The Art Exhibitions Blog

A month ago, we published a preview of November's new exhibitions, only to find within a few hours that the new coronavirus lockdown in England had rendered half of it irrelevant. Still, with the reintroduction of a tier system and the builders in at Buckingham Palace, there's a lot more certainty about December's openings.... The Picture Gallery at the Palace is home to a truly stunning collection of Old Master paintings, but it's a location the public really only gets the chance to tour when the royal residence is open in the summer (and we've noticed on our visits to Buck House that many a tourist just sees the fabulous art on the walls as part of the opulent decor). With the palace's wiring and water pipes now being updated, there's the opportunity to appreciate 65 of those paintings in the purpose-built Queen's Gallery next door. Masterpieces from Buckingham Palace features Vermeer, Rembrandt, Titian, Canaletto and van Dyck, among others. Even if t...

Compiling this preview of new exhibitions for November, we're filled with the foreboding that quite a few may not actually open, at least not as scheduled, given the way the coronavirus pandemic is developing. Some shows that were due to open their doors have already been delayed.  It seems right to start, then, with what the Royal Academy in London describes as an exploration of grief, loss and longing through dark territories and raw emotions. Tracey Emin/Edvard Munch: The Loneliness of the Soul  finds Emin, who's long been fascinated with the Norwegian, selecting some 20 of his works from the Munch Museum in Oslo to sit alongside 25 of her own. On from November 15 to February 28, and then moving to the sparkling new Munch Museum , which opens in Oslo in the spring.  A new show at Tate Britain features the paintings of contemporary British artist  Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. Fly in League with the Night  brings together about 80 works and will run from November 18 ...

Some of Britain's most prestigious museums and art galleries will be open again within weeks, although the visitor experience looks set to be very different. In London, the National Gallery and the Tate have just announced their plans, and it's the National Gallery that will be back in action first, on July 8. There will be timed tickets, limited visitor numbers, initially shorter opening hours, specific routes through the galleries, more efficient air-conditioning, and they'd like you to wear a face covering. Titian: Love, Desire, Death , the show of the reunited Titian series depicting classical myths that was open for just three days before lockdown, is now back on, extended until January 17. And continuing until September 20 is the free show about Rembrandt's pupil  Nicolaes Maes , the painter whose most memorable contribution to the Dutch Golden Age is the witty sub-genre depicting mistresses eavesdropping on their servants. We saw it last year in The Hague. ...

The Dutch Golden Age wasn't just Rembrandt, Hals and Vermeer. A little further inland from the North Sea, the painters of Utrecht -- Dirck van Baburen, Hendrick ter Brugghen and Gerard van Honthorst -- pursued a very different course, echoing the drama and light effects pioneered in the far south of Europe by Caravaggio. That's the theme of Utrecht, Caravaggio and Europe at the Centraal Museum in Utrecht from December 16 to March 24, with 60 loans from across Europe and the US. Caravaggio's Entombment of Christ  from the Vatican can be seen for the first four weeks of the exhibition. At the Petit Palais in Paris, there are two shows that are a little out of the ordinary. The strange dream-like images of late 19th-century Belgian Symbolist Fernand Khnopff  are the subject of a major retrospective in an exhibition subtitled The Master of Enigma. Even odder are the drawings of Jean Jacques Lequeu , who died in poverty in 1826 having created his own architectural fantasy wo...