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...

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 ...

It's one of art's most famous images, though probably not the version you're most familiar with. A black-and-white lithograph of The Scream will be on show at the British Museum in London from April 11 to July 21 as part of Edvard Munch: Love and Angst . The exhibition will focus on the Norwegian Expressionist's prints, with nearly 50 from the Munch Museum in Oslo and a total of 83 artworks on display. Two key sections of the show demonstrate his passion for women, and his fear of them, the museum says. The next show at the National Gallery is of new work by Irish-born Sean Scully. Sea Star 's abstract stripes and chequerboards with their thickly applied paint are inspired by JMW Turner's seascape The Evening Star . April 13 to August 11, and admission is free. At the British Library, a new exhibition looks at Writing: Making Your Mark across 5,000 years and seven continents. More than 100 objects range from ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs through the first ...

The Dutch Golden Age wasn't just Rembrandt, Hals and Vermeer. A little further inland from the North Sea, the painters of Utrecht -- Dirck van Baburen, Hendrick ter Brugghen and Gerard van Honthorst -- pursued a very different course, echoing the drama and light effects pioneered in the far south of Europe by Caravaggio. That's the theme of Utrecht, Caravaggio and Europe at the Centraal Museum in Utrecht from December 16 to March 24, with 60 loans from across Europe and the US. Caravaggio's Entombment of Christ  from the Vatican can be seen for the first four weeks of the exhibition. At the Petit Palais in Paris, there are two shows that are a little out of the ordinary. The strange dream-like images of late 19th-century Belgian Symbolist Fernand Khnopff  are the subject of a major retrospective in an exhibition subtitled The Master of Enigma. Even odder are the drawings of Jean Jacques Lequeu , who died in poverty in 1826 having created his own architectural fantasy wo...

There are some outstanding exhibitions on in Vienna at the moment ( Bruegel and Schiele , to name but two). Unfortunately, Gustav Klimt: Artist of the Century at the Leopold Museum isn't up to the same standard. For a stunning Klimt experience, far better to head to the Belvedere, where you can see not just The Kiss , but a lot of other great paintings too. The Leopold is marking the 100th anniversary of the deaths of both Klimt and Schiele this year, but unlike the Schiele show in the basement, the Klimt retrospective is a bit muddled and not very well laid-out. If, like us, you know a bit but not a lot about Klimt, you'll find it somewhat confusing and irritating. And much of the really good stuff has stayed in the Belvedere, which has the biggest collection of Klimt works in oil. In the first room, the curators give you a detailed biography of the artist, a man who loved a lot of women and fathered quite a lot of children. It's a bit of a shock to learn that Consue...

A century after Egon Schiele's death, his art is still too shocking for some. Last year, the Vienna tourist board's posters advertising the centenary with images of his nudes were only allowed on the London Underground with the naughty bits covered up . And, as Egon Schiele: The Jubilee Show -- Reloaded at the Leopold Museum in Vienna shows in a thoroughly splendid exhibition, many of the Austrian Expressionist's works remain startlingly fresh. How far ahead of his time he must have seemed before World War I. Warning: There is no censorship in this show or in this blog post. Here he is, bequiffed and staring moodily out at you in this  Self-Portrait with Striped Shirt  made in 1910, the year he turned 20. You feel he could have just got off a tram at the Karlsplatz with a skateboard tucked under his arm. Or what about this? As if dancing to some throbbing beat under the influence of mind-altering substances, the artist portrayed himself in the same year as a  Kne...