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Dates: 20 Jun 09 - 31 Jan 10
Categories: Design Decorative
Address: Amstel 51 Amsterdam 11675
Tel: +31-20-5308755 Website

This huge exhibition—featuring more than 2,000 objects on loan from the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg—inaugurates the Russian museum’s Amsterdam’s home in the newly restored 17th-century Amstelhof (now the Hermitage’s sole foreign exhibition centre). The space has been designed by the architectural firm Merkx+Girod to give an impression of the splendour of public rooms in which the court met in the royal palaces in St Petersburg and Moscow. Russia vacillated in the 19th century between Francophile and “native” Slavic and Byzantine poles: the court fashioned its taste on European or national styles and more often than not a combination of the two. The tsars patronised artists and craftsmen from Italy, France and Germany, and British gardeners to ensure that the Russian court kept pace with developments in western Europe, and a succession of German tsarinas ensured a regular flow of works by Romantic and Nazarene artists. In the court costumes and furniture we see the native adaptation of the same sequence of styles seen elsewhere—neo-classical, Egyptian, Gothic revival and art nouveau. In this show are ball gowns and uniforms, jewellery by Fabergé, court paintings, furniture, silver, clocks and watches and Sèvres and other porcelain dinner services. D.L.

A. Malyukov, after original by Franz Krüger, Alexandra Feodorovna, 1836.

Dates: 20 Nov 09 - 15 Feb 10
Categories: Old Master
Address: Jan Luijkenstraat 1 Amsterdam 107 ZD
Tel: +31 (0)20 674 7000 Website

Forty-five of Hendrick Avercamp’s paintings and drawings have been assembled for this show of chaotic and bustling winter scenes of people enjoying the frozen rivers and canals that came to typify 17th-century Dutch winter landscapes. The 20 paintings on show are supplemented by 25 of Avercamp’s drawings, the works having been loaned by such museums as the National Gallery, London, the Szépmüvészeti Múzeum, Budapest, and the Houston Museum of Fine Arts. The exhibition is the first to be devoted to Avercamp’s works. After studying with the Danish portrait painter Pieter Isaacks (1569-1625) in Amsterdam, Avercamp (1585-1634) moved to Kampen in 1608 where his winter scenes found great popularity. This exhibition, however, also includes works that shed light on other more surprising areas of his oeuvre. The drawings on show include summer landscape studies, depictions of 17th-century workers and costume sketches that often appear in subsequent paintings. These less well known graphic works show Avercamp, say the show’s organisers, at his “most varied and adventurous”. The show, which travels to the National Gallery of Art, Washington (21 March-5 July 2010), is accompanied by the publication of Hendrick Avercamp, Master of the Ice Scene, edited by Pieter Roelofs, and published by Nieuw Amsterdam (€29.95). The museum is launching a special programme for deaf and hard of hearing visitors to coincide with the exhibition. Hendrick Avercamp was himself deaf and mute.

Winter Landscape with Skaters (detail), about 1608.

Dates: 9 Oct 09 - 3 Jan 10
Categories: 1800-1900 (Impressionism, etc)
Address: Paulus Potterstraat 7 Amsterdam 1070 CX
Tel: +31 (0)20 570 5200 Website

This exhibition celebrates the publication of definitive, six-volume edition of the artist’s correspondence (see p49). The Van Gogh Museum is marking the book launch by showing 120 letters, nearly all from the family collection. These are rarely exhibited, for conservation reasons, and never have so many been on show before. Three recently acquired letters with sketches addressed to Van Gogh’s artist friend Emile Bernard are being lent by the Morgan Library in New York. Presented in the museum’s original Rietveld building, the letters are shown alongside paintings from the permanent collection. Altogether there are 340 artworks, including The Potato Eaters and The Bedroom. Light levels will be lowered for the works on paper, with the paintings spotlit, giving a different feel to a museum that is normally filled with daylight. The display of letters will also flow over into the print gallery. Some of the letters include small drawings (above). Once Van Gogh became a full-time artist he would make rough sketches of his pictures to show his brother Theo what he was working on. The letters, mostly in Dutch and French, provide an intimate and revealing account of his development as an artist. Another show (with almost completely different artworks) will be presented at the Royal Academy, London (“The Real Van Gogh: the Artist and his Letters”), from 23 January- 18 April 2010. Martin Bailey

Dates: 21 Nov 09 - 14 Mar 10
Categories: Contemporary (1970-present)
Address: Lichtentaler Allee 8b Baden-Baden 76530
Tel: +49 (0)7221 39898 0 Website

This exhibition is the last of three major retrospectives at the Museum Frieder Burda to feature significant German artists. After Polke and Richter, the Baselitz retrospective, curated by Goetz Adriani, consists of 75 large paintings and 50 works on paper, celebrating 50 years of the artist’s oeuvre. The first exhibition is divided into four main categories: works from the early 60s; diptychs from the 70s; the “Heroes” series; and the late “Remix” paintings. Chronologically organised, they trace Baselitz’s painting career from 1959 to the present. The show aims to offer new insights by focusing on the role of the past in his work. According to Adriani, the artist’s East German heritage plays an essential part in the works shown: “Already in his early work Baselitz revolted against the political and painterly restrictions of social realism, introducing scandalous sexual themes to his art.” The “Heroes” series critically deals with “broken German heroes rather than brave German soldiers”, Adriani notes. A highlight of the show is the “Remix” series, which Baselitz began in 2005. Engaging anew with his works from the early 1960s, he manoeuvres the past into the present. What were dark and depressed works are now repainted with a “rococo lightness” said Adriani, In “Baselitz: 30 Years of Sculpture” at the neighbouring Staatliche Kunsthalle, which consists of 15 sculptures shown alongside eight paintings, curator Karoline Kraus explores the relationship between the artist’s sculpture and painting. Works of different media from the same creative period are displayed to offer a new perspective on the Baselitz’s three-dimensional work. Among the works on show is the new sculpture Volks Ding Zero, 2009, which is being shown for the first time.

Volks Ding Zero, 2009

Dates: 21 Nov 09 - 14 Mar 10
Categories: Contemporary (1970-present)
Address: Lichtentaler Allee, 8a Baden-Baden D-76530
Tel: +49 (0)722 130 0763 Website

Dates: 23 Sep 09 - 17 Jan 10
Categories: Contemporary (1970-present)
Address: Plaza dels Àngels, 1 Barcelona 08001
Tel: +34 (0)93 412 0810 Website

MACBA moves into theoretical territory with this group exhibition that aims to investigate modernity in contemporary culture and question its place in artistic practice. The exhibition brings together nearly 40 artists, including Dan Graham, Falke Pisano and Gordon Matta-Clarke, and art collectives, who explore the concept through works in mediums including relief sculpture and film projection. Issues tackled in the exhibition include the production of space, the role of contemporary architecture, the idea of an aesthetic language and the authority of authorship. The underlying difference between modernity and modernism is addressed through examples of modern work influenced by modernity. R.C.

Gordon Matta-Clark, Window Blow-Out, 1976

Dates: 9 Oct 09 - 9 Feb 10
Categories: Contemporary (1970-present)
Address: Plaza dels Àngels, 1 Barcelona 08001
Tel: +34 (0)93 412 0810 Website

This show brings together 15 international artists to present their views on the role of text and narrative in contemporary art. The exhibition consists of proposals from each of the artists that will, along with talks and seminars, create a forum in which words and their relationship to the modern art production are discussed. Artists including Will Holder, the founder of DotDotDot magazine, Falke Pisano, whose work engages with problems of language and text, conceptual New York artist Seth Price, and the Bernadette Corporation collective, whose work investigates strategies of art production, all present text pieces. The museum has created an “active space for reading” where visitors will be able to take in the written proposals from the artists involved. Rob Curran

Dates: 1 Nov 09 - 24 Jan 10
Categories: Contemporary (1970-present)
Address: Baselstrasse 101 Basel CH-4125
Tel: +41 (0)61 645 97 00 Website

US artist Jenny Holzer’s text works are so prolific she even has a regular Twitter feed, posting in uppercase (as with her other text works). The exhibition of her works at Fondation Beyeler shows pieces from various phases of her career, and she has been closely involved in its presentation. The show was first displayed at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, last year, and its basic structure remains the same, but some works have been added here, including early paintings and painted signs. The show includes text works from the late 1970s onwards and objects from the early 1980s to the present. The majority of works are LED installations, shown alongside new paintings and sculptural works that are not well known in Europe. “Another topic of the exhibition is the presentation of these works in the exceptional museum space created by Renzo Piano,” said curator Philippe Büttner. “Great art will meet great architecture.” The exhibition will extend beyond the gallery, said Büttner: “Together with the artist we are planning a number of projections onto different buildings and sites in Basel and Zurich.” Among these is a projection onto the historic Basel City Hall. Holzer is also curating her own room within the Fondation Beyeler. “We have invited the artist to select works from our collection to be shown in two rooms just beside the first room of her exhibition,” said Büttner, adding that a work of hers may be displayed within the collection. “This special presentation will establish a link between the Beyeler collection and the Holzer exhibition. The artist has a very rich knowledge of the history of art and it is an important opportunity and challenge for her to get into a dialogue with works by former great artists of our time,” he said.

Monument, 2008

Dates: 14 Nov 09 - 28 Feb 10
Categories: Old Master
Address: St Alban-Graben 16 Basel CH-4010
Tel: +41 (0)61 206 62 62 Website

This exhibition focuses on the newly restored Adoration of the Magi by Frans II Francken (1581-1642). The work, bequeathed to the museum in 2004, required restoration due to the risk of damage from nails used to secure the painting. This show heralds its return to the collection after the restoration work, where it sits alongside works from Francken’s Antwerp contemporaries to put the work in context. Although Francken created many altarpieces and panels, it is for his smaller cabinet works that he is most celebrated and this Adoration together with 12 lesser-known pieces loaned by private collectors exemplifies his characteristic attention to detail. According to curator Bodo Brinkmann, the Kunstmuseum’s curator of old master paintings, these lesser-known works are perfect examples of the work that gave Francken such a reputation as a “gifted story-teller”. A recently discovered panel by Francken is also included in the show. Belshazzar’s Feast, around 1610, has been loaned by the Hermann Beyeler Collection and according to Brinkmann the panel provides ample evidence as to why the “elite of connoisseurs and art collectors have never ceased to admire Francken’s work”

Adoration of the Magi

Dates: 18 Sep 09 - 31 Jan 10
Categories: Contemporary (1970-present)
Address: Alte Jakobstrasse 124-128 Berlin D-10969
Tel: +49 (0)30 7890 2600 Website

Looking specifically at work influenced by the fall of the Berlin Wall, which occurred 20 years ago in November, this show includes sculpture, painting, film and the recreation and documentation of site-specific temporary installations from German and international artists, including John Armleder, Tacita Dean, Wolfgang Tillmans and Alicja Kwade. All of the works on show trace changes to the structure of the city during this time. The period in which these works were made, 1989 to 2009, highlights both the reunification which Berlin underwent after the dismantling of the pre-1989 political system and the fact that the new city is now seen as a hub for the artistic community. This exhibition is accompanied by a programme of films, discussions, performances and concerts. W.O.

