The Art Exhibitions Blog

It's widely referred to as the world's most valuable private art collection : the one assembled over decades by the Nahmad brothers, dealers Ezra and David . Worth an estimated $3 billion or more, it's said to include hundreds of Picassos. Some 60 works from it are now on display at the Musée des impressionnismes in Giverny as  The Nahmad Collection: From Monet to Picasso . Intended, apparently, to demonstrate how art developed from the early 19th century through Impressionism and on to the start of the modern era, towards the liberation of colour and form, this is an exhibition that ends up coming across as somewhat incoherent. We're not really told much about the Nahmads or their collecting choices -- and as you search the Internet, things become slightly mysterious: Is Ezra alive or dead? The art, presumably, is supposed to speak for itself, but it's a rather eclectic, if not confusing, selection; some of the works are fantastic, some are distinctly ho-hum.  Let...

Summer's almost here, and it's perhaps the time for outdoor pleasures; there certainly aren't that many big exhibitions to tell you about in June. So let's start with a small one, a free display at London's National Gallery. Picasso Ingres: Face to Face , running from June 3 to October 9, brings together for the first time Pablo Picasso's 1932 painting Woman with a Book , from the Norton Simon Museum in California, and the work that inspired it, the National's own Madame Moitessier by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Picasso saw the Ingres portrait in 1921 and was enthralled by it. "Lesser artists borrow," Picasso said. "Great artists steal."  Summer means the seaside, so what better destination to see an exhibition than the Towner in Eastbourne. Following 2021's superb John Nash retrospective, this year's big event puts the spotlight on the pioneering female collector who opened the Wertheim Gallery in London in 1930 and the arti...

Work, work, work, of course. It was Thomas Edison who said genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration, and for every artist's light-bulb moment, there'll be a lot of hours sitting in the studio.     A Century of the Artist's Studio: 1920-2020  at the Whitechapel Gallery in east London takes us to a hundred of those studios to witness the hard labour of the creative process in an ambitious and often fun exhibition.  "Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday...." intone the voices in the video From March to April.... 2020 by the Dubai-based Ramin and Rokni Haerizadeh and Hesam Rahmanian. Tehching Hsieh took it further.  One-Year Performance saw him clocking on daily. In Darren Almond's A Real Time Piece nothing disturbs the eerie quiet of the artist's empty studio apart from the loud thwock once a minute of the changing display of the mechanical digital clock on the wall. In this other piece by Almond there's not a sound to be heard, but if the...

Picasso's artistic progress from teenager to 30-something comes under scrutiny from March 13 at the Sainsbury Centre in Norwich in  Pablo Picasso: The Legacy of Youth . More than 20 of his works will be on show in this exhibition looking at his advance to the head of the international artistic avant-garde at the start of World War I, and comparing his achievements with painters including Monet, Bonnard and Redon. It runs until July 17. Now, if you wanted to combine a trip to Picasso in Norwich with something else in East Anglia, how about David Hockney in Cambridge? Hockney's Eye: The Art and Technology of Depiction is on at the Fitzwilliam Museum and the Heong Gallery from March 15 to August 29, with free entry. The shows will explore Hockney's experiments in new ways of seeing the world as well as allowing you to compare his works with those of artists such as van Gogh, Constable and Andy Warhol.   If you missed the recent Laura Knight show at MK Gallery in Milton Ke...

Pablo Picasso kicks off the exhibition year in London, with Picasso and Paper  at the Royal Academy bringing together more than 300 works from an 80-year career. Drawing, printmaking, collage and even paper sculpture all feature in this show, running from January 25 to April 13. Just outside the capital, we've enjoyed a couple of shows recently at the Lightbox in Woking, and their new exhibition is David Hockney: Ways of Working . It will look at how one of Britain's most popular artists has explored the possibilities of a wide range of media over 60 years. January 25 to April 19. Edward Hopper  is the subject of the first big show of the year at the Fondation Beyeler, just outside Basel. It will focus on Hopper's landscapes and cityscapes, and it's been put together with the Whitney Museum in New York, which holds the largest collection of his works. January 26 to May 17. Also on in Switzerland, from January 24 to May 24: Canada and Impressionism at the Fonda...

Collage: Now there's an art form anyone can have a go at. For some of us, it brings back memories of primary school, using those scissors with the rounded ends and that glue that smelt of fish. Or for something a little more tactile, what about Fuzzy-Felt ? Art history has given us the view that it was the Cubists like Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso and those daring Dadaists who first started cutting up pieces of paper and sticking them down together to form pictures in the early years of the 20th century. But as the excellently titled Cut and Paste: 400 Years of Collage  at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh makes clear, they really weren't breaking new ground at all. People were a-cutting and a-pasting long before Picasso, but then they weren't calling it high art. So our story of collage takes us back to the days before anyone had even coined the term, back to the Victorian era and long before, when lots of amateur artists found amusement in...

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...

It's getting more expensive to visit London's big art exhibitions, with prices in 2018 crossing the £20 mark. The Picasso 1932 show at Tate Modern starting in early March looks to be setting a new benchmark. The headline price for tickets to Picasso, described by the Tate as "one of the most significant shows the gallery has ever staged", will be £22, or £25 including a Gift Aid donation. The exhibition is a joint effort with the Musée Picasso in Paris, where it's just finished its run. In Paris, though, full-price tickets cost just 12.50 euros, or £11, half the London level. Exhibition prices at the Tate have been hovering just under the £20 mark recently. The Modigliani show on Bankside and the Impressionists on Millbank both cost a headline £19.70 (£17.70 without a Gift Aid donation), while the Bacon and Freud show starting at Tate Britain on February 28 is £19.50 (though it's £17 if you book in advance). Both the recent Cezanne show at the Nat...