The Art Exhibitions Blog

We've got rather more modern and contemporary art than usual in our preview this month, starting with the first ever museum show in the UK of Wayne Thiebaud, the US artist who died in 2021 at the age of 101. Thiebaud made his name in the 1960s painting quintessentially American subjects -- pinball machines, hot dogs, deli counters and cakes -- in vibrant colours.  Wayne Thiebaud: American Still Life  is on at London's Courtauld Gallery from October 10 to January 18.  Those sweet treats should provide enough sustenance for the short walk across Waterloo Bridge to the Hayward Gallery for  Gilbert & George: 21st-Century Pictures . This show highlights work the besuited pair have created since the start of the millennium, tackling themes such as sex, corruption, religion and death. On from October 7 to January 11, and it's perhaps one to miss if you're likely to be easily offended.  A rather different experience awaits at the British Library, in the form of...

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...

The Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition  this year is a little bit special: It's the 250th, and Grayson Perry heads the committee that's picked the 1,200 or so art works on show from June 12 to August 19. Concurrently, the RA is putting on The Great Spectacle: 250 Years of the Summer Exhibition telling the story from Joshua Reynolds to the present day. There are two linked shows at the National Gallery as well, running from June 11 to October 7. Thomas Cole: Eden to Empire  is the first exhibition in the UK devoted to the British-born American landscape artist inspired by Turner and Constable (tickets can be had for less than £10 on weekdays, so the National is clearly not expecting Monet-size crowds.) At the same time, there's a free display with Ed Ruscha 's modern take on Thomas Cole's work in Room 1. Tate Britain marks the centenary of the end of World War I by examining the immediate impact on British, French and German art.  Aftermath , running from ...

The blockbuster is Picasso 1932: Love, Fame, Tragedy at Tate Modern, which runs from March 8 to September 9. It's the first ever solo Picasso show there, and the Tate is calling it one of the most significant it's ever staged. More than 100 works will take the visitor on a month-by-month journey through a pivotal year in Picasso's life. When it was on at the Musee Picasso in Paris, this exhibition was called 1932: Année Erotique , but you can imagine the Tate might have had trouble with that for its posters on the Tube... Be warned, this show appears to set a new standard for London ticket prices at £22 (they cost half that -- 12.50 euros -- in Paris). The National Portrait Gallery offers Victorian Giants: the Birth of Art Photography   from March 1 to May 20, featuring pictures by Lewis Carroll and Julia Margaret Cameron. There's more camerawork at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich in The Great British Seaside , including new material by Martin Parr. Ta...