The Art Exhibitions Blog

Swiss-born  Sophie Taeuber-Arp  (1889-1943) was one of the leading abstract artists and designers of the early 20th century, working across a wide range of media from textiles through puppetry and painting, but she's never had a retrospective in the UK. That changes on July 15, when Tate Modern in London opens an exhibition that brings together her most important works from across Europe and the US, many of which have not been on display in Britain before. The show comes direct from the Kunstmuseum in Basel and is at the Tate until October 17, after which it moves on to MoMA in New York.  If you're looking for something more cuddly than Germanic abstraction, you should head to the British Library for Paddington: The Story of a Bear , a family-friendly exhibition uncovering the inspiration behind the star of Michael Bond's classic children's books. There are first editions and original artwork for the grown-ups, and a marmalade trail to follow for the younger visitors. F...

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...

Those government-designated hotbeds of coronavirus infection that are England's public museums are due to open again on May 17, and all those exhibitions that have been stuck behind closed doors for months now will suddenly be able to welcome the public. So there's a lot of new shows to get through this month.... When the first lockdowns hit Europe last year, David Hockney was at his home in Normandy, and he spent three months recording in drawings on his iPad how nature in his immediate surroundings evolved day by day. The results can be seen at London's Royal Academy from May 23 to September 26 in  David Hockney: The Arrival of Spring, Normandy, 2020 , which features 116 works. You'll be familiar with Hockney's iPad drawings if you saw A Bigger Picture , the exhibition of his landscapes at the RA in 2012 (astonishing to think it was that long ago). The Normandy show goes on to Bozar in Brussels in October. Tate Modern also has a French theme, with the start on Ma...

Even though more than half of adults in England have had a coronavirus jab, museums won't be welcoming visitors again before May. And with case numbers mounting in several European countries, who knows when they'll be reopening in France or the Netherlands.  So let's concentrate on the few places in Europe where we have got confirmed dates for new exhibitions in April, starting in Madrid, where the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum is presenting a retrospective on Georgia O'Keeffe , one of the greatest names in 20th-century American art. A selection of around 80 works, providing a complete survey of O'Keeffe's career and including her famed flower paintings and images of New Mexico, opens on April 20 and runs until August 8. And assuming travel restrictions do ease at some point, if you can't see it in Madrid, this exhibition will be moving on to the Pompidou Centre in Paris and the Fondation Beyeler just outside Basel.  Stockholm's National Museum reopens on Ap...

So museums and galleries in Britain won't be welcoming art-lovers back for a while yet (not until mid-May in England, according to Boris Johnson's current timetable), but they're open in Austria, Belgium and Spain and will be unbolting their doors again in Switzerland from the start of March.   That means we do have a few exhibitions to tell you about this month, and let's start in Switzerland, because the new show at the Kunstmuseum in Basel is scheduled to be making its way to London and New York before too long, assuming there are no more lockdowns.... Sophie Taeuber-Arp: Living Abstraction  from March 20 to June 20 celebrates one of the most influential avant-garde artists of the 20th century. She's perhaps better-known in German-speaking countries (her face is on the Swiss 50-franc note ) for her geometric designs across a wide range of media, including textiles, sculpture and painting. The exhibition is due at  Tate Modern in July and then  MoMA in Novem...

Got any plans for the first month of 2021? Zoom call? Vaccination? An exhibition? Well, here's a few that are scheduled to open, if the authorities allow.  London's first big-name show of the year is at the Royal Academy. Francis Bacon: Man and Beast  looks at how the boundaries between humans and animals are so often distorted in Bacon's violent pictures. Bacon was fascinated by the subject of animal movement throughout his career. This exhibition is scheduled from January 30 to April 18.  The previous lockdown meant the curtain failed to go up in November on  Noël Coward: Art & Style  at the Guildhall Art Gallery, but the show is now slated to begin its run on January 14. The exhibition, including previously undisplayed material, is being staged to commemorate the centenary of Coward's West End debut as a 19-year-old playwright. The writer of  Brief Encounter  and  Mad Dogs and Englishmen  had a huge impact on fashion and culture in the...

So, 2021. What will we be able to see, where will be able to go? We're making no plans, but we're nevertheless looking forward to some interesting exhibitions across Britain and Europe in the coming 12 months. There are plenty of big names -- Botticelli, Rembrandt, Titian and Vermeer among them -- though with galleries closed yet again across much of the continent as 2020 ends and lockdowns tighten, we're only too aware of the huge coronavirus-shaped cloud of uncertainty hanging over the calendar.  Just under half of the 30 or so exhibitions we highlighted in our 2020 preview were either postponed till this year or later, if not cancelled altogether. In a spirit of vaccine-fuelled optimism and with fingers firmly crossed, here's a selection of key shows for your diary, in more or less chronological order. January  What more hopeful way to start the year than with a picture of a summer evening by the sea? It's by Peder Severin Krøyer, one of the leaders of the artist...