The Art Exhibitions Blog

Jean-François Millet -- one of the most influential artists of the 19th century with his depictions of toiling country folk -- is the subject of a free exhibition in just one room at London's National Gallery that opens on August 7. Millet: Life on the Land  mainly features work from British museums, but has a star attraction in the shape of  L’Angélus from the Musée d'Orsay. On until October 19.  In eastern Germany, Chemnitz is one of this year's European capitals of culture, and one of the major exhibitions on their programme starts on August 10. Edvard Munch -- Angst  in the Kunstsammlungen am Theaterplatz will recall, in part, a visit by Munch to Chemnitz 120 years ago. And, of course, there'll be a version of The Scream . Until November 2.  On the other side of the country, a rather different offering at the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn: an exhibition devoted to the German filmmaker Wim Wenders, creator of Wings of Desire and Paris, Texas , and marking his 8...

Pan-European art superstar Angelica Kauffman comes to the Royal Academy in London on March 1. Feted in London, Venice and Rome in the late 18th century, and indeed a founding member of the RA, she was one of the few women to smash through the glass ceiling of the male-dominated art world. Known above all for her celebrity portraits, she also created history paintings with a female slant. Kauffman was originally due a retrospective at the RA in 2020 before Covid struck, and we saw that show at the Kunstpalast in Dusseldorf. Her story is a fascinating one though, to be frank, we found the history more intriguing than some of her art. You can see Kauffman at the RA until June 30.   Two more women at Charleston in Lewes, but a very different tale.  Dorothy Hepworth and Patricia Preece: An Untold Story  from March 27 to September 8 relates how, over decades, the couple fooled the art world: The shy Hepworth created widely praised paintings that she signed not in he...

We start off in London this month with two new exhibitions at the British Museum. The first, opening on May 4, takes us back to the ancient history of the region round the eastern Mediterranean and an examination of Luxury and Power: Persia to Greece . It aims to uncover how the Persian Empire spread ideas of elegance and craftsmanship across neighbouring lands around 500 BC. Featuring items from the museum's own collection as well as international loans, the show runs until August 13.  We head further east for the second exhibition, exploring  China's Hidden Century . On from May 18 to October 8, this show looks at life in 19th-century China through art, fashion and everyday objects, seeking to show how decades of violence and turmoil that ended with the deposing of the emperor in 1912 were also a period of significant creativity.  The National Gallery is staging the first ever exhibition in the UK to be devoted to Saint Francis of Assisi . Looking at how the saint's com...

Jacobus Vrel: the mystery man of Dutch Golden-Age painting. We don't know where he came from, where he lived and worked, or anything of note about him at all. His cryptic interiors and detailed street scenes were attributed by galleries, dealers and art historians, sometimes clearly fraudulently, to other artists -- Pieter de Hooch or the much more famous JV, Johannes Vermeer.  We've been fascinated by Vrel since first coming across his work a decade ago. So we've been looking forward for quite a while to the first ever exhibition devoted to him:  Vrel, Forerunner of Vermeer  at the Mauritshuis in The Hague.  This is the Vrel painting that first piqued our interest when we saw it in a show about women in Dutch interiors at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge back in 2012. Simply because it's such an unusual subject. To a certain extent, Dutch genre paintings repeat themes over and over again; messengers arrive with letters; swooning ladies are treated by doctors; mu...

House more than a century old? In need of renovation? Perhaps a friendly acquaintance can look after some of those valuable pictures you have while the workmen are in.  It's the Frick Collection in New York that's having the makeover, and they've sent 10 of their Dutch Golden Age masterpieces back to Holland for a few months, paintings that have mostly been in America for over 100 years, since the industrialist Henry Clay Frick bought them for his stunning art collection. They're now on display at the Mauritshuis in The Hague in  Manhattan Masters: Rembrandt and Friends from the Frick NYC . Rembrandt and Friends? Yes indeed: Vermeer, Hals, Cuyp. This is a high-quality show, beautifully presented, and almost guaranteed to instil feelings of inner calm and satisfaction in the viewer. Frick may have been a ruthless entrepreneur (there's an interesting introductory film) but he was also an enthusiastic and ambitious collector, even if some of the supposed Rembrandts he...

London's Courtauld Gallery has just reopened after renovation, and its first big exhibition,  Van Gogh: Self-Portraits ,   starts on February 3. This show -- the first to cover the full range of Vincent van Gogh's self-portraiture -- will bring together around half those he created over his short career: 16 of them, from his time in Paris in 1886 to his stay in the asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in September 1889. It runs until May 8. At Tate Modern they're tackling another popular subject, surrealism, in the shape of  Surrealism beyond Borders , which starts on February 24. The Tate says previous stories of surrealism have focused on Paris in the 20s -- not in our exhibition-going experience -- and that this one will rewrite the history of the genre, reaching across 50 years and looking at art in centres from Buenos Aires to Seoul. This show comes from the Met in New York; the New Yorker called it "deliriously entertaining", though the Wall Street Journal sai...

Peter Paul Rubens' Rainbow Landscape -- that symbol of hope seems a fitting image to start with this month as the weather finally turns summery and the coronavirus pandemic looks to be on the wane, variants permitting. June 3 will see the painting brought together at London's Wallace Collection with its companion piece, A View of Het Steen in the Early Morning  from the National Gallery, for the first time in 200 years. Het Steen was Rubens' country estate outside Antwerp, and these paintings appear to have been made for his own pleasure. Rubens: Reuniting the Great Landscapes  is free of charge, though there's a suggested £5 donation, and it runs until August 15.  Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirror Rooms at Tate Modern is, in principle, meant to be open to the general public from June 14, but the Tate says all tickets up to October 24 are sold out and the next lot won't be released until September. So you can either mock up your own Kusama-inspired immersive installati...

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...