Tobias Hauser, Walden am Leipziger Platz, 2002

Dates: 31 Oct 09 - 24 Jan 10
Categories: Old Master
Address: Spandauer Damm 20-24 Berlin 14059
Tel: + 49 (0) 331 96 94 200 Website

This is an exhibition of more than 200 objects in two sites. It has been organised by the Stiftung Preußische Schlösser und Gärten Berlin-Brandenburg in cooperation with the Evangelical parish of St Petri-St Marien, Berlin. The main idea of the show is to relate the art patronage of the Hohenzollern dynasty from 1417 to 1613 to the events of that period. The chronological brackets enclose the inauguration of the Hohenzollerns as Electors of Brandenburg, the events of the Protestant Reformation, the uncertain rise to power of Brandenburg as a small, but significant, segment of the Holy Roman Empire to the eve of its establishment as the centre of a quasi-independent state, the emergence of a middle-class urban elite in Berlin, and the internal religious and political tensions within the Hohenzollern territories, as well as those states the empire and the rest of Europe. The first part of the exhibition in the Charlottenburg Palace opens with a depiction of the founder, Friedrich I, in a donor portrait on the Cadolzburger Altar, a winged altarpiece made around 1430 by an anonymous Nuremburg painter. There follows a series of works by Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472-1553), his workshop and his son Lucas the Younger (1515-86), commissioned by or during the reign of the Elector Joachim I (1499-1535)—portraits (shown here, of his son and heir, Joachim II, around 1555), the nine Passion Cycle paintings, 1537, a self-portrait and an early version of the Naiad, 1515, as well as sculptures, prints, textiles, ceramics, books and manuscripts by other artists. An ardent Catholic and supporter of the emperor, Joachim I’s personal religious convictions were at variance with many, if not most, of his subjects who were Lutherans. Joachim tried to ensure a Catholic succession, but, following his death and that of the emperor, his successor, Joachim II, converted to Lutheranism in 1555. In the period covered by this part of the exhibition, the viewer is shown how the Hohenzollerns developed a realpolitik that permitted the artistic expression of various antagonistic religious alliances. The second part of the exhibition at the St Marienkirche illustrates the interests of the emergent bourgeoisie of Berlin. A Last Judgement, 1558, by Michael Ribestein (1539-65) and sculptures by the Swabian Catholic Hans Schenck (1611-45), made for the St Marienkirche, are evidence of lively local, if not widely significant, ecumenical art production. The Renaissance ideal of the educated gentleman was bolstered by a rapidly expanding print culture, demonstrated by many works from the St Marien church library, and documents concerning the foundation in 1574 of “Zum Grauen Kloster”, which became Berlin’s most prestigious grammar school. D.L. A 272-page catalogue, Cranach und die Kunst der Renaissance unter den Hohenzollern: Kirche, Hof und Stadtkultur, with 327 colour illustrations, is published by Deutscher Kunstverlag (€34.90 ISBN 9783422069107) and the exhibition is sponsored by the Kultur Stiftung der Länder and the Ernst von Siemens Kunststiftung. Donald Lee

Joachim II, around 1555

Dates: 12 Nov 09 - 17 Jan 10
Categories: Contemporary (1970-present)
Address: Niederkirchnerstrasse, 7 Berlin D-10963
Tel: +49 (0)30 254 860 Website

This exhibition is part of a series of three celebrating the 20th anniversary of the twinning of Istanbul and Berlin. The series, which continues at the Akademie der Künste, Hanseatenweg, and the Akademie Pariser Platz, presents a comprehensive presentation of work from a variety of Turkish contemporary artists. Artists included in the Martin Gropius Bau show include sculptor and abstract modernist Kemal Önsoy, the figurative and painterly Temür Köran, Aydan Murtezaoglu, who makes films, photographs and installations, and the abstract painter Ekrem Yalcindag. Curated by Çetin Güzelhan, Beral Madra, Levent Çalikoglu and Johannes Odenthal, this section of the series consists of work dating from 1928 to the present day. The Akademie Pariser Platz shows work by female artists, and the Akademie Hanseatenweg shows work by artists engaging with the socio-political issues of modern Turkey. Included in the Martin Gropius show is a six-minute film by Sener Özmen, who lives and works in the south-east of Turkey, entitled The Road to Tate Modern, 2003, in which two men ride horses through a bleak mountainous landscape asking farmers for directions to Tate Modern. Rob Curran

Dates: 11 Sep 09 - 22 Nov 09
Categories: Old Master
Address: Hodlerstrasse 12 Bern CH-3000
Tel: +41 (0)31 328 09 44 Website

The Uffizi holds the largest collection of drawings by Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, 1591-1666) and this exhibition consists of a selection from that collection of 50 sheets by the artist along with 42 by his workshop and pupils and drawings by such Bolognese masters and contemporaries as Ludovico and Annibale Carracci, Guido Reni and Domenichino. The idea is to give the viewer a sense of Guercino’s singularity and of the riches of artistic invention that radiated out from Bologna to other parts of Italy and beyond at the end of the 16th and in the first half of the 17th centuries. The exhibition is sponsored by Credit Suisse. D.L.

A Doctor, Assisted by Two Devout Women, Tending the Wounds of St Sebastian, 1619

Dates: 19 Oct 09 - 17 Jan 10
Categories: Old Master
Address: Museo Plaza 2 Bilbao 48011
Tel: +34 (0)94 439 60 60 Website

This is an exhibition of about 50 paintings by the Spanish Counter-Reformation artist par excellence, Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (1617/18-82). Murillo’s reputation has waxed and waned over the years—being the object of the highest admiration in his lifetime and in the 18th and early 19th centuries, through a steady decline in the latter half of the 19th to its nadir throughout most of the 20th century. At first admired for his soft, idealised, melting forms (particular in his Immaculate Conceptions), sweet expressions and soft, sfumato colourings, he was later castigated for his sentimentality and sugariness. Now his work is better appreciated by being viewed historically and this exhibition of 50 paintings from the early part of his career (that is roughly before 1660 when he was appointed the joint president of Spain’s first painting academy, in Seville) focuses on his artistic education. With works such as St Francis, around 1645-50, St Lesmes, around 1655, St Peter Weeping, around 1650-55, and St Jerome, 1665-75, from the Bilbao and the Seville Fine Arts Museums, the viewer can observe the emergence of Murillo’s characteristics—tenebrism, naturalism and his soft, lucent brushstrokes. The exhibition is curated by Alfonso E. Pérez Sánchez and Benito Navarrete. Illustrated above, The Holy Family with a Little Bird, around 1650. Donald Lee

The Holy Family with a Little Bird, around 1650

Dates: 28 Oct 09 - 14 Feb 10
Categories: Old Master
Address: Dózsa György út 41 Budapest 1146
Tel: +36 (0)1469 7100 Website

Szépmûvészeti Múzeum (Museum of Fine Arts), Budapest 28 October-14 February 2010 www.szepmuveszeti.hu This is the second exhibition (the first was the Spanish 16th- to 19th-century painting show in 2006) of a series presented by the Hungarian Museum of Fine Arts that aims to present a canonical overview of a national school of a specific period, in this case the early and high Italian Renaissance. On view are more than 130 works, about half of which are on loan from the Louvre, the Prado, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Getty Museum, the National Gallery, the National Gallery of Art, and Kunsthistorisches Museum and the Berlin Gemäldegalerie, the rest being complemented by works from the museum’s own collection. This exhibition will not only provide the Hungarian public with an excellent opportunity to see masterpieces that would otherwise be beyond view, but also to afford the museum the chance to stage a much-needed money-making blockbuster, a goal its publicity department is vigorously exploiting with an international media campaign, hoping to attract at least 300,000 visitors. On view are works by such artists as Botticelli, the Bellinis, Giorgione, Raphael, Titian, Veronese and Tintoretto, and many others. Above, Raphael, The Esterházy Madonna, 1508. D.L.

Raphael, The Esterházy Madonna, 1508

Dates: 21 Nov 09 - 10 Jan 10
Categories: Post-War (1945-70)
Address: Castle Street Cambridge CB3 0AQ
Tel: +44 (0)1223 748 100 Website

The British painter Roger Hilton’s final years were spent in his cottage at Botallack Moor, Cornwall, suffering from peripheral neuritis and the effects of long-term drinking and smoking. Confined to bed, he turned to working with poster paints, charcoal and gouache through the hours of the night, sleeping during the day. This show consists of more than 50 paintings and drawings that reflect his prolific return to an interest in figuration, and letters he left for his wife, the artist Rose Hilton. The show coincides with the publication of a new edition of “Night Letters”, edited by Timothy Bond and published by the Archive of Modern Conflict. The exhibition follows last year’s show of paintings by the artist at Kettle’s Yard, “Swinging Out into the Void”.

Untitled, 1974

Dates: 1 Oct 09 - 17 Jan 10
Categories: Modern (1900-1945) Contemporary (1970-present)
Address: University of Chicago, 5550 South Greenwood Avenue Chicago 60637
Tel: +1 773 702 0200 Website

The Smart Museum of Art delves into the heart of middle America and comes up with surprising results in this two-part exhibition, organised with the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven. The Dutch segment, on view last year, presented to a European audience a broad survey of the Midwest’s culture, art and music. The Smart’s version looks at independent artist communities in centres such as Detroit and Kansas City. Design 99 (Gina Reichert & Mitch Cope) have been towing an old speedboat through the Midwest. “By the time they arrive in Chicago, they’ll have transformed it into a portable, carnivalesque sculpture,” says curator Stephanie Smith. Kansas City’s dance and variety show Whoop Dee Doo performs in Chicago in its first ever museum commission. H.S.

Whoop Dee Doo

Dates: 23 Aug 09 - 4 Jan 10
Categories: Decorative
Address: Staatlichen Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Schlossplatz, Georgenbau Dresden 01067
Tel: + 49 (0)3 51 49 14 2000 Website

News of arranged marriages causes outrage in the western media: the very idea of an involuntary wedding flies in the face of the bien-pensant orthodoxies of feminism and romantic love. Meanwhile, the west’s own history of arranged marriages goes largely unacknowledged (apart from anachronistic condemnations) and with it any recognition that these arrangements are largely responsible not only for the political shape of our nations today, but that they resulted in a vast and rich European artistic and cultural heritage. Should there be any doubt about the positive effects of diplomatic unions, this exhibition of 260 objects and works of art from eight of the Dresden State Museums and another 100 loaned by the Royal Danish Collections at Rosenborg Castle (whither the show will travel next year), Fredericksborg Castle, the National Museum of Denmark, the Royal Library and the Statens Museum for Kunst, will convince the severest cultural critic. Following the establishment of Lutheranism as the state religion of Saxony and Denmark (in 1527 and 1537 respectively), it was imperative for their rulers to find brides of the right religion to create political bonds. The international diplomatic approaches, the marriage negotiations and contractual terms, the weddings and the ensuing relationships—personal, public and political—were all commemorated by the production, exchange and collection of a vast array of works of art. Paintings (mainly portraits) and drawings (many of the diplomatic and state occasions) by artists such as Lucas Cranach the Younger and Karel van Mander, jewellery (including spectacular Saxon and Danish chivalric orders), silver, ceremonial arms and armour, highly wrought objets de vertu in silver and gold by Johann Melchior Dinglinger, among others, commemorative coins and medals, textiles including uniforms and court dress, printed texts and images, ceramics and glass have been assembled to illustrate and provide a backdrop to four marriages over five generations and 150 years of Saxon and Danish marriages—first, of the Saxon Elector August to Anna, the daughter of King Christian III of Denmark in 1548; of the Elector Christian II to Hedwig, the daughter of the Danish King Frederick II in 1602; of Magdalene Sibylle, daughter of the Elector Johann Georg I, to Christian, Crown Prince of Denmark, in 1634; and of the Elector Johann Georg III to Anna Sophie, daughter of King Frederick II in 1666. (There is, incidentally, a British connection in all this: Hedwig’s sister, Anna, was the wife of King James VI and I of Scotland and England, and Anna Sophie was the sister of Prince Georg, the husband of the fecund but fruitless Queen Anne of England.) The objects on display relate directly to these unions; for example, we are shown the Elector Augustus’s wedding uniform, objects collected by Hedwig during her long widowhood, illustrated prints of the wedding of Magdalene Sibylle, the silver wedding armour of the Elector Johann Georg III, and much, much more. This exhibition has been long in the making. Its principal curator, Jutta Kappel, deputy director of the Grünes Gewölbe, told The Art Newspaper: “It has long been my dream to curate this exhibition. When I started work at the Grünes Gewölbe 20 years ago, I wanted to write about the women of the Saxon court and I found Jorgen Heim [curator of the Royal Danish Collections] had a similar idea. So, ‘Crossing the Sea with Fortuna’ is literally a dream come true.” The 320-page catalogue, edited by Dr Kappel and the exhibition’s specialist curator, Claudia Brink, is published by Deutscher Kunstverlag (€34.90, ISBN 9783422069091). D.L.

