The Art Exhibitions Blog

She was a highly successful artist in 17th-century Brussels, creating the sort of paintings you might have seen from Rubens or Van Dyck, but then she vanished from art history. It's only very recently she's been rescued from obscurity, her pictures rightfully reattributed.  Michaelina Wautier  comes to the Royal Academy in London on March 27 from the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, offering the first opportunity to encounter her work on a large scale. On till June 21.  And while we're on the theme of new discoveries, we've made quite a few at the Dulwich Picture Gallery down the years. The latest arrival there is a completely unknown name to us, from the Baltic:  Konrad Mägi  (1878-1925), described as a pioneer of Estonian modernism. More than 60 of his works are being shown in the UK for the first time in an exhibition that runs from March 24 to July 12.  No introduction is needed for David Hockney, and he's taking over the Serpentine Gallery on March ...

An advertising poster, you might think, is completely ephemeral -- just a sheet of paper that's here today, gone tomorrow, fading in the wind and rain and then pasted over by a newer, fresher advert. The most successful advertising, though, is anything but ephemeral. How many of those television commercials from your childhood still resonate today, for example? And as the advertising poster came into its own in late 19th-century Paris, it produced some of the most striking images in French art -- and became a collector's item in its own right.   Now those posters can be seen en masse at the Musée d'Orsay in  Art Is in the Street , a fun if somewhat bloated exhibition that gives due credit to the masters of the art: not just Alfons Mucha, Pierre Bonnard and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec , though they're here too, but also many others you've perhaps never heard of. This is a show that neatly brings together art and social history, often a winning formula in our eyes.  An...

Near the top of our list of exhibitions we want to go and see: retrospectives of relatively neglected women artists. Also right up there: Nordic painters we would like to learn more about. So it's no surprise we were keen to explore  Harriet Backer (1845-1932): The Music of Colours  at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris.  Backer was Norway's most renowned female painter of the 19th century, if little known outside her homeland. We must have seen her work in the past in the old National Museum in Oslo, but she'll have been one of many unfamiliar names. Now, though, she's getting the full retrospective treatment with a show that's already been seen in the Norwegian capital and in Stockholm.  Backer's paintings are mostly intimate depictions of interiors, both domestic and church. There's a calmness to them, and often a very interesting treatment of light, with Impressionism showing an influence from time she spent in France. One or two of the pictures on show are ...

You won't find a single work of art by Gustave Caillebotte in a British public collection. And yet he's one of the key figures in the Impressionist movement, whose 150th anniversary we're celebrating this year. But over in Paris, he's the subject of a big, big exhibition at the Musée d'Orsay; we jumped on the Eurostar to see it, and, even though  Caillebotte: Painting Men   was the most crowded show we'd been to in quite some time, we absolutely adored it.  And let's start with perhaps the pièce de résistance. Even if you don't know Caillebotte at all, you may have seen this image before; there's something about it that encapsulates late 19th-century Paris, with its view of an intersection between the broad new streets pushed through by that radical city-planner, Baron Haussmann, lined by elegant new buildings. This was the modern city, the modern world. Paris Street; Rainy Day : a painting in which there's nothing really happening, and there...

Are you ready? London's National Gallery says you're going to "be blown away by Van Gogh's most spectacular paintings in our once-in-a-century exhibition", Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers , which is on from September 14 to January 19. The show brings together "your most loved of Van Gogh’s paintings from across the globe, some of which are rarely seen in public," according to the museum. Given Vincent's prolific output and the plethora of Van Gogh shows, such hype may be a little overblown. Note that tickets are already selling well, and standard admission costs £28 before Gift Aid.  Still, the Van Gogh show may provide more bang for your buck than Monet and London -- Views of the Thames in the rather small exhibition space of the Courtauld Gallery (for which standard tickets are £16). Claude Monet stayed in London three times from 1899 to 1901, painting the Houses of Parliament, Charing Cross Bridge and Waterloo Bridge. He showed the pictures in Paris, ...

There's been a spate of exhibitions over the past few years aimed at redressing centuries of neglect of the work of women artists, and the Italian Baroque painter  Artemisia Gentileschi is the latest to come into focus, at the National Gallery in London, starting on October 3. Most of the works have never been seen in Britain before, and they cover a lengthy career that features strong female figures in Biblical and classical scenes, as well as self-portraits. Until January 24.  Also starting at the National on October 7 is a free exhibition that looks at Sin , as depicted by artists from Diego Velázquez and William Hogarth through to Tracey Emin, blurring the boundaries between the religious and the secular. This one runs until January 3.   Tate Britain shows this winter how JMW Turner embraced the rapid industrial and technological advances at the start of the 19th century and recorded them in his work. Turner's Modern World , starting on October 28, will inclu...

One of the most exciting exhibitions on in Paris at the moment is  Les Nabis et le Décor  at the Musée du Luxembourg, showing how Vuillard, Denis, Bonnard and others created truly stunning interior designs in the final decade of the 19th century. The Nabis took their name from the Hebrew word for prophet, and if you want to see how they were inspired, the place to go is the Musée d'Orsay, where there's a show centred on the painting that sparked an artistic revolution. It's called Sérusier's  The Talisman , a   Prophecy of Colour , and the picture is just 27 x 21 centimetres, painted in oil on wood by Paul Sérusier in October 1888. Sérusier was staying in Pont-Aven in Brittany with Paul Gauguin. Earlier that year, he'd been painting in a fairly conventional style, as we see elsewhere in this show, but now, as Maurice Denis related a decade and a half later, he listened to the guidance Gauguin gave him: "How do you see these trees? They are yellow. So, put ...