhibition of the year. But by no means the best. There's some astonishing art in this show, of course there is. How could there not be? Superb drawings, beautiful paintings like La Belle Ferronnière . But, oh, the crush. We've been to crowded blockbuster shows in the past, but this was like a pre-Christmas Saturday shopping on Oxford Street. Quite a lot of it is really badly laid out. And this is not the definitive Leonardo retrospective that the curators were aiming for in this 500th anniversary year of his death. You won't, for example, see the Lady with an Ermine from Krakow, which was in the National Gallery Leonardo exhibition in London eight years ago. Now, the Louvre may have just about the most fantastic array of art anywhere, but your visit can be almost as stress-inducing as a peak summer departure from Gatwick. It...

It's not normally this crowded at the entrance to the Queen's Gallery in London; there are two queues outside the door, one to get tickets and a second of ticketholders waiting to actually enter the exhibition. But then, they don't normally have Leonardo da Vinci: A Life in Drawing  showing. Leonardo's pulling power is clear, as we reported earlier this year . Displays of his drawings from the Royal Collection to mark the 500th anniversary of his death attracted more than 1 million people at museums from Southampton to Glasgow. Now all those works, and more -- over 200 in all -- can be viewed together at the Queen's Gallery. It's quite a show. Because Leonardo was the definition of the Renaissance man. He was a painter, an engineer, an inventor, a scientist, an architect, and more besides. And the Royal Collection has the largest collection of his drawings in the world, more than 550. This is the only reliable portrait of Leonardo known to have survived, a...

It may not have escaped you that it's 500 years since the death of Leonardo da Vinci, and the big exhibition in Britain to mark the anniversary opens on May 24 at the Queen's Gallery in London. Leonardo da Vinci: A Life in Drawing  brings together more than 200 drawings from the Royal Collection for the largest show of the work of the ultimate Renaissance man in more than 65 years. Running until October 13, the display includes 144 drawings that are still on show until May 6 in 12 galleries around the UK. For something completely different, head to the Museum of London Docklands for an exhibition entitled Secret Rivers , looking at the history and the art surrounding the tributaries of the Thames such as the Tyburn and the Walbrook. May 24 to October 27, and entry is free. Another significant anniversary this year: 200 years since the birth of that most influential art critic John Ruskin. Following on from the enlightening show at Two Temple Place in London, Sheffield...

Renaissance nudes.... let's see what springs to mind. Well, there's Titian's Venus of Urbino , obviously, or maybe the Sleeping Venus started by Giorgione and finished by Titian. How about Botticelli's Birth of Venus , or Velázquez's Rokeby Venus , or one of those many Cranachs with Venus and Cupid ? And that's just the one Roman goddess, off the top of our heads. So, for an exhibition on the Renaissance Nude , at London's Royal Academy, organised in conjunction with the J Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, you might be expecting a bit of a blockbuster. But this show is a lot more low-key. There are some fine works of art, to be sure, with Raphael, Titian, Michelangelo and Leonardo represented, but it just all feels a wee bit flat. You see, as we left, we were thinking about what pictures might have given a bit of oomph to this exhibition, and one of the first we came up with was Jean Fouquet's Virgin and Child from the Royal Museum of Fine Arts ...

The exhibitions of Leonardo da Vinci drawings from the Royal Collection at 12 galleries around the UK are drawing such crowds that they are set to break attendance records. The show marking the 500th anniversary of Leonardo's death at the Millennium Gallery in Sheffield has produced a "fantastic response", Museums Sheffield said this week. "In the first 19 days since we opened we’ve welcomed over 25,000 visitors through the doors, which sets it on track to become the Millennium Gallery’s most popular exhibition ever." Glasgow's Kelvingrove Art Gallery reported the highest daily attendance figures of the eight museums that responded to our inquiries. It saw 18,408 visitors in the first 12 days after the displays opened simultaneously around the country on February 1. Liverpool's Walker Art Gallery  also reported more than 1,150 visitors a day, with a cumulative total of 19,603 by February 17. The Ulster Museum in Belfast reported 16,576 visitor...

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 , ...

A couple of big anniversaries dominate the 2019 exhibition calendar: It's 500 years since Leonardo da Vinci's death, and 350 since Rembrandt's. Van Gogh is celebrated in two major shows, while Bridget Riley and Antony Gormley are among the leading contemporary artists in focus. Here's a look at some of the standout dates for the diary in 2019, in more or less chronological order. January The first big show of the New Year comes at Tate Modern in London, with Pierre Bonnard: The Colour of Memory opening on January 23. The Tate is promising 100 of Bonnard's greatest works from museums and private collections around the world. Until May 6. To mark Rembrandt Year in the Netherlands, the Mauritshuis in The Hague is putting on show all of the 18 paintings in its collection that are by Rembrandt or have been attributed to him. January 31 to September 15. February Leonardo da Vinci: A Life in Drawing will see drawings by Leonardo in the Royal Collection exhibite...