A 16th-century Milanese crystal nef or salt, in the form of a ship mounted in gold, enamel, emeralds and rubies

Dates: 20 Sep 09 - 10 Jan 10
Categories: 1800-1900 (Impressionism, etc)
Address: Corso Ercole I d'Este, 21 Ferrara 35121
Tel: +39 (0)532 244 949 Website

The “Master of Swish” receives a major exhibition in his hometown of Ferrara, focusing largely on works created by the artist in Paris between 1871 and 1886. This show explores how impressionists such as Manet, Degas, Meissonier and Caillebotte influenced the early work of the Italian, who is widely regarded as one of the greatest Belle Epoque portrait painters of 1890s Paris. Giovanni Boldini (1842-1931) moved to Paris in 1871, settling in the Place Pigalle, an area popular with artists and writers. He quickly became accustomed to life in the French capital and befriended leading artists of the day including Degas, whom he often accompanied to the theatre and concert halls. It was a prolific and highly experimental period for Boldini, during which he created pieces in several genres including portraiture and landscapes. On view are 100 works of various genres drawn from international public and private collections. The show opens with an early self-portrait made in Florence in 1865 while he was a student at the Accademia di Belle Arti. On loan from the Modern Art Gallery at the Pitti Palace, the painting shows Boldini’s modern take on portraiture by depicting himself in his study rather than opting for a neutral environment. The exhibition is organised into thematic sections including: fanciful paintings created specifically for the American and European art markets; cityscapes that record modern life; landscapes; scenes that capture the vibrant nightlife of Paris including a painting of a singer entiled, La Cantante Mondana, about 1884; scenes of his atelier, including A Woman in Black, about 1888; and finally, for what Boldini is by far best remembered—portraiture. The show ends with his society portraits. Like Sargent, Boldini counted the crème de la crème of high society among his patrons. An 1894 portrait of socialite and author Gertrude Elizabeth Blood, Lady Colin Campbell is on loan from the National Portrait Gallery, London. After its debut in Ferrara, the exhibition will travel across the pond to the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts (14 February-25 April 2010). The US presentation will be the first major display of Boldini’s work outside Europe. E.S.

Cléo de Mérode, 1901

Dates: 13 Nov 09 - 28 Feb 10
Categories: Old Master
Address: Städelsches Kunstinstitut und Städtische Galerie, Durerstrasse 2 Frankfurt D-60596
Tel: +49 (0)69 605 09 80 Website

It is a commonplace that some artists reach in their old age a “late style” characterised by loose, free expression and a distillation of experience (for example, Michelangelo and Titian) while others wither and decay (for example, Pontormo and Domenichino). Botticelli is reckoned, however, to have taken a different trajectory by turning, in his old age, from a mature style and content to the manner and concerns of his youth. The life and work of Sandro Botticelli is, like Caesar’s Gaul, divided in partes tres: his Florentine early training and career, from his birth in 1444/45 to around 1478, covering the years of his apprenticeship under Fra Filippo Lippi and in which he produced works such as St Sebastian, 1473-74, and a number of frescoes in Florence and Pisa, most of which are now lost. During the years of his maturity, around 1478 to 1490, he painted most of the works for which he is famous: frescoes in Florence and Rome, altarpieces, portraits, allegories and mythological narratives. Here he perfected his personal style, perhaps best described as a combination of International Gothic and classical prototypes, an assimilation of the stile nuovo and antico, in which figures are presented in supple contours, contrapposto, graceful proportions, most memorably exemplified in the Primavera, around 1478, and The Birth of Venus, 1482-86. This high courtly style also informed his religious paintings (shown, The Virgin Adoring the Sleeping Christ Child, about 1490), which may have incurred the censure of the charismatic Dominican reformer, Girolamo Savonarola, who, it is believed, came to influence Botticelli as, from the 1490s until his death, the artist turned back to the simplicity and affective expression of his early work. This maniera devota, inspired by moral and religious sentiment, resulted in works such as the Mystic Nativity, around 1500, and the illuminations for a luxurious, unfinished manuscript edition of The Divine Comedy, 1490s. Following his death, Botticelli fell from favour and it was not until 19th-century art historians began to resurrect and elevate Florentine artists that he came again into favour. This process was initiated mainly by German art historians and collectors: the Berlin museum acquired the St Sebastian and the Bardi altarpiece in the 1820s; Walter Ullmann produced the first Botticelli monograph in 1893 and Aby Warburg produced his influential dissertation in the same year. Thus it comes as something of a surprise that this is the first Botticelli show to take place in the German-speaking world (pace the exhibition of the Divine Comedy illuminations in Berlin in 2000-01). The exhibition is curated by Andreas Schumacher, the director of the pre-1800 Italian, French and Spanish paintings collections, and is the first in line to celebrate the quincentenary of the artist’s death (1510). The show, like Botticelli’s life, is in three parts: his portraits and allegorical paintings, the mythologies and, finally, his religious œuvre. Although many of the works have recently been seen in the shows at the Palais de Luxembourg (2003-04) and at the Palazzo Strozzi (2004)—the fragility, the renown and the limited number of his works make it impossible to transport many of them—this exhibition includes workshop pieces and drawings from private lenders never seen before in public. Special attention is given to the unrequited love Botticelli bore for the celebrated beauty Simonetta Vespucci (around 1453-76), wife of a Florentine nobleman, who is thought have been his model for his Venuses (and with whom he was buried), and to his works commissioned by the Medici. In addition to the 40 Botticelli paintings, there are 40 by Verrocchio, Antonio del Pollaiuolo and Filippino to put Botticelli’s work into a historical context. The show is sponsored by the Commerzbank-Stiftung with support from Alnatura Produktions- und Handels, the Italian National Tourist Board, Weleda and Ikarus design. The catalogue is edited by Dr Schumacher and published by Hatje Cantz (€49.80).

The Virgin Adoring the Sleeping Christ Child, about 1490

Dates: 5 Nov 09 - 21 Feb 10
Categories: Modern (1900-1945) Post-War (1945-70)
Address: Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, 1, Place Neuve Geneva CH-1204
Tel: +41 (0)22 3105270 Website

After a 20-year break from Giacometti (the last Genevan exhibition was in 1986), the curator of the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, Nadia Schneider, has designed an exhibition of sculpture, drawings, notebooks and photographs illustrative of his career between 1835 and 1946. In this period, he abandoned the influences of his impressionist-inspired father, Giovanni, and of the surrealists, and turned to figurative art, in particular to representations of the human body. The early part of this period sees the diminution of heads and figures which later becomes an investigation of the relationship between distance and dimension. This chapter is bracketed by earlier and later works to highlight this radical change. The exhibition has been made in collaboration with the Fondation Alberto Giacometti, Zurich, which has loaned a number of the exhibits.

Man Walking in the Rain, 1948

Dates: 13 Sep 09 - 3 Jan 10
Categories: Far East
Address: 1001 Bissonnet Houston 77005
Tel: +1 713 639 7300 Website

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, hosts a landmark exhibition of ancient Vietnamese art this month. This ambitious, large-scale show—the first of its kind to be staged in the US—is the culmination of 20 years of research, planning and negotiations with Vietnamese institutions and government officials. The wide variety of works on display, many of which have never before been exhibited outside Vietnam, are drawn from the country’s leading museums in Ho Chi Minh City, Da Nang, Ha Noi, Hue and Dong Nai. “We aim to introduce Vietnamese art and culture to an American audience,” says San Francisco-based independent curator Dr Nancy Tingley. She adds: “Most people in the US are unfamiliar with Vietnamese history prior to the 20th century and associate the country primarily with the Vietnam War.” The Houston museum’s in-house curator for the exhibition, Christine Starkman, adds: “People are familiar with Chinese, Indian and, to a certain degree, Korean art, but Vietnamese art is still a bit of mystery and we hope to change this.” The exhibition will show that Vietnam was a central hub for exchange between Asia and the West from as early as the first millennium BC. The 110 sculptures, bronzes, terracottas and jewellery on display originated from countries including India and China and places as far west as Rome. “As the exhibition develops, visitors will see an increase in material goods and exchange of ideas between countries,” says Tingley. The display is divided chronologically into sections. The first is entitled “Early Cultures” and covers the country’s first “Golden Age” from 1000 BC to the second century AD when the Sa Huynh and Dong Son civilisations dominated the landscape in the centre/south and north respectively. Most of what remains from this period are grave goods such as large funerary jars, ornamental bronze drums, axes and beads. The next section concentrates on the Fu Nan people who inhabited the Mekong River Delta in the southwestern part of the country from the first to eighth centuries AD. The seafaring Champa people are explored in the third section. From the fifth to the 15th century this kingdom flourished, controlling the highly profitable spice trade in Southeast Asia. Cham objects on display include sculpture and metalwork from Indonesia, Butuan and India. The final section covers the 12th to the 15th centuries and concentrates on the ceramic trade in the port of Hoi An. Several of the works on display have been unearthed within the past two decades. “Vietnam is incredibly rich in cultural remains. There are at least 75 archaeological excavations every year, which is an extraordinary amount of digs for a country of its size,” notes Tingley. Some of the most interesting objects come from a shipwreck excavated in the 1990s off the coast of Cu Lao Cham Island in the central province of Quang Nam. Archaeologists discovered a cache of 150,000 to 200,000 ceramic pieces. This find illustrates not only the varied types of ceramics produced in Vietnam, but also the obvious demand for these wares. The exhibition will travel to the Asia Society in New York (2 February-2 May 2010). Emily Sharpe

Female, probably fifth century

Dates: 31 Oct 09 - 27 Dec 09
Categories: Old Master
Address: Okazaki Enshoji-cho, Sakyo-ku Kyoto 606
Tel: +81 (0)75 761 4111 Website

This exhibition of about 50 works from the Galleria Borghese in Rome—including masterpieces by Raphael, Botticelli, Caravaggio and Bernini—gives the Japanese audience a rare opportunity to experience a collection of art from the Italian Renaissance assembled by one of the greatest artistic patrons of any era. Scipione Borghese owed his wealth and influence to his role as favoured nephew of Pope Paul V (pontiff 1605-21), who gave him control of both papal and Borghese family finances. As a result, he was able to put together one of the greatest art collections in Europe. Many of the Borgheses’ Greek and Roman antiquities were transferred to the Louvre in Paris during the Napoleonic occupation of Italy two centuries later, but Scipione’s Renaissance collection has survived intact; it was taken over by the Italian state in 1902, and is still housed in the Villa Borghese. The show, which transfers to Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum (16 January-4 April 2010), includes numerous works never shown before in Japan, such as Raphael’s Lady with Unicorn, 1505-06, and one of Caravaggio’s final works, St John the Baptist, 1609-10, acquired from the artist’s estate soon after his death. Also on show is Bernini’s bust portrait in marble of Scipione Borghese, one of a pair commissioned by the patron and executed in 1632. Bruce Millar

Raphael’s Lady with Unicorn, 1505-06

Dates: 10 Oct 09 - 10 Jan 10
Categories: Curious
Address: 74 The Headrow Leeds LS1 3AH
Tel: +44 (0)113 246 7467 Website

The paragone—an intellectual exercise current from about the middle of the 16th century until the early 18th—was an attempt to tease out the implications of a comparison of or a rivalry between the arts of painting and sculpture. Which better represented nature? Which could outdo nature? What were the various relations of these arts to nature? This exhibition of about 30 paintings depicting sculptural works, dating from the 16th century to the present, touches on the paragone, featuring in particular those works in which the model appears alongside the sculpture, typified by Titian’s La Schiavona, 1510-12, on loan from the National Gallery. The second half of the exhibition, featuring works by artists such as Hogarth and Vuillard, raises questions about the correspondences of and differences between two- and three-dimensional art.

William Dyce, Titian Preparing to Make his First Essay in Colouring, 1856-57.

