The Art Exhibitions Blog

It's a perfect day in Venice, that most picturesque of cities, most desired of travel destinations. Just look at those fluffy clouds in the sky. Not too hot, not too sunny. Scarcely more than a light breeze to stir the surface of the canals. Certainly no hint of a flood in the offing for this miracle of civilisation constructed in a lagoon in the Adriatic Sea.   Your gondola awaits. Climb aboard for an hour or so, for a trip around the sights. Your guide is none other than Canaletto, that master of the 18th-century painted cityscape and a man who has helped shape our vision of Venice right down to the present day. This is Canaletto's Venice Revisited , at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. There are 24 stops on this tour, 24 canvases by Canaletto. They've come to Greenwich from Woburn Abbey in Bedfordshire, where they normally hang in the dining room, but which is now undergoing restoration. This exhibition offers a rare chance to view all these paintings at eye le...

You'd have had to be on another planet or in a remote part of the world without Internet access to have missed that it's fifty years since Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the Moon (or since NASA faked the entire thing, if you subscribe to the conspiracy theory).  Only 10 other men have followed their giant leap, and none since 1972, which is something surely nobody would have expected in 1969. Thomas Cook was even printing luggage labels for the package tourists it was going to take there, and you can see one of them in  The Moon , the latest exhibition at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich.  The curators use the anniversary not only to relive the breathtaking scenes from 1969 and to explore how the race to get there developed but to examine the significance and allure of the Moon around the world, before bringing us bang up to date with the latest plans for a permanent human presence on Earth's only satellite.  As the show reveals, human...

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...