Exhibitions in the year ahead

Some of the great names in European art have been celebrated in exhibitions in the last year, to considerable acclaim. Such shows validate the idea – often now discredited – of monographic surveys in the face of increasingly popular themed ones, often skimming hundreds of years. While broad anthological exhibitions exploring the development of a particular genre can make their point, the themed show – images of the moon, the colour blue, the horizon line – is exclusively focused, often to the detriment of an artist’s intentions, and invariably contains more chaff than wheat. While  big retrospectives have become thin on the ground, shows that choose a particular period or subject or stylistic manoeuvring in an artist’s output can be illuminating, refreshing and encourage ­concentrated looking. We have had some splendid moments with Pontormo, El Greco, Veronese, Rembrandt, Constable and Turner, Malevich and Matisse. Rembrandt. The Late Works continues at the National Gallery to 18th January before transferring to the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (12th February to 17th May), with some significant additions such as the Family group from Braunschweig. The cut-outs of Matisse, luminously and spaciously displayed at Tate Modern, are now at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (to 8th February), in an unfortunately cramped and enervating display. Several lesser figures have had their moment in the sun – from Jordaens in Paris and Richard Wilson in New Haven and Cardiff to Emile Bernard (reviewed on pp.51–53 below) and Sonia Delaunay (both currently in Paris, the former moving to Bremen, the latter to Tate Modern this spring), Segantini in Milan (to 18th January), and Camille Claudel in Roubaix (to 8th February).

Among old-master exhibitions running into the new year, there is an investigation of the brothers Antonio and Piero Pollaiuolo in Milan (to 16th February); Perugino can be seen in Paris to 15th ­January; Venetian drawings from the National Gallery of Art, Washington, will be at the Museo Correr, Venice (to 15th March, then in Washington); and Rubens and his Legacy (transferring this month from Brussels to the Royal Academy, London, 24th ­January to 10th April). This is one of several shows in 2015 that attempt to map the long shadow of one artist’s influence over the centuries; Rubens looks forward to Cézanne while Botticelli is well represented in a show that stretches to the late twentieth ­century (Gemäldegalerie, Berlin, opening on 30th September); Michelangelo’s later impact is studied in a show at the Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn (6th February to 25th May); and perhaps the most scholarly of such shows will be the loan exhibition Eugène Delacroix and Modernity (Minneapolis Institute of Arts later this year, and then at the National Gallery, London, in early 2016). But what promises to be an exceptional show, mounted during Milan’s Expo 2015, is devoted to Giotto (Palazzo Reale, 2nd September to 10th January 2016).

Welcome are several shows looking at less famous figures such as Piero di Cosimo at Washington (1st February to 3rd May), then at the Uffizi, Florence (23rd June to 27th September; see the article on p.4 below); Andrea Schiavone at the Museo Correr, Venice (opening in October); Joachim Wtewael in Utrecht (21st February to 24th May, then in Washington and Houston); Valentin de Boulogne at the Louvre (3rd March to 31st May, concurrent with the Museum’s major exhibition on Poussin and religious painting in France); and the first comprehensive show in Britain devoted to the pastels and paintings of Jean-Etienne Liotard (Edinburgh, 6th June to 13th September, then at the Royal Academy, London, in the autumn).

Masters of Spanish painting are to the fore in 2015, already begun with the substantial loan show of paintings by Velázquez at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (to 15th February, then at the Grand Palais, Paris, 25th March to 13th July); Zurbarán. A New Perspective will be at the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid (9th June to 13th September, then in Düsseldorf in the autumn); there is a triple helping of Goya with Order and Disorder at the Boston MFA (to 19th January); a show devoted to his early tapestry designs at the Prado (to 3rd May); and a fine selection of his ­portraits, later in the year, at the National Gallery, London (7th October to 10th January); Goya’s portrait of the Duke of Wellington in the National Gallery will be moved round the corner for the National Portrait Gallery’s Wellington exhibition, marking the 200th anniversary of Waterloo (12th March to 7th June). The ­relationship of Picasso and Dalí is looked at in a show at the Dalí Museum, St Petersburg FL (to 16th February; then at the Museu Picasso, Barcelona, 19th March to 28th June).

The period of Impressionism still holds sway in museum ­programmes but visitors to the Musée d’Orsay, the heartland of the movement, will find at various times in the year many works ­missing from its walls; it has lent a whole show of Impressionist portraits to the Kimbell, Fort Worth (to 25th January); groups by Degas, Cézanne and Seurat will be at the Albertina, Vienna (3rd January to 3rd May) and three masterpieces by Whistler, Manet and Cézanne are off to Pasadena (27th March to 22nd June). ­Karlsruhe has a probing exhibition on Degas and his sources in Classicism and Experimentation (to 1st February). Gustave Caillebotte will be seen at the National Gallery of Art, Washington (28th June to 4th October, later in Fort Worth), with a focus on his distinctive contribution to Impressionism in the late 1870s and early 1880s. J.S. Sargent comes nearest to Impressionism in his intimate portraits of family and friends and these will be shown at the National Portrait Gallery, London (12th February to 25th May).

British art is well looked after – in Britain at least – and ­exhibitions include an exploration of Reynolds’s technique and compositional experiment, through international loans, at the Wallace Collection (12th March to 6th June); history painting is surveyed from Copley and West to the present at Tate Britain (9th June to 13th September) after its major show, already seen in New Haven, of sculpture in the Victorian age (25th February to 25th May); more sculpture follows with a full retrospective devoted to Barbara Hepworth (Tate Britain, 24th June to 25th October) overlapping with a show devoted to the paintings of Frank ­Auerbach (9th October to 13th March).

Substantial shows of twentieth-century art include Pierre Bonnard: Painting Arcadia at the Musée d’Orsay (17th March to 21st June, later in Madrid and San Francisco); an exploration of art in the Weimar Republic, 1919–33, at the Museo Correr (2nd May to 30th August, coinciding with this year’s Venice Biennale) and later in Los Angeles; the personal and professional relationship between Klee and Kandinsky is explored at the Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern (19th June to 27th September, then in Munich); and among ­several shows on aspects of Pop art, the Walker Art Center, ­Minneapolis’s International Pop (11th April to 6th September, later in Dallas and Philadelphia) will be by far the most comprehensive.
For further details about and confirmation of all these exhibitions, and many more, please consult our monthly Calendar.