Dates: 11 Jul 09 - 10 Jan 10
Categories: Contemporary (1970-present)
Address: Avenida de los Reyes Leoneses, 24 Leon 24008
Tel: +34 987 09 00 00 Website

Swiss-born, New York-based artist Ugo Rondinone’s only museum show of 2009 is also his solo debut in Spain. Curated by Augustín Pérez Rubio, Musac’s acting director, the show encompasses many aspects of Rondinone’s eclectic practice—with sculpture, painting, video, collage and installation—and consists of more than 50 objects arranged across five rooms. “He’s never shown anything in Spain, so that’s why it’s such a huge presentation,” Mr Rubio told The Art Newspaper. The overriding theme is of fantasy, poetry and ritual, and the exhibition begins with an installation of six ancient olive trees, painted white. This is a new version of Get Up Girl a Sun is Running the World shown at the 2007 Venice Biennale when Rondinone represented Switzerland with Urs Fischer. Because of the generous scale of Musac’s exhibition spaces, the trees reach up to 4.5 metres in height, compared to the three-metre forms in Venice. In the centre a giant sculpture of a light bulb hangs from the ceiling, and strong white light fills the room to create the sensation of “white night”, says Mr Rubio. In another room Rondinone is showing his Star paintings, a brand new series of 13 works, all around 4x3 metres. “He wants to install them altogether as a tribute to Rothko’s chapel,” Mr Rubio told TAN. “Each painting is like a cosmos, showing the stars by night. He wanted to create the feeling of night and loneliness, and in the middle of the room is the sculpture of a clown lying on the floor. For Ugo, the idea of the clown is somebody who looks human but is also a creation. You never know if it’s a man or a woman—it’s like a human being in process.” In the final room is Still.Life (John’s Fireplace), a 2008 installation showing a replica of US poet John Giorno’s fireplace from his apartment in New York. Poetry is a strong influence: the show weaves together disparate elements that build up poetic layers of symbolism and personal narrative, at times menacing, at times more dreamlike. On a different register, one of Rondinone’s bright rainbow sculptures, Hell, Yes!, 2001, adorns the façade of the New Museum, New York, until 19 July. Rosie Spencer

Get Up Girl a Sun is Running the World

Dates: 24 Sep 09 - 24 Jan 10
Categories: Archaeology & Ancient art Latin American
Address: Great Russell Street London WC1B 3DG
Tel: +44 (0)20 7323 8299 Website

A dejected ruler murdered by his own people after failing to prevent Spanish forces from conquering his once mighty empire that at its height stretched from the Pacific Ocean the Gulf of Mexico; this is the image of Moctezuma II that resonates five centuries after his demise. This show, the last in the museum’s series to explore power and empire through historical figures, investigates the less well-known period in the life of the Aztec emperor—the 18 years he reigned prior to the arrival of the conquistadors. The display tells the story of Moctezuma (reigned 1502-20) through monumental sculpture, gold and turquoise artefacts, codices, European portraits and enconchados (oil paintings with mother of pearl detail inlaid on wood panels) drawn from the museum’s collection as well as those in Mexico, the US and Europe. “We want to reinsert Moctezuma into the Columbian world as a unique ruler in his own right—not merely as a post-colonial figure. It’s a wonderful challenge,” says Dr Colin McEwan, head of the museum’s Americas department and curator of the show, in cooperation with his Mexican colleagues Eduardo Matos Moctezuma, Leonardo López Luján and Felipe Solís Olguín, who died in April 2009. Divided into thematic sections, the show examines various aspects of Moctezuma’s life including his role as a semi-divine figure or intermediary with Aztec gods, his military prowess and his varied achievements as a ruler. The exhibition also delves into the Spanish conquest and presents an alternative version of the ruler’s death. On display are two 16th-century codices—shown together here for the first time—one of which depicts Moctezuma in chains and the other with a rope around his neck, suggesting he might not have willingly welcomed the Spanish, but rather been a captive who was later dispatched by the Hispanic invaders. “We’re showing how history is constructed and represented and how events can be read in the 21st century. We want to bring less well-known aspects of his life into Western historicity,” says McEwan. The show presents new scholarship on the emperor including the first in-depth reconstruction of a lost portrait of Moctezuma carved into Chapultepec Hill in Mexico City. E.S.

Turquoise mosaic mask, Aztec/Mixtec, 1400-1521 AD

Dates: 14 Oct 09 - 10 Jan 10
Categories: Post-War (1945-70) Contemporary (1970-present)
Address: Southbank Centre, Belvedere Road London SE1 8XX
Tel: +44 (0)20 7921 0813 Website

“Each piece cultivates its own labyrinth that you can enter in to, if you were to spend a little time thinking about it.” So says Hayward Gallery director Ralph Rugoff, but it’s not a sentence you would immediately associate with the minimal paintings of Ed Ruscha. Rugoff says that through his experience of curating this autumn’s exhibition, he has discovered “layers and layers” to these “deceptively simple-looking” paintings. “The more you think about them, the more you can spin out all sorts of references and resonances that these works are setting into play,” he told The Art Newspaper. The show of 78 works, many of which haven’t been shown before in the UK, celebrates 50 years since Ruscha first made paintings that he would include in his “official body of work”. “These were works that he made when he was still a student, but works that he feels could represent him,” says Rugoff. Ruscha started out in the late 1950s looking at print media, magazines and books, which led to his focus on words, but treating words as objects or images rather than carriers of linguistic meaning. He became interested in the graphic potential of words and the ambiguity of communication. “One thing Ed often says is that he associates the word, because of the way it unfurls horizontally, with landscape,” Rugoff says. “He is taking a very broad definition of what landscape might be. Unless you’re painting people, which is something he doesn’t do, all painting might be related to landscape.” Ruscha has also been very influenced by film, particularly widescreen formats such as cinemascope. Often the proportions of his work reflect this way of framing the world, with pieces that are four or fives times as wide as they are high. “It’s about a type of look, a scanning look,” says Rugoff. “It’s not a static look at one object that’s fixed in place, it’s about a landscape you might be driving through. It’s very much a product of car culture, a reflection on that.” But there is also a fascination with the sublime in Ruscha’s work, images of majestic snow-covered mountains, fiery sunsets or rays of light, a recurring motif in his paintings. “He’s very interested in ideas of grandeur, and how even when these have become clichés, they still awaken certain yearnings in us, we’re still susceptible to them,” says Rugoff. Following this exhibition, the gallery will be closed until May 2010 for renovations. The show travels to Haus der Kunst, Munich (12 February-2 May 2010) and Moderna Museet, Stockholm (29 May-5 September 2010).R.S.

Standard Station, 1966

Dates: 21 Oct 09 - 24 Jan 10
Categories: Latin American Old Master
Address: Trafalgar Square London WC2 5DN
Tel: +44 (0)20 7747 2885 Website

Today’s audience is familiar with the quest for the hyper-real in work by contemporary artists such as Duane Hanson, Robert Bechtle and Ron Mueck. But what are the precedents for this tradition? The National Gallery mounts an exhibition devoted to religious art from 17th-century Spain—the country’s artistic Golden Age—when hyperrealistic paintings and polychrome sculpture reigned supreme. This landmark presentation pairs 15 paintings by artists such as Velázquez and Francisco de Zurbáran alongside 14 examples of Spain’s lesser known art form—painted sculptures—to show how artists who painted on canvas were inspired and often competed with those who painted sculpture. This is the first major exhibition of Spanish polychrome sculpture ever staged and contains many pieces never before shown outside of the Iberian peninsula. Works are drawn from the museum’s collection as well as private and public collections in Spain, the UK and the US. According to the exhibition’s curator, Xavier Bray, from the museum’s 17th- and 18th-century paintings department: “In Spain, sculpture was the preferred artform to make religion more immediate, more direct. It was a shock to the senses,” adding: “We want to reintroduce this lost art form.” Scenes of the Passion were especially popular, with artists exercising their entire repertoire, including using glass for eyes, pieces of bark to simulate coagulated blood and real bone for toe and fingernails, to create the most realistic pieces. As some of the sculptures are still used as devotional objects, Bray was presented with difficulties in term of both negotiating loans and displaying the objects. In order to secure the loan of an Immaculate Conception work from a Spanish convent, Bray agreed, after a five-hour conversation, to mark the feast day (8 December) by bringing a priest into the museum. “We want to respect religious decorum as much as we can,” said Bray. One of the biggest coups is the sculpture St Francis Standing in Meditation, 1663, by Pedro de Mena. The work has never before left the sacristy of Toledo Cathedral and access to it is so limited that an Emperor of Brazil was even denied access. The exhibition also sees the return to Europe of two major paintings by Zurbáran. St Serapion, 1628, is on loan from the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, US, and The Crucifixion, 1627, considered lost until it was purchased by the Art Institute of Chicago in 1952. Both pieces have not been on view in Europe in more than 50 years. Accompanying this presentation is the focused exhibition “The Making of Spanish Polychrome Sculpture”, which features as its centrepiece the recently conserved sculpture St John of the Cross, 1675, by Francisco Antonio Ruiz Gijón. Above, Pedro de Mena, Christ as the Man of Sorrows, 1673. Coinciding with the National Gallery show is “The Mystery of Faith: an Eye on Spanish Sculpture 1550-1750” at Matthiesen Gallery. The display features 30 terracotta, stone and wood sculptures by leading Spanish artists. E.S.

Pedro de Mena, Christ as the Man of Sorrows, 1673

Dates: 18 Nov 09 - 21 Feb 10
Categories: Contemporary (1970-present)
Address: Trafalgar Square London WC2 5DN
Tel: +44 (0)20 7747 2885 Website

The Hoerengracht (Whore’s Canal) is a dark, intricate, large-scale installation work by US artists Ed Kienholz (1927-94) and his wife Nancy Reddin Kienholz (b1943). The piece, made between 1983 and 1988, has been shown in venues around the world since 1989, but never before in London. The walk-through installation, which evokes Amsterdam’s Red Light District through a series of dense assemblages, is staged in the National Gallery’s Sunley Room, a temporary exhibition space that holds a series of contemporary shows that connect with the permanent collection of the museum. In this case the work is being shown in relation to 17th-century Dutch paintings, including Jan Steen’s Interior of an Inn, 1665-70, and Pieter de Hooch’s A Musical Party in a Courtyard, 1677. “This connection is important,” Colin Wiggins, curator of the exhibition, told The Art Newspaper. “The National Gallery collection ends at 1900. For a younger audience, this can make the collection seem remote and inaccessible. Contemporary exhibitions that show the connection between the old and the new help to bridge that gap and can help to introduce a younger audience to the richness of the collection.” Wiggins believes that the Sunley Room is the perfect location for such shows as it is “right in the centre of the National Gallery, sandwiched between Velázquez and the Italian Renaissance. We don’t want to show contemporary work, for example, in a back corridor disconnected from the collection,” he said. “The National Gallery is a living collection and continues to inspire today’s art. It is not a collection of old dead fossils.” The last major Kienholz show in London was at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1971. “Since then this city has been strangely neglectful,” said Wiggins. We all know about Picasso, Duchamp, Pollock and Warhol, but I have become convinced that Kienholz is similarly one of the defining names of the 20th century.” The show is supported by the Outset Contemporary Art Fund.

Dates: 6 Oct 09 - 16 Jan 10
Categories: Contemporary (1970-present)
Address: Millbank London SW1P 4RG
Tel: +44 (0)20 7887 8888 Website

The annual hunt for trends and themes that inevitably accompanies the announcement of the Turner Prize shortlist has fallen this year on the works of contemporary surrealist Enrico David, installation artist Roger Hiorns, Glasgow-based artist Lucy Skaer, and wall-based artist Richard Wright. Drawing is in, while Glasgow’s standing as a British centre for contemporary art is recognised with two of the artists living and working in the Scottish city. The exhibition is curated by Lizzie Carey-Thomas, the Tate’s curator of contemporary British art: “If anything characterises this year’s shortlist it is probably craft and drawing, which underpin all of the artists’ work. They also have a very direct engagement with their materials and the process of making in the more traditional sense of the word.” Another key theme that engages the four, she says, is the process of transformation. “Lucy Skaer, for example, always starts with a found image that she transforms through a process of transcribing it from one format to another,” said Carey-Thomas. “Through that process she attempts to slow down our understanding of what we are looking at, to draw attention to the act of looking.” Skaer, who divides her time between Glasgow and London, has meditated on diverse themes in past works, including whales, prison cells and the artist Leonora Carrington. Italian-born David, like Skaer, often appropriates and uses pre-existing imagery in his sculptures, paintings and works on paper that feature comically grotesque cloth dolls and harlequins—he is shortlisted for solo shows at the Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel, and the Seattle Art Museum. Glasgow-based artist Richard Wright (b1960), who just sneaks in under the prize’s under-50 criteria, moved in the early 1990s from figurative paintings on canvas to delicate, hand-drawn patterns and marks applied directly on to walls. The drawings relate closely to their architectural context, often sitting modestly in unlikely corners or on decorative features. Roger Hiorns is shortlisted for his Artangel-commissioned exhibition Seizure, 2008, for which he filled a disused 1960s South London flat with 90,000 litres of liquid copper sulphate to create an alien, cavernous space coated in intense blue crystals. Hiorn’s knowledge of his materials is such that he can set the works in motion and then allow them to take their course. Carey-Thomas suggests there will be surprises in the show but that the artists have remained focused on the long view. “Yes, it’s the Turner Prize and it has a higher profile than most shows of contemporary art, but I don’t think that’s really entered into their decisions as to what to show. They’ve approached it thinking about where they are now in their practice, where their work is going and wanting to reflect that in the exhibition above and beyond anything else.” The artists were selected by Charles Esche, director of the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Jonathan Jones, art critic, Mariella Frostrup, writer and broadcaster, Andrea Schlieker, director of the Folkestone Triennial and Stephen Deuchar, director of Tate Britain and the jury’s chair. The winner of the £25,000 award—the runners-up receive £5,000 each—will be broadcast live on Channel 4 on 7 December. James Hobbs

Dates: 30 Oct 09 - 14 Feb 10
Categories: Curious
Address: Buckingham Palace Road London SW1A 1AA
Tel: +44 (0)20 7839 1377 Website

Paintings by Johan Zoffany, William Hogarth, Thomas Gainsborough, and Dutch 17th-century artists Pieter de Hooch and Godfried Schalcken, are included in this exhibition of conversation pieces. Such works depict and celebrate intimate and informal aspects of family life, and were associated with a Dutch 17th-century middle-class tradition. A third of the 40 paintings are by Dutch 17th-century artists, followed by English 18th-century conversation pieces which are considered a continuation of the Netherlandish tradition. The English section seeks to emphasise the close relationship of the royal family to the genre, using it as a platform to present themselves in a more private and approachable fashion. So, for example, there are works showing the monarch in an intimate environment. According to curator Desmond Showe-Taylor “through the conversation pieces the royal family delivered an important message, communicating the idea of a model functioning family”. Included is Zoffany’s The Tribuna of the Uffizi, 1772-78, which depicts a gathering of artists and gentlemen in a landscape of masterpieces.

