The Art Exhibitions Blog

From The Angel of the North to Another Place , Antony Gormley 's sculptures provide some fantastic open-air art experiences. How about indoors, though? We'll find out when he takes over the main galleries at the Royal Academy in London from September 21 to December 3. Over at Tate Britain, the biggest exhibition in 20 years of the works of William Blake  opens on September 11. The show is designed to offer visitors the chance to sense how Blake's radical and rebellious art must have come across when first shown two centuries ago. Until February 2. It's curtain up at the Foundling Museum on September 20 on Two Last Nights! Show Business in Georgian Britain , an exhibition looking at how similar, and how different, theatre-going was then and now. Hogarth is, of course, involved. The fat lady sings on January 5. And for those of us in south-east England, there's a chance to get a bit better acquainted with the Fauvist-influenced post-Impressionism of the 192...

It was by accident, not design, that we found ourselves viewing the art collection of a German-turned-Swiss arms manufacturer. On our recent trip to Paris, we were on our way to see the excellent show about the Nabis at the Musée du Luxembourg when we walked past the Musée Maillol, which was showing a loan exhibition from the Emil Bührle Collection in Zurich, with Monet, Manet, van Gogh and more. That looks interesting, we thought, let's pop in and see it on the way back. So we did, and it turned out to be very enjoyable. But back to the paintings in a minute. Because, as debate rages over the funding of art and museums, with the Sackler family now under attack for their pharmaceuticals company's role in the opioids drug-abuse crisis sweeping America, it's impossible not to acknowledge a certain degree of queasiness about the way this collection, one of the most prestigious in private hands in Europe, was built up. Emil Georg Bührle was a controversial figure who di...