The Art Exhibitions Blog

Visit the evocative Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller exhibition at the National Gallery in London and you could think it was sponsored by the Austrian Tourist Board, because these oil paintings so beautifully depict the magnificent Alpine scenery that has long attracted visitors.  Those towering mountains with their craggy grey peaks, so high they're topped with a glacier, the rich green meadows, some above the treeline, others on lower slopes or down in the valleys where the rivers meander. It's all there. But look a little longer and you become aware that some things are missing; where are those familiar chairlifts, cable cars, broad ski pistes, railways and roads? There are only a scattering of houses; maybe just a few inns and hotels catering for the adventurous, for Austrian tourism is in its infancy. That's because Waldmüller was born in Vienna in 1793 and died near the Vienna Woods in 1865.  Waldmüller: Landscapes , a free single-room display of just over a dozen paintings...

August is always one of the quietest months for new exhibitions, and this year is no different, but we do have one big event to alert you to, as well as two splendid shows that only have weeks to run.  The one major opening is  Gwen John: Strange Beauties  at the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh. Running from August 1 to January 4, this is a comprehensive retrospective of the work of the woman perhaps now seen as Wales's most significant artist, born 150 years ago this year. Maybe a little too comprehensive, according to some of the reviews of the show when it was on at the National Museum in Cardiff. The exhibition goes on to the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut, in February and then at the end of July next year to the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington DC. We saw a rather smaller Gwen John exhibition in Chichester in 2023.  Last chance to see.... Ending on August 23 is the exhibition at the Lakenhal in Leiden ...

We must confess that religious paintings are not our favourite subject, and we've tended to regard Spanish Catholic art as being, well, just a little too religious to cope with. So we approached the Francisco de  Zurbarán  exhibition at the National Gallery in London with a certain amount of trepidation. A degree of contrition is due.... Yes, there were monks, altarpieces and lots of saints, but we were blown away by Zurbarán's ability to depict textures and fabrics and to convey an intensity of feeling.  It's an absolutely excellent exhibition, full of truly beautiful paintings. Such religious art was intended to bring the faithful closer to God, to bridge the gap between Heaven and Earth, in an age when many could not read. Zurbarán was a master at it. Let's start with a saint: Just take a look at the fabrics, trimmings and gems in this picture. And the garments are even more striking when you are stood in front of this nearly life-size figure.  This is Casild...

No one before had ever painted horses like George Stubbs. Not only did they look incredibly lifelike, he seemed able to capture their individual character -- a talent that ensured he could command extremely high prices for his work from wealthy and influential patrons.  There's now a rare chance to appreciate the only one of the painter's outstanding lifesize equine canvases still in private hands in a small free exhibition,  Stubbs: Portrait of a Horse , in Room 1 at the National Gallery in London. This is Scrub, eight times a race winner, who like the gallery's Whistlejacket belonged to one of those rich patrons, the Marquess of Rockingham, and he commissioned both pictures in about 1762.  Scrub, again like Whistlejacket, was depicted not just as a racehorse, under the control of a jockey or stable boy, but in a grand manner, intended to serve as the steed in an equine portrait of George III, who had recently come to the throne. Other specialist painters would be u...

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 ...

If you're thinking about seeing  Wright of Derby: From the Shadows  at the National Gallery in London, be warned: There's not a huge amount to this show. The gallery describes it as "the first major exhibition dedicated to the British artist’s 'candlelight' paintings". Major? There are actually only 10 of Joseph Wright's oil paintings in this smallish display, and while they certainly include some of his finest, it's not a lot for your money.   Especially as the star attraction is  An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump , Wright's masterpiece of 1768, which you can usually see for free just yards away in another room in the gallery, in rather less cramped circumstances. Without a shadow of a doubt, it's an astonishing painting, somehow encapsulating the 18th-century Enlightenment -- the advance of reason and science -- in one image. Whenever we're in the National Gallery we almost always stop by to look at it for a minute or two.  There is...

Georges Seurat was on to something when he moved on from Impressionism to develop the radically different painting technique popularly known as Pointillism. He and his followers applied unmixed dots of pure colour to their canvases, separate little spots of paint that, the theory went, would come together in the eye of the viewer to create glowing, luminous pictures.  Seurat died young, and Pointillism didn't really hang around for very long either. But it produced some gorgeous art, and 50 or so of its finest creations are gathered at the National Gallery in London in  Radical Harmony: Helene Kröller-Müller's Neo-Impressionists . It's a glorious, light-filled, uplifting exhibition, and the most enjoyable show we've been to all year. "Art is harmony," Seurat said, and it's hard to argue with that in this show. These pictures are Helene Kröller-Müller's Neo-Impressionists, by the way, because more than half of them come from the Kröller-Müller Museum i...

A lot of new shows to tell you about this month as the summer holidays end and autumn arrives, all across Europe, from medieval to digital. The big event at the National Gallery in London is  Radical Harmony: Helene Kröller-Müller's Neo-Impressionists , running from September 13 to February 8. Kröller-Müller was a major early collector of work by the likes of Signac, Seurat, van Gogh and van Rysselberghe, and the bulk of the exhibits here come from the museum she opened in 1938 in the eastern Netherlands.    The most fashionable queen in history? That'll be Marie Antoinette, according to the Victoria & Albert Museum. And from September 20 to March 22, you can see Marie Antoinette Style  at the V&A, exploring how she became a fashion icon whose influence has lasted for more than two centuries -- down to Dior, Chanel and Manolo Blahnik. The exhibition will have more than 250 objects, some of which have never been seen before outside Versailles.  There are ...