Zoffany’s The Tribuna of the Uffizi, 1772-78

Dates: 16 Oct 09 - 3 Jan 10
Categories: Contemporary (1970-present)
Address: 77-82 Whitechapel High Street London E1 7QX
Tel: +44 (0)20 7522 7888 Website

The French artist Sophie Calle’s first UK retrospective consists of 12 key works dating from 1979 to the present. Its aim, says director of the Whitechapel Art Gallery Iwona Blazwick, is to “look at the political and social dimensions of her work,” said Blazwick, “and focus on the way that she enters into dialogues and a social contract with the participants of her projects.” It includes the premier of the English language version of the installation Take Care of Yourself (left), which was first shown in the French Pavillion at the 2007 Venice Biennale. It is based on an email sent to Calle by her partner in which he told her he wanted to end the relationship. She responded by asking 107 women, including judges, dancers and therapists, to comment on the email. “She precipitates something creative from something negative,” said Blazwick, “and affects a kind of alchemical translation into something that is art.” Little in her life seems to be off limits for Calle; her work Couldn’t Capture Death, 2007, shows Calle’s mother’s final moments on her death bed. The exhibition continues to the De Pont Museum of Contemporary Art, Tilburg, from 16 January to 16 May 2010. J.H.

Take Care of Yourself

Dates: 16 Jul 09 - 8 Feb 10
Categories: Archaeology & Ancient art
Address: 17985 Pacific Coast Highway Los Angeles 90265-5708
Tel: +1 310 230 7075 Website

Inaugurating the long-term partnership between the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Florence is the display of the fourth-century BC Etruscan masterpiece The Chimaera of Arezzo. On loan from the Florence museum, which according to Getty museum director Dr Michael Brand “houses one of the most important collections of Etruscan art in the world”, this sculpture forms the centrepiece of an exhibition exploring six centuries of representations of the mythical beast described by Homer as “a thing of immortal make…lion-fronted and snake behind, a goat in the middle, and breathed forth flames of fire”. Accompanying the 80cm bronze are antiquities from the museum’s permanent collection as well as loans from such institutions as the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Villa Giulia, Rome, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The work was unearthed in the Tuscan town of Arezzo in the 16th-century and entered the collection of ruler and art patron Cosimo I de’Medici. This is the first time the sculpture has travelled to the US. E.S.

The Chimaera of Arezzo

Dates: 15 Nov 09 - 3 May 10
Categories: Contemporary (1970-present)
Address: 250 South Grand Avenue Los Angeles 90012
Tel: +1 213 621 1749 Website

When MoCA’s dire financial straits were revealed last year—the endowment drained from $20m to about $7m—many thought the much-loved Los Angeles institution would have to shut down or merge with another museum. But this month, following the announcement that fundraising efforts had resulted in $60m for the museum (including the $30m founding chairman and life trustee Eli Broad promised last year to save the institution), MoCA opens a 30th anniversary show celebrating the collection. More than 500 works will be on view in the largest long-term display of the museum’s permanent holdings, installed in both its Grand Avenue home and its outpost The Geffen Contemporary, which has been closed since last year’s emergency cutbacks. Organised chronologically, the exhibition covers major contemporary movements and artists from 1939 to the present and demonstrates the scope of MoCA’s collection. “We’ve had plans for the 30th anniversary show for many years but it became larger when support from the Broad Foundation allowed us to open up both facilities, at Grand Avenue and The Geffen Contemporary. It went from being a large exhibition to the largest we’ve ever done. The last time we had a show installed across both venues was for the opening of the Isozaki building on Grand Ave and that was over 20 years ago,” says MoCA chief curator Paul Schimmel, who has organised the show. Highlights include post-war works such as Jackson Pollock’s Number 1, 1949, but the real strength lies in the selection of more recent contemporary work. This includes in-depth holdings of works by Franz Kline, Robert Rauschenberg and Mark Rothko, among others, and MoCA’s long-time commitment to collecting the work of California artists such as Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Laura Owens, Raymond Pettibon, Charles Ray and Jason Rhoades. “Los Angeles artists are part of the DNA of MoCA. They helped found it,” says Schimmel. MoCA is also hosting a weekend of special events including a gala party to raise for money for the museum lead by gala chairs Maria Arena Bell and Eli Broad, and honorary chairs Larry Gagosian and Dasha Zhukova. Artist Francesco Vezzoli has created a new performance work starring pop singer Lady Gaga and dancers from the Bolshoi Ballet. Entitled “Ballets Russes Italian Style (The Shortest Musical You Will Never See Again)”, the piece will be performed for the first and only time at the gala and has been commissioned by Gagosian Gallery and the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, Moscow. A comprehensive catalogue of MoCA’s collection and history was finished before the economic downturn, and Schimmel says: “That book was my bible for organising this exhibition.” Titled after a Baldessari work from the collection, This Is Not To Be Looked At: Highlights from the Permanent Collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles features works by more than 150 artists from the museum. Above, Chris Burden, The Big Wheel, 1979

Dates: 16 Sep 09 - 3 Jan 10
Categories: Contemporary (1970-present) Biennials
Address: Various Venues Lyon
Tel: Website

For the tenth Biennale de Lyon the Paris and San Francisco-based curator and critic Hou Hanru has focused on the opposing notions of spectacle and the everyday in our society, a theme, he feels, that has a particular resonance at this time. “This biennale happens at a time of financial and economic crisis, but it’s also about questioning the profound roots of the social system that we are in,” he told The Art Newspaper. “I was looking how to put these two opposing notions together to create new energy and new dynamics.” Hou, who is director of exhibitions and public programmes and chair of exhibition and museum studies at the San Francisco Art Institute, curated the 2007 Istanbul Biennale, and lived in France for 16 years before moving to the US in 1990. The works of nearly 60 international artists (see below) are on display in a variety of venues across the city of Lyons and surrounding areas, and arranged in four main chapters across four museums and public spaces in an interactive way to create what Hou describes as an “urban experience” that reflects the dynamism of the themes of spectacle and everyday. “ You go into a space and it’s like you walk through a city. You will bump into the work of artists who are working on different chapters that somehow try to transform everyday objects.” “The Magic of Things” focuses on artists who transform such objects, situations and environments, “Celebrating the Drift” explores urban spaces inspired by the situationist strategy of “drifting” (dérive), and “Another World” is Possible” consists of works that envision new social orders and alternative models of living in an age of globalisation. The fourth section, “Living Together”, which is mainly housed within the city’s Museum of Contemporary Art, “reactivates” works from the collection, or which have been exhibited in the museum in the past, to create a platform for discussion within different communities. “I feel a museum is not only a place for conservation and display,” says Hou. “It is about opening its memory up to the public.” For instance, the Paris-based Turkish artist Sarkis is reshowing, with new elements, the central part of his 2002 show at the Museum of Contemporary Art, L’Ouverture, in which air is blown into the gallery through a ventilation system scattering pieces of newspapers from around the world. A series of conferences, happenings, readings and dance and musical events will then take place in this space while the ventilation system is closed down. Linked to “Living Together” is a related section, “Veduta”, in which three artists or groups of artists have been invited to take residence in the Lyons suburbs to make new works with the involvement of the largely immigrant inhabitants that will be shown in the Museum of Contemporary Art. Eko Nogroho will create puppet shows with local youths, collective Bik Van der Pol builds a floating platform over a lake for discussions and leisure activities, and French artist Robert Milin, who is making ten light boxes featuring sentences from inhabitants talking about their dreams and desires. About half of the works are new commissions, including a film by Maria Thereza Alves, an installation by Jimmie Durham, two large site specific installations by Pedro Cabrita Reis, a performance piece by Istanbul artist Ha Za Vu Zu and wall drawings by Dan Perjovschi. Michael Lin’s What a Difference a Day Made, shown in the Shanghai Gallery of Art last year, is a reconstruction of a Shanghai shop of everyday household objects. The artist has invited magicians and acrobats to perform with the objects, which are then reclassified and stored within the shop. The four main strands of the biennale are shown in two converted warehouses—La Sucriére, the flagship venue of the biennale since 2003, and the Bichat Warehouse, an 800 sq. m former arsenal that is being used for the first time, which houses a single work, a neon drawing by Pedro Cabrita Reis—and the Bullukian Foundation, as well as the city’s Renzo Piano-designed Museum of Contemporary Art. But the city as a whole embraces the event; interventions planned for the city’s streets include a whole series of large-scale murals by San Francisco-based Rigo 23. The biennale is not just the tenth in Lyons, but the first after a trio of themed trilogies, so was there pressure on Hou to mark this edition in some way? “The number is not that important but it’s a conjunction of different elements: the number, the timing and the momentum of now,” he said. “I don’t pretend to have the ambition to say this [biennale] will be a revolution...but I think that it is an interesting opportunity for us to think what a biennial, or even in the wider sense a cultural institution, should do in our times” explains the Chinese curator. James Hobbs

Sarkis, Le Monde est Illisible, Mon Coeur Si, installation view at the Musée d’Art Contemporain, Lyons in 2002

Dates: 16 Oct 09 - 10 Jan 10
Categories: 1800-1900 (Impressionism, etc)
Address: Castelló 77 Madrid 28006
Tel: +34 91 435 4240 Website

From the age of 24, the German Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) lived for the most part in Dresden where he quickly absorbed at the Hochschule der Bildenden Künste the great Saxon tradition of drawing from nature, as well as the technique of sepia drawing, the two basic techniques that underpinned his painted work which he began in 1807. This show features more than 60 works on paper by the artist, including gouaches and watercolours, curated by Christina Grummt, a fellow of Stiftung Alfried Krupp, Greifswald, who is also compiling the catalogue raisonné of the artist’s drawings. The aim of the exhibition is to relate the drawings to Friedrich’s painted works, showing how he progressed from plein-air studies to the final works. To do this, the works are grouped according to his frequently repeated motifs such as architecture and ruins, and trees. The works are on loan from those German state museums where most of Friedrich’s works are found today: the Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremburg, the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden, the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin-Preussicher Kulturbesitz, Berlin, and the Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe, as well as other collections. Above, Hill near Teplice, 1835. D.L.

Hill near Teplice, 1835

Dates: 3 Nov 09 - 31 Jan 10
Categories: Old Master
Address: Paseo del Prado 8 Madrid 28109
Tel: +34 (0)91 369 01 51 Website

Jan Van Eyck’s Annunciation Diptych, 1441, from the museum’s own collection is at the centre of this exhibition of 18 paintings, illuminations, textiles, ivories and sculptures that examines the variety of grisaille works in late medieval art. The monochromatic technique employed by artists is based on the gradual application of a single colour, usually grey, to create a sculptural, sometimes trompe l’oeil effect. The Annunciation is brought together with another Van Eyck work, Saint Barbara, 1437, from the Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp. Whereas the Annunciation is painted with a reduced palette to create two sculptural figures, Saint Barbara is “either an unfinished painting or one of the first independent drawings that has survived”, says the curator, Till-Holger Borchert. “The works on show come out of the idea that art history has always interpreted [grisaille] in a certain way by looking at specific genres. The paintings have received the most attention, but painting scholars don’t always know manuscripts, let alone sculptures, and suddenly you end up with explanations that are short of covering the whole ground.”

Jean Le Noir, Psalter of Bonne de Luxembourg, around 1360.

