Category: Exhibitions

Social climbing was a competitive sport in Tudor England, requiring a complex range of skills, strategies, and techniques. How to Be a Power Player: Tudor Edition invites you into a world of lace ruffs, jousting, hawks, bad handwriting, scandal, and political factions. Experience the playbooks, the people, and the spectacular fails, as courtiers tried to navigate the minefield of working for a boss who could shower you with riches or chop off your head.

The exhibition features more than 60 objects from the Folger’s collection to demonstrate the “rules” for how to be a successful courtier. They show how historical and literary figures ranging from royal advisors to household staff used cunning, cutthroat, and creative means to acquire power and curry favor with the Tudor monarchs.

Art played a pivotal role during the dawn of European natural history in the 16th and 17th centuries. Advancements in scientific technology, trade, and colonial expansion allowed naturalists to study previously unknown and overlooked insects, animals, and other beestjes, or “little beasts.”  Artists such as Joris Hoefnagel and Jan van Kessel helped deepen and spread knowledge of these creatures with highly detailed and playful works that inspired generations of printmakers, painters, decorative artists, and naturalists.

A delight for all ages, this exhibition features nearly 75 of these paintings, prints, and drawings in a unique presentation alongside specimens and taxidermy from the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. Learn about the rich exchange between artists and naturalists that sparked a fascination with earth’s living creatures, big and small. See how this intersection of art and science continues to inspire us today in a new film by artist Dario Robleto.

 This exhibition will draw from the Center’s rich holdings of the artist’s work, encompassing all media and phases of his nearly sixty-year career. This is the first show at the YCBA to focus on Turner in more than thirty years, displaying the complete arc of his radical artistic evolution. The exhibition will examine the contradictory nature of this revolutionary figure, who was as inspired by the past luminaries of the European landscape tradition as he was determined to surpass their greatest achievements.

“We are thrilled to welcome visitors back to the museum to reconnect with our extraordinary collections,” said Martina Droth, Paul Mellon Director. “Turner is an artist whose groundbreaking works continue to inspire. His work has long been a cornerstone of our collection and we are excited to show our returning and new visitors the full range of our Turner holdings.”

In the wake of the important studies by Carlo Knight (who recently passed away) and the great exhibition at the British Museum in 1996, the Gallerie d'Italia - Naples is dedicating its 2024 autumn exhibition to William Hamilton, His British Majesty’s ambassador at the  court of Ferdinand IV of Bourbon and his wife Maria Carolina of Hapsburg. Diplomat, antiquarian and volcanologist, Hamilton, with his multifaceted personality, found fertile ground in the “Enlightened” Naples of the second half of the 18th century to affirm and develop his great passions, antiquity and science.

The sections through which the exhibition will unfold will highlight his great interest in volcanology, landscape painting, music, and collecting, as well as the role he played in Neapolitan society of the time, amplified by the sometimes legendary figure of Lady Emma Hamilton. In reconsidering and promoting the extraordinary human, political and intellectual story of a man who was undoubtedly one of the greatest interpreters of his time, leaving a profound mark on the city, the exhibition will also trace the fruitful cultural and artistic exchanges that took place between Italy and the United Kingdom at a key moment in European history.

Technical art history brings together art historians, conservators and scientists to gain deeper insights into works of art and the methods and intentions of their makers. A new exhibit opening Jan. 30 at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke, “On the Same Wavelength: Art, Science and Conservation,” explores the challenges and many accomplishments of these efforts.

Using microscopes, specialized cameras, scanners, and different wavelengths of light, the team examined objects from the Nasher Museum’s permanent collection, ranging from ancient American ceramics to a contemporary artwork made from found plastic.

Through the ever-evolving lens of technical art history, On the Same Wavelength presents the discoveries about these objects’ materials, original uses, and the techniques used to create them. This exhibition also highlights the role of the museum in navigating challenges related to an object’s condition, display and evolution over time because of aging and conservation.

Pablo Picasso’s prolonged engagement with paper is the subject of the groundbreaking exhibition Picasso and Paper, organized by the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Royal Academy of Arts, London, in partnership with the Musée national Picasso-Paris.

Showcasing nearly 300 works spanning the artist’s career, the exhibition highlights Picasso’s relentless exploration of paper. His appreciation of and experimentation with the material is revealed in the works ranging from collages of cut-and-pasted papers to sculptures from pieces of torn and burnt paper, manipulated photographs, drawings in virtually all available media, and prints in an array of techniques. The exhibition’s highlights include Femmes à leur toilette (1937–38), an extraordinarily large collage (9 13/16 x 14 1/2 feet) of cut-and-pasted papers, which will be exhibited for the first time in the United States; outstanding Cubist papiers collés; artist’s sketchbooks, including studies for his best known paintings, including Les Demoiselles d’Avignon; constructed paper guitars from the Cubist and Surrealist periods; and an array of works related to major paintings and sculptural projects.

A selection of approximately 40 paintings, prints, and drawings from the BMA’s collection explores the role of water and landscape in defining the early modern Dutch Republic.

The water’s edge was a site of rich and often fraught ideas, where environmental, economic, political, and social narratives came to the fore. It also served as a site of immense inspiration for Dutch artists such as Frans Hals, Rembrandt van Rijn, Jacob van Ruisdael, and