The Art Exhibitions Blog

Tate Britain offers a double-header of 20th-century British artists this month with  Edward Burra -- Ithell Colquhoun . Though they were close contemporaries, it's not an obvious combination; Burra is perhaps best known for his depictions of sometimes seedy inter-war nightlife, Colquhoun for her Surrealist work. This show features more than 80 pictures by Burra and over 140 Colquhoun exhibits. On from June 13 to October 19.  At the National Portrait Gallery, you can see  Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting , featuring 45 works from across the career of the contemporary British artist known for her large-scale, close-up paintings of the human body. June 20 to September 7. Another double bill, this time at the Royal Academy, where contemporary artist Anselm Kiefer is paired with one of the all-time greats, Vincent Van Gogh. As a teenager Kiefer received a travel grant to follow in Vincent's footsteps. From June 28 to October 26 Kiefer/Van Gogh  looks at the Dutchman...

The fabrics swirl, billow, ripple and cling.... the colours are gorgeous, the atmosphere often dreamlike. It is a feast for the eyes.  We've come to see  Evelyn De Morgan: The Modern Painter in Victorian London at the Guildhall Art Gallery in the very heart of the City. It's a bit of a misnomer, that title, because De Morgan's work doesn't really convey much of an impression of modernity, certainly not in the sense of late 19th-century technological and scientific progress. The style is reminiscent in many ways of the Pre-Raphaelites from earlier in the Victorian era, and  Edward Burne-Jones  in particular.  But what was modern about Evelyn De Morgan was in fact the most obvious thing about her; she was a woman, in what was still a very male art world.   Before we get into De Morgan's history, let's start with a painting to give a flavour of her art, and it's one of the most spectacular in this exhibition: The Storm Spirits . Just pause for a moment t...

If you were asked to name a Mexican painter, you'd probably initially think of Frida Kahlo. Then, maybe, Diego Rivera. But the first historical Mexican artist -- indeed the first from Latin America -- to get an exhibition at London's National Gallery in its 200-year existence is José María Velasco. No, we didn't know anything about him either, so we were keen to see the show.    And what you discover in  José María Velasco: A View of Mexico  is certainly exotic, though not perhaps in the way you're expecting. Velasco, born in 1840, was trained in a tradition of European landscape painting, and while some of the pictures you see at the National Gallery have an air of the Old World, this one definitely doesn't:   The cactus is spectacular enough, with its green branches reaching into the blue sky above the hills beyond, but it's only when you notice the man in the shade beneath it that you realise how immense this plant really is. This is a painting that...

Which Japanese artist had the greatest influence on the West at the end of the 19th century? Perhaps not so much Katsushika Hokusai , despite The Great Wave ; maybe more Utagawa Hiroshige, four decades younger and the last great exponent of the ukiyo-e tradition, with his stunningly framed landscapes. From May 1, you have the chance at the British Museum in London to experience Horoshige's world, which ended just as Japan started to open up to the outside. Featuring a large body of work from a major US collection,  Hiroshige: Artist of the Open Road  is on until September 7. And also at the British Museum, a second new exhibition explores the origins of Hindu, Jain and Buddhist sacred art, going back at least 2,000 years. More than 180 objects from the museum's collection as well as items on loan will be on display.  Ancient India: Living Traditions  runs from May 22 to October 19.  If you enjoyed the colour and swagger of the John Singer Sargent show at Tate ...

Paris -- there's always so much art to see, so many blockbuster shows of big-name artists in big-name museums. Sometimes, though, there's a lot of pleasure to be had from getting to know a less familiar painter in a much more intimate setting. Such as when we went to see  Maximilien Luce: The Instinct for Landscape at the Musée de Montmartre.  Luce painted light-filled landscapes in the 1890s following the Divisionist and Pointillist examples of Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, and these would be attractive enough on their own, but there's a lot more to discover in this quite extensive exhibition. There are pictures of men at work, building Paris, and of industry, producing the raw materials for the modern world. Some of these paintings of Belgium's Black Country are very dark indeed. And late on in his career, more light-bathed idylls of life in a riverside village in a rather different neo-Impressionist style.  Now, even though Luce was a Parisian (he lived and worked...

Cleopatra, David and Goliath, Judith and Holofernes. Drama, emotion, colour. Agony and ecstasy. It's all there in Artemisia: Heroine of Art at the Musée Jacquemart-André in Paris. Except they haven't got the space to do it justice. Because if we're going back in art herstory, there's really no bigger name than Artemisia Gentileschi.  This heroine of art draws big crowds, and her often quite sizeable canvases deserve a large stage on which to be properly appreciated. But there's next to no space in the Musée Jacquemart-André, which has some of the most cramped and crowded exhibition rooms we've been to anywhere in Europe. It's a bit like watching City play United -- or perhaps in this case Roma against Napoli -- in your back garden.  But that's enough whinging about the venue -- for a paragraph or two, at least -- because the art is spectacular. Artemisia Gentileschi was a prodigy, creating masterful -- mistressful? -- canvases at quite a young age. In a...

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...