Dates: 19 Oct 09 - 24 Jan 10
Categories: Modern (1900-1945) Contemporary (1970-present)
Address: Palacio de Buenavista, San Agustín, 8 Malaga 29015
Tel: +34 952 12 76 00 Website

Swiss-born Sophie Taeuber-Arp (1889-1943) is an artist whose work transcends boundaries. A real “renaissance artist”, Taeuber-Arp embraced many disciplines, from painting and embroidery to puppetry and interior design, with equal vigour and intensity. She was greatly admired by contemporaries such as surrealist Hugnet, Kandinsky and her husband, fellow artist and collaborator Jean Arp, and the German artist Hugo Ball once said: “Everything to do with Taeuber has the luminosity of sunlight…she is full of invention, whim and extravagance”. An active member of multiple avant-garde movements, her work shows elements of dada, constructivism and abstraction. Curated by Spanish scholar Estrella de Diego, this exhibition—the first of its kind in Spain—brings together 130 pieces including paintings, textiles, drawings, furniture, photographs, plans, puppets and collages drawn from public and private collections in Germany, France, Switzerland and the US. The exhibition is divided into three sections. The first, “Broken Rhythms” focuses on her early work when constructivism and dada coexisted openly. This section contains Portrait of Jean Arp, 1918, one of the artist’s iconic “dada heads”. “Inhabiting Spaces” explores her involvement in interior design and architectural projects. The final section, “Living Geometry” is devoted to the display of a series of her striking, geometrical abstractions. E.S.

Portrait of Jean Arp, 1918

Dates: 15 Oct 09 - 24 Jan 10
Categories: Post-War (1945-70) Modern (1900-1945)
Address: Piazza del Duomo 12 Milan 20121
Tel: +39 (0)2 88 46 59 31 Website

This exhibition celebrates the prominent American realist painter and printmaker Edward Hopper (1882-1967), renowned for his visions of modern American life and the subtleties of human interaction. Following recent major shows in his native country, this presentation, curated by Carter Foster of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, is the first of its kind in Italy with more than 160 works from public and private collections spanning his entire career. Organised chronologically and thematically, it includes works such as Second Story Sunlight, 1960, and A Woman in the Sun, 1961 (above), both of which depict subjects from life in tranquil, middle-class apartments. Produced by the Palazzo Reale, Fondazione Roma and Artemisia, the show travels next to the Museo del Corso in Rome (16 February-13 June 2010). Katelyn Kucey

Dates: 24 Sep 09 - 28 Feb 10
Categories: Contemporary (1970-present) Far East
Address: 1750 Hennepin Avenue Minneapolis 55403
Tel: +1 612 375 7600 Website

For her first solo museum show in the US, Korean artist Haegue Yang will install one of her newest works, Yearning Melancholy Red, 2008, co-produced by the Walker and the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater (REDCAT), Los Angeles, where it was shown last year. For the piece, walls of custom-built white venetian blinds are suspended from the gallery ceiling around Plexiglas mirrors, infra-red heat lamps, fans and circling theatre lights to create shifting optical effects. The artist, who is representing Korea at the Venice Biennale, will also be working at the Walker later this year as its artist-in-residence. Another work, Series of Vulnerable Arrangements—Blind Room, 2006/2007, was shown at the Walker in 2007 as part of an exhibition of emerging international artists, “Brave New Worlds”, and was subsequently purchased by the museum for its collection. This show also includes photographs, works on paper and sculptures. H.S.

Dates: 1 Sep 09 - 31 Dec 09
Categories: Biennials
Address: Various venues Moscow
Tel: Website

Moscow’s third biennale of contemporary art is tied, for the first time, to one venue, Dasha Zhukova’s vast Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, under one curator, Frenchman Jean-Hubert Martin. He has chosen “Against Exclusion” as the overarching theme of the core exhibition, a title he sees as encompassing a number of aspects. “One of the references in the background of this title is certainly the issue of civil rights in Russia, the way individual freedom is treated,” Martin told The Art Newspaper. “Of course that is not a point that is addressed by most of the artists in the exhibition, but it is behind the exhibition as a whole.” The title also refers to the breadth of countries represented in the biennale: “In Moscow in the last ten or 15 years there have been a number of exhibitions showing European or North American art, but very little coming from South America, Africa or Asia, with probably a few exceptions for the Chinese because they’re fashionable,” Martin said. “Most of my colleagues show artists that are in the network of galleries and museums and have more or less accepted the mould of modernist and postmodernist work. My understanding of art is much wider—I want to also include artists working for their communities, for example Aboriginal Australians who are not usually included in the network of high art.” Martin was the curator of the renowned “Magiciens de la Terre” exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, in 1989, which brought artists from marginalised areas of the world to the fore. He also said that he wants to include older artists in “Against Exclusion” rather than just focusing on emerging artists, as the two previous biennales did, and that he is against any type of aesthetic exclusion. It will be interesting to see how the city of Moscow reacts to such an influx, but Martin feels confident that at the very least, it will spark debate. “It’s difficult to say beforehand how well an exhibition will be taken, but I have nothing against creating a discussion—it is always very positive in terms of culture,” he told us. Some of the works will directly address the question of politics in the title, with Flemish artist Koen Vanmechelen showing an installation of chickens from various countries that have been crossbred to create hybrids, “physical examples of how racial purity is a fantasy that doesn’t exist”, Martin told us. Chinese artist Huang Yong Ping is also showing work with animal hybrids that explores similar ideas but is also “a metaphor about violence and war”, said Martin. Works incorporating animals seems to be a thread that runs through the show, whether intentional or not, continuing into the pieces commissioned specifically for the biennial. There are around 15 of these, including French artist Céleste Boursier-Mougenot’s installation of birds under a net that are enticed to “play” electric guitars, with a special program loaded to interpret the sounds. “It makes a very particular, strange music,” said Martin. Martin is not directly involved with the expansive guest programme and special projects, which were mostly programmed by the biennale commissioner, Joseph Backstein. “I think we were very liberal because there will be an enormous number of annexed exhibitions next to the Garage,” said Martin. He also said that, compared with the previous two years, there will be a much greater proportion of Russian artists in the main exhibition, with 12 invited to take part who he believes need to be better known on an international level. He sees it as important that they are visible in the large Garage show as opposed to just in the peripheral events. “Foreign visitors who sometimes come for a very short time don’t have the chance to visit all the annexed exhibitions, they concentrate on the main show,” he said. Rosie Spencer

Huang Yong Ping, Le Pont (Bridge), 1993-95, on show at this year’s Moscow Biennale

Dates: 1 Oct 09 - 6 Jan 10
Categories: Old Master
Address: Barer Strasse Munich D-80333
Tel: +49 (0)89 238 050 Website

In 1514 the Florentine businessman Giovanni Battista Puccini commissioned Andrea del Sarto (1486-1531) to paint a Holy Family with St John the Baptist, St Elizabeth and Two Angels, which he intended as a present for the French king, François I. On completion, he was clearly so taken with the picture that he kept it for himself and had the artist make a second version for the king (one assumes that the king was not made aware that he was getting second best, as it were). Following an extensive restoration, the first version (in the Bavarian State Painting Collections), which has not been on public display for nearly 20 years, is shown alongside the second, which is on loan from the Louvre. Part of the exhibition is dedicated to showing the various stages of the restoration work; another explains the primary version’s travels from Puccini’s hands to Munich, and the main section concerns itself with the differences and similarities of the two paintings, the delicate colouring, sfumato effects and dynamic composition which help one wholly to understand why Puccini was reluctant to let go of it. D.L.

St Elizabeth and Two Angels

Dates: 12 Oct 09 - 17 Jan 10
Categories: Contemporary (1970-present)
Address: Prinzregentenstrasse, 1 Munich D-80538
Tel: +49 (0)89 211 27 113 Website

This major new solo exhibition by Ai Weiwei, which focuses on political debate in China and internationally, includes two newly commissioned works for the museum as well as older pieces and performance documentation. Ai believes that there is a new political culture whereby failure is excused following an apology, which he sees as an avoidance of responsibility by politicians. His political views are well known within China, and his blog, which has been used as an outlet for the distribution of information restricted by the Chinese government, is viewed by up to 10,000 people a day, and regularly closed down. Ai’s two new commissions are both large-scale installations. Remembering consists of 9,000 backpacks that cover the façade of the museum, referring to the thousands of children who died in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. The second installation, Soft Ground, consists of a carpet that replicates the space’s stone floor tiles. The artist painstakingly photographed each individualsection of the floor and then had the carpet woven at a traditional mill in the Hebei province, which is famous for its textiles. Above, Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, 1995. W.O.

Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, 1995

Dates: 24 Sep 09 - 3 Jan 10
Categories: Modern (1900-1945) 1800-1900 (Impressionism, etc)
Address: 1080 Chapel Street New Haven 06520-8280
Tel: +1 203 432 2800 Website

Towards the end of the 18th century, Edmund Burke summed up Mrs Delany as “a real fine lady, the model of an accomplished woman of former times”, a succinct and just verdict: Mary Delany, née Granville (1700-88), was the epitome of sense and sensibility. A niece of George Granville, First Baron Lansdowne, she was a friend of Handel, corresponded with Swift, was entertained by Garrick, courted by John Wesley, discussed botany with Banks and Solander, studied drawing with Hogarth, flower drawing with Ehret, painting with Goupy, her collages were praised by Reynolds, and her portrait was painted by Opie. At the age of 17, she had entered into a loveless arranged marriage with Alexander Pendarves, MP, 40 years her senior. When he died in 1724, she moved to London where she began to create a circle of friends and acquaintances and to perfect her talents as an artist, writer and needlewoman. Following an introduction in 1776 to King George III and Queen Charlotte, she moved to a small house in Windsor, provided by the royal couple, to facilitate frequent visits. This exhibition, created in collaboration with Sir John Soane’s Museum (whither it travels, 18 February-1 May 2010), consists of 130 objects that belonged to or were associated with her: drawings, embroidery, shell-work, botanical specimens, manuscripts and, above all, her découpages—extraordinary illustrations of plants and flowers, made entirely of colour paper. D.L.

Opie, Portrait of Mrs Delany, 1782

Dates: 28 Oct 09 - 24 Jan 10
Categories: Contemporary (1970-present)
Address: 235 Bowery New York 10002
Tel: +1 212 219 1222 Website

For the first time ever, the New Museum has invited one artist to completely take over the museum. Swiss artist Urs Fischer, working with organising curator Massimiliano Gioni, will transform the entire gallery space in what Gioni calls an “introspective” (rather than retrospective) exhibition, which he hopes will “feel like stepping inside the artist’s mind”. The exhibition came about after Gioni worked with Fischer for a 2005 solo show at the Trussardi Foundation in Milan, where he is the director. “For that show, Urs realised this gigantic iron tree, which is now in the collection of François Pinault, and his famous House of Bread,” says Gioni. “At the time I was very impressed by Urs’ ability to stage large interventions and solve them as sort of magical gestures…So when I started working at the New Museum, it only came natural to think of Urs as an ideal candidate for taking over the whole museum. The scale and the ambition of his work also needs space to resonate. And after more than a year in our new home we felt the New Museum was ready to change gear and try out a new format.” Gioni promises this will be an exhibition unlike traditional solo shows, where a wish-list of works to include is drawn up and existing pieces are borrowed from public and private collections. “The show grew as a sort of living creature,” says Giono. “To tell you the truth, we are one month away from the show and we don’t even have a complete checklist and I have a feeling we will get to one only once the show opens.” Instead, Gioni says 90% of the works on view are new or pieces Fischer has been working on for the past four years and have only recently been completed. Some previously shown pieces will be included, such as Noisette, 2009, a large fleshy tongue that pops out of a hole in the wall as visitors walk by, triggering a motion sensor. But the main display on the second floor is an installation Fischer has been working on and expanding for year. Consisting of more than 50 chrome box sculptures, the tallest at around 12 feet high, arranged like miniature buildings filling the gallery, with images of everyday objects silk-screened on their mirrored surfaces. “The effect will be like walking in a city grid,” says Gioni. “It will be like walking through a collage that unravels in front of your eyes, a maze of images of which the visitors will also become a part as their bodies get reflected onto the boxes.” Not surprisingly, this ambitious show is a one-off. “The vast majority of the works has been realised for the New Museum and the whole show is pretty much site specific. Both Urs and I were clear from the beginning that this show was not going to travel, that it would exist in this configuration only here.” Above, Marguerite de Ponty, 2006-08. Helen Stoilas

Marguerite de Ponty, 2006-08

Dates: 1 Nov 09 - 5 Apr 10
Categories: Contemporary (1970-present)
Address: 22-25 Jackson Avenue, Long Island City New York 11101
Tel: +1 718 784 2084 Website

The idea behind “100 Years”, which is is held in conjunction with the Performa 09 biennial, is to outline a history of performance art, marking the 100 years that have passed since the futurist manifesto was published. Images, documentation and films of performances, happenings and events trace such key works as Allan Kaprow’s 18 Happenings in 6 Parts, 1959, Yves Klein’s Anthropométrie de l’Epoque Bleue, 1960, Yoko Ono’s Bed In (Bed Peace), 1969, Matthew Barney’s Drawings Restraint, 1987-present, Tilda Swinton’s The Maybe, 1995, and Tino Sehgal’s Kiss, 2004. A different version of the show is at the Julia Stoschek Collection in Düsseldorf, Germany (until 31 July 2010). This show, curated by Klaus Biesenbach, PS1 chief curatorial adviser and MoMA chief curator of media and performance art, and RoseLee Goldberg, Performa’s director, is supported by the Annual Exhibition Fund of PS1 Contemporary Art Center and the Julia Stoschek Foundation.

Tilda Swinton’s The Maybe, 1995

Dates: 23 Jun 09 - 22 Nov 09
Categories: Contemporary (1970-present) Middle East
Address: 1, rue des Fossés-Saint-Bernard Place Mohammed-V Paris 75005
Tel: +33 (0)1 40 51 38 38 Website

This year saw important developments in the field of Middle Eastern contemporary art, as established and up-and-coming artists from the region followed in the footsteps of their Chinese and Russian counterparts in capturing the attention of international collectors and sellers. Charles Saatchi stamped a seal of approval on the field with his exhibition “Unveiled: New Art from the Middle East”. Amid the furore, the voice of Palestinian artists is rising. This month, for the first time, the territories will be represented at the 53rd Venice Biennale in an exciting exhibition that, according to curator Salwa Mikdadi, “underscores the chronic impermanence faced by Palestinian artists”. Within this context, the exhibition at the Institut du monde arabe (IMA) could not be more timely. For 20 years, the IMA has sought to convey the importance and breadth of contemporary Arab art, becoming a crucial platform between two cultures. This show brings together the work of 19 artists, men and women, across generations, working in varying techniques, living and locally or abroad, who commune in a Palestinian aesthetic forged in exile and displacement. Taysir Batniji and Khalil Rabah, two artists who are showing in Venice, explore these themes respectively in a series of 26 photographs, Miradors, 2008 and United States of Palestine Airlines, London Office, 2007, and Mona Hatoum is represented by Every Door a Wall, 2003, which describes through silkscreen the plight of illegal immigrants smuggled inside a truck. The media – from drawings and paintings, photography, video and installation art – mix with ease, and in the breadth of the curatorial choice, we are provided with an interesting overview of the state of Palestinian art in the 21st century. Caroline Cardon

Dates: 11 Sep 09 - 11 Jan 10
Categories: Old Master
Address: 158, boulevard Haussmann Paris 75008
Tel: +33 (0)1 42 89 04 91 Website

Continuing its series of exhibitions focused on major collectors, the Jacquemart-André Museum presents 50 Flemish, Italian, German and Dutch works amassed by Baron Samuel von Brukenthal (1721-1803). The pieces are drawn from the Brukenthal National Museum in Romania—home to one of the most prestigious art collections in Central Europe. A career politician, Brukenthal was made governor of his native Transylvania by Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, who considered him a close personal adviser. He began acquiring his collection in Vienna and quickly earned a reputation as an insatiable collector with a discerning eye, purchasing nearly 16,000 books, 800 etchings, 12,000 paintings and a number of objets d’art. Particularly rich in 17th-century Dutch and Flemish paintings—the Golden Age of Art in the Low Countries—the collection was supplemented by a number of works presented to him by Maria Theresa. His baroque palace in Sibiu, central Romania, was constructed as a showcase for his collection and upon his death in 1803 it was opened to the public. The exhibition aims to show the quality of his collection by presenting the very best pieces amassed by Brukenthal. Most of the works are Flemish, a school particularly popular with 18th-century Viennese collectors. The show is arranged in five thematic sections: portraits, landscapes, genre paintings, still-lifes and history painting. The segment dedicated to portraiture is dominated by works by the Flemish Primitives, a group of 15th-century artists concerned with the precise rendering of details such as jewellery, fabrics and furs. The oldest portrait by Van Eyck, Portrait of the Man in a Blue Turban (1430-33), shows the artist’s desire to include details like the sitter’s fur coat and beard, and Hans Memling’s Portrait of Reading Man (1485) shows the careful rendering of the book’s gilded pages. Included in the section devoted to landscapes is one of Bruegel’s best known works, Massacre of the Innocents (1566-67), a piece depicting villagers being slaughtered by soldiers following the orders of Philip II of Spain. Visitors can see genre paintings by Dutch artists David Teniers and Frans Van Mieris, still-lifes by Jan Davidsz de Heem and Erasmus Quellinus and history paintings by Jacob Jordaens. Pieces by Italian masters Lorenzo Lotto and Titian are also included in the display. The show is curated by Flemish art specialist Jan de Maere and Jacquemart-André curator Nicolas Sainte Fare Garnot. E.S.

Bruegel’s Massacre of the Innocents, 1566-67

Dates: 12 Sep 09 - 6 Dec 09
Categories: Old Master Photography Modern (1900-1945) 1800-1900 (Impressionism, etc)
Address: Westzeekijk 341 Rotterdam 3015 AA
Tel: +31 (0)10 440 0300 Website

Paintings from the Hague School (1860-90) are here presented alongside documentary photographs, both of which point to the impact that the industrial revolution had on the 19th-century rural Dutch landscape. The exhibition reveals, through more than 90 paintings and photographs, the landscape that has gradually become overtaken by Dutch industrialisation. The works are supplemented by a film by Bert Koenderink about the industrial revolution that informs the landscape painting of the time. The paintings and photos have been gathered from the collections of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, and the Neue Pinakothek, Munich. The exhibition capitalises on the partial closure for renovation of the Rijksmuseum to secure loans that make up a large part of the display. Aside from paintings and photographs, other historical material is presented, such as railway maps, that further illustrate the evolution of the Hague School’s native landscape. A large part of the photographic material comes from Johann Georg Hameter (1838-85). Hameter presented work at the first exhibition of photography in the Netherlands in 1855 and his photographs on show here tell us as much about early photography as they do about the rapidly industrialised landscape. R.C.

Dates: 7 Nov 09 - 14 Feb 10
Categories: Contemporary (1970-present)
Address: Mönchsberg 32 Salzburg 5020
Tel: +43 (0)662 8422 20401 Website

The Museum der Moderne Salzburg has 25 reasons to cheer Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac’s anniversary after the dealer’s donation of 25 works—one for each year—to the museum. “We thought it was more interesting to give works to Salzburg than organise a self-celebratory gallery show,” said Ropac, who invited museum director Toni Stooss to visit studios and choose from the gallery inventory in order to make the selection. The resulting exhibition comprises new and recent work by gallery artists, focusing on work by artists from German-speaking countries, based on the focus of the museum’s existing collection. The show, at the Mönchsberg site, includes two Georg Baselitz drawings, a recent Anselm Kiefer work, an Elger Esser photograph, paintings by Lisa Ruyter, Hubert Scheibl and Bernhard Martin, a video installation by Harun Farocki and sculptures by Sylvie Fleury and Erwin Wurm.

Gerwald Rockenschaub, Untitled, 2006.

Dates: 29 Aug 09 - 17 Jan 10
Categories: Old Master
Address: Museumstrasse 32 St Gallen 9000
Tel: +41 (0)71 242 0671 Website

Dutch landscape came into its own, so it is said, as a result of the revolt or war of independence (1568-1648) when artists celebrated the nascent independent nation with views, real and imaginary, that celebrated the country’s rural environs and, of course, its sea coast and shipping. This exhibition compares and contrasts actual visual transcriptions of sites (the topographies) and the invented or dreamed images that evoked a beloved, but unreal, country (that included, in the baroque, alpine scenes). This exhibition includes works in three media by artists such as Esaias van de Velde, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Jan van Goyen, Jacob van Ruisdael and Rembrandt, thus showing the development of landscape from renaissance “realism” to baroque panoramas and inventions. The prints on show have been loaned by an undisclosed private Swiss collection and are being shown to the public for the first time. D.L.

Dates: 25 Oct 09 - 17 Jan 10
Categories: Contemporary (1970-present)
Address: 2, Dvortsovaya Ploshchad St Petersburg 190000
Tel: +7 812 710 90 79 Website

The Hermitage continues its “20/21” contemporary art programme with “Newspeak: British Art Now”, the museum’s second collaboration with London’s Saatchi Gallery after “USA Today” in 2007, which kicked off the project. Since then the Hermitage has shown paintings by US artist Chuck Close, textiles by Russian artist Timur Novikov, photography by Russian artist Boris Smelov, and gothic sculpture by Belgian artist Wim Delvoye. “Newspeak” at the Hermitage includes the work of around 20 British artists—including Spartacus Chetwynd, Mustafa Hulusi, Goshka Macuga, Toby Ziegler, Pablo Bronstein and Littlewhitehead—on show in one of the museum’s largest rooms, the Nikolaevsky Hall in the Winter Palace. The exhibition will have an expanded UK showing at the Saatchi Gallery in June 2010. “After the success of ‘USA Today’, we were discussing possibilities of future joint projects with the Saatchi Gallery,” Dimitri Ozerkov, head of the 20/21 project and curator of “Newspeak”, told The Art Newspaper. “We agreed to make a British show in partnership, but agreed that the final selection and conception would be carried out by a Hermitage curator, and the premiere is in St Petersburg.” Ozerkov is an enthusiastic follower of Saatchi, and is convinced of the superiority of this collection. “Some 80%, if not more, of the world’s contemporary art is total rubbish, and big institutions such as museums know this, but are not allowed to say it publicly. One feels this when researching material for a show,” he told us. Saatchi proposed the title “Newspeak”, which refers to the fictional language spoken in George Orwell’s novel “1984”. Ozerkov made the initial selection of exhibits from Saatchi’s website, and then visited the works in storage in London, where most of the works for the exhibition were chosen. He also visited studios and galleries to finalise a number of acquisitions and commissions for the show, including a new work by Pablo Bronstein, Relocation of Temple Bar, 2009. “The Hermitage will present only the best part of the collection,” Ozerkov told us. “Some of the works I didn’t find interesting for a Russian audience—such as those referring to everyday realities that a Russian visitor would not understand. Some of the works won’t work well in the context of an old traditional museum. But there are still a couple of risky decisions and I’m curious about the reaction of visitors.” He cites Barry Reigate’s work, in which “cartoon characters parade, penises in hand, to be installed at the Hermitage’s heart”. The exhibition will also include the work of one of the artists featured in the forthcoming reality TV show, currently titled “Saatchi Art Stars”. The BBC programme—which is due to air from late November for four weeks—will feature six artists, to be judged by a panel comprising artist Tracey Emin, broadcaster and critic Matthew Collings, collector Frank Cohen and Barbican Art Gallery head Kate Bush. Rosie Spencer

Alastair MacKinven, Et Sick In Infinitum [Sic], 2008

Dates: 12 Nov 09 - 28 Feb 10
Categories: Old Master
Address: 8 Korte Vijverberg The Hague 2313 AB
Tel: +31 (0)70 302 3456 + 440 Website

The Mauritshuis Museum hosts the first ever monographic exhibition of works by Dutch 17th-century artist Philips Wouwerman. While Wouwerman was highly regarded in his time and up until the 19th century, today his work is largely overlooked. Curator Quentin Buvelot is seeking to reintroduce the artist to a wider public as one of the main figures of 17th-century Dutch painting. The Mauritshuis holds a large collection of works by the artist that were previously owned by the Dutch royal family. Chronologically organised, the exhibition consists of 33 paintings, a third of which originate from private collections and are previously unseen by the public. “It was time to finally show Philips Wouwerman at the Mauritshuis,” Buvelot said, “as he is among the great painters of the Dutch Golden Age.” Wouwerman, who is known mainly for his equine paintings, is shown to be a versatile artist engaging with a variety of themes in landscapes, religious paintings and genre scenes. “There will be many surprises for the visitor,” Buvelot promises. The show includes the 1655-60 painting Battle Scene at War. This “complicated painting”, as Buvelot describes it, emphasises Wouwerman’s painterly talent and sets the tone of the exhibition. Also on show are 10 drawings, several of which have recently been attributed to Wouwerman, which will be a “revelation for the visitor”, Buvelot says.

Dates: 31 Oct 09 - 24 Jan 10
Categories: Contemporary (1970-present)
Address: 4-1-1 Miyoshi, Koto-ku Tokyo 135
Tel: +81 (0)3 5245 4111 Website

It is perhaps surprising that it is only now, at the age of 65, that Rebecca Horn has been honoured by a solo exhibition in Japan. Significant both as a post-war German artist and as a woman artist, Horn was prominent among the creative generation that emerged in the 1960s, producing a body of work that has remained consistent across a wide range of artistic practices, from drawing and photography through performance and film to kinetic sculpture and installation. She has traced her artistic vision to the year she spent convalescing after almost poisoning herself to death at the age of 20 while working with fibreglass without a mask: confined to bed, she passed the time designing extensions to her limbs and body. A work that brought her early acclaim was Unicorn, 1970, in which a young woman is filmed walking through a wheat field wearing only a tall prosthetic horn on her head; the piece seemed very contemporary, but also tapped into the timeless and mythic. Later extensions often included feathers, and eventually they left the human body behind, to become strangely elegant and affecting automata, often described as “machines with souls”. This exhibition provides an overview of Horn’s 40-year career, from early film works to the “bodylandscapes” of recent years. B.M.

Dates: 7 Jun 09 - 31 Dec 10
Categories: Contemporary (1970-present)
Address: Campo San Samuele, 3231 Venice 30124
Tel: +39 (0)41 5231680 Website

After a year and a half of renovation works, French magnate François Pinault inaugurates the new exhibition space at Punta della Dogana with a permanent show that includes about 300 works selected from his vast collection of contemporary art, also displayed in Palazzo Grassi. The title “Mapping the Studio” takes direct inspiration from the influential video installation by Bruce Nauman, 2001, and reflects on Pinault’s choices as a collector, as he stated: “Its aim is to explore the individual course followed by a collector for whom the acquisition of works of art has meant becoming closely associated with the creative process of the individual artists themselves. Obviously this means running certain risks and making certain choices, one of them being the very decision to share one’s passions and ideas with the public at large.” Pinault and the exhibition curators (Alison Gingeras and Francesco Bonami) selected works by some of the best-known artists of the past 40 years, including Jeff Koons, Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince, Cy Twombly and Takashi Murakami, but also featuring emerging artists such as Matthew Day Jackson, Adel Abdessemed, Richard Hughes, and Kai Althoff. Created in partnership with the City of Venice, the project of Punta della Dogana was supervised by Japanese architect Tadao Ando and the total cost of the structural restoration was 20m euros. The contest for the creation of a centre for contemporary art was launched in July 2006 and saw the main contenders, Palazzo Grassi and the Guggenheim Foundation, engaged in a strenuous battle in order to expand their influence on Venice. The space of the ancient customs building has been re-designed in order to accommodate part of Pinault collection, and as a pendant to Palazzo Grassi, which re-opened in 2006 after extensive works. Giovanna Paterno

Dates: 13 Sep 09 - 13 Dec 09
Categories: Contemporary (1970-present)
Address: Musée du Château Versailles 78000
Tel: +33 (0)1 30 83 77 01 Website

As only the second contemporary artist to show works at the Château de Versailles following the Jeff Koons exhibition of 2008, French artist Xavier Veilhan has a hard act to follow in terms of impact. Unlike Koons, who placed existing works within the palace, Paris-based Veilhan is showing seven specially commissioned sculptural pieces in the manicured gardens. Works include a series of statues of famous architects—including Claude Parent, Richard Rogers, Norman Foster, Jean Nouvel and Tadao Ando—a 100-metre-high fountain in the middle of the Grand Canal that pays homage to Constantin Brancusi’s Endless Column sculpture of 1938, and a violet-coloured carriage and horses frozen in motion in the Court of Honour. Rosie Spencer “‘Veilhan Versailles’ is a stroll, an itinerary, a journey through the landscape-territory of Versailles,” says Laurent Le Bon, the exhibition organiser. “Mainly running along the east-west axis outside the château itself, my proposal features a series of works specially produced for this occasion that create a contemporary dotted line which splits in two the masterly garden lay-out of Le Nôtre,” says Veilhan.

Tadao Ando in the Court of Honour

Dates: 20 Nov 09 - 7 Feb 10
Categories: Curious
Address: An der Donau-Au 1, Klosterneuburg Vienna A- 3400
Tel: +43 (0)2243 370 50 Website

In 1999 the Essl Museum, which grew out of Karl-Heinz and Agnes Essl’s private collection of more than 7,000 works, was opened to the public. It started in 1959 as a collection of Austrian art, but at the end of the 1980s the Essls started to include international modern and contemporary art. “As the communist movement broke down our company moved into Eastern Europe,” explained Karl-Heinz. “I took over the business and we had more funds to realise art projects. We decided to open the collection to international art, alongside Austrian. The museum was built as we realised that the collection was important culturally and should be seen by the public.” In celebration of the tenth anniversary of the Essl Museum, this exhibition shows works that have been recently acquired through the Essl acquisitions and exhibition project by 10 international museums. These museums were offered a budget, funded by the couple, to acquire works that will return to the museums on permanent loan after the exhibition. “I invited museums from across the world, from Tokyo to Delhi. The problem with a lot of these museums is that they don’t have the funds to collect all they would like, so I had the idea to give each of the museums a budget and tell them to buy whatever they wanted, with restraints on how they acquired,” said Essl. The resulting show is an insight into the collecting strategy behind the different museums. “As a collector I was very interested to see what and how museums from a wide-ranging social and cultural background collect. Do they collect from their own country or do they focus on international works? Some have chosen one major piece while others have chosen 30 smaller works,” Essl explained.

Annette Messager, Gonflés, Dégonflés, 2005-06

Dates: 15 Sep 09 - 10 Jan 10
Categories: Old Master
Address: Maria Theresien-Platz Vienna A-1010
Tel: +43 (0)1 525 240 Website

The favourite impresa or heraldic emblem of Charles the Bold was a device showing the flint, steel and flames. With hindsight, this piece of armorial self-promotion ironically summarises the duke’s essential weakness, rather than the power and energy he intended it to project. The English and German translations of his posthumous epithet “le Téméraire”—“the Bold”, “der Kühne”—fail to convey the harmonics of the French: foolhardy, rash or overreaching, as well as brave and daring. Sparks flying from steel and stone can set fires that run out of control as well as provide heat and light. Charles’s reign brought the Duchy of Burgundy to its white-heat culmination as one of the most brilliant, aesthetically refined European courts of the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance, and finally to cinders and dust with his ignominious death on the battlefield of Nancy. The four Valois Dukes of Burgundy, a branch of the French royal house, built up their territories from the accession of Philip the Bold (“le Hardi”) in 1363 by inheritance, marriage, conquest and purchase. Over four generations, their territories expanded from an area of about a 100-mile radius around Dijon and Besançon to a state that also included all of present-day Alsace-Lorraine, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and most of north-eastern France. Until Charles the Bold, the dukes had—not without dollops of good luck—advantageously manipulated their geographical position between France, the Holy Roman Empire and England (for example, Charles married Mary of York, the sister of Edward IV, to whom Charles had made massive loans, thus binding England to Burgundy with ties of marriage and money). The dukes were also lavish patrons of the arts, none more so than Charles’s father, Philip the Good (1396-1464) as well as Charles himself. This exhibition, having been seen in Bern and Bruges, places intimately connected with Charles’s death and life, now comes to its final stage in the city most closely associated with the heirs to the bulk of the Burgundian wealth and power, the Habsburgs. On show are some of the most magnificent works created for the court of Charles the Bold (1433-77), who reigned from his father’s death in 1467. It features paintings by artists patronised by the Burgundian dukes, most notably Roger van der Weyden, Hans Memling, Hugo van der Goes and Jan van Eyck, textiles including Arras and Tournai tapestries, embroideries, vestments, court costumes and other luxury fabrics, and arms and armour (some tailor-made for Charles). Also included is metalwork and jewellery by Parisian, Bruges and Augsburg goldsmiths, among which are several precious gold chains with jewelled and enamelled pendants of the Order of the Golden Fleece, founded by Charles’s father in 1430. A highlight is the reliquary of St Lambert’s finger presented by the figure of Charles the Bold in his Milanese parade armour, supported by his patron, St George (Charles belonged to the Order of the Garter)—modelled on the figure of the same from Van Eyck’s Van der Paele altarpiece. The reliquary had been commissioned by Charles in 1467 and presented by him to the cathedral in Liège in 1471. Illuminated manuscripts (including Charles’s Book of Hours from the Getty) and other documents, medals and medallions, tableware, plate and ceramics round out the display. The show is divided into six sections covering: Burgundian court culture; political administration and trade in the mid-15th century; objects directly related to Charles the Bold and Margaret of York; materials relating to the ceremonies of the meeting of the Emperor Frederick III and Charles in Trier in 1473; Charles’s ill-judged gamble on a war with the Swiss Confederation, 1474-77, which brought the break-up of the Valois hegemony with Charles’s death on the battlefield where, plundered, his naked corpse, ravaged by wolves, was later found (one of his favourite jewels, “The Three Brothers”, a setting of three rubies and three diamonds that was looted, eventually found its way into the hands of Elizabeth I, who prized it highly and is shown wearing it in Nicholas Hilliard’s The Ermine Portrait, 1585); and, finally, the Habsburg heritage (Charles’s daughter, Mary, married Maximilian I, bringing the Low Countries into the Habsburg sway). The exhibition’s extremely well and intelligently designed catalogue has an English edition published by Mercatorfonds (£45, $80 hb ISBN 9789 061538592). Donald Lee

Reliquary of St Lambert’s finger

Dates: 20 Nov 09 - 12 Jan 10
Categories: Old Master
Address: Fürstengasse 1 Vienna 1090
Tel: +43 (0)1 319 57 670 Website

Rudolf von Habsburg was born in 1552 in Vienna, the eldest son of the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian II. He spent his formative years, from the age of 11 to 19, at the stiffly formal court of his uncle, Philip II, King of Spain, an experience that seems to have made him pensive, melancholy, secretive, reserved and aloof. He developed a great love of the arts and (occult) sciences. He succeeded his father as Emperor in 1576 and moved the court to Prague (he was also King of Bohemia, as well as of Hungary and Archduke of Austria) where he created a Wunder- and a Kunstkammer, the former consisting of natural curiosities and specimens, musical instruments, clocks, water works, astrolabes, compasses, telescopes and other scientific instruments, and the latter containing over 2,000 works by such cutting-edge artists as Bartholomäus Spranger, Hans von Aachen, Giambologna, Josef Heintz, Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Aegidius Sadeler, and Adrian de Vries, as well as “old masters” such as Dürer and Brueghel. He patronised the botanist Charles de l’Ecluse and the astronomers Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler, and kept a menagerie of exotic animals and botanical gardens. He never married. His reigned was marked by inconclusive wars with the Ottomans and a revolt by his Hungarian subjects, as well as the turmoil brought about by the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Church’s retrenchment. These events came to overwhelm him and, stripped of all power, save the imperial, by his younger brother and successor, Matthias, he died in 1612. The conventional (and teleological) view has been that while he was a great patron of the arts, he was an inept and disastrous ruler, taking steps that made the Thirty Years War (which saw the complete dispersal of his collections) inevitable. Revisionist views have come to emphasise his far-sightedness in looking to the arts and sciences as means of surmounting theological and ideological differences, his tolerance of Judaism and Protestantism, his backing of the moderate protagonists of the Counter-Reformation and his ambiguous sexuality as modern man avant la lettre. This exhibition is the fourth in 20 years to have focused on Rudolf II, and each successive show has reconfigured him according to the temper of the times. Collectors and collecting studies, much in fashion in the 1970s and 80s, informed “Prag um 1600” at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, and the Villa Hügel, Essen, in 1988-89, while “Rudolf II and Prague” at the Wallenstein Palace and the Prague Castle Museum in 1997 clearly reflected the Czech Republic’s need to assert its European roots and identity, after decades of occident-phobic and Russophile Soviet domination. (Under communism, Rudolf was portrayed as a fool.) Interestingly, the Prince von und zu Liechtenstein refused to lend works of art to this exhibition in protest at the seizure, first by Czechoslovakia and then by the communists, of his family estates at Valtice and Feltrice in Moravia. Hard on the heels of the Liechtenstein Biedermeier show at the Pushkin Museum earlier this year, this exhibition may well be another gesture of the House of Liechtenstein’s recent Ostpolitik, underscoring the family’s connections with Eastern Europe and, in this case, emphasising the Liechtenstein hand in Bohemian culture and life. From around 1597, Rudolf relied on Prince Karl I (1569-1627) to advise and help him to assemble his art collection. (The Emperor made him steward of the imperial household in 1600 and the viceroy of Bohemia in 1622.) The prince himself owned a considerable collection, works from which feature in this show, particularly two works recently acquired and restored: Diana with her Hounds and Two Companions, with Actaeon in the Background, 1602, and the Coronation of the Virgin, 1602, by Joseph Heintz the Elder.

Coronation of the Virgin, 1602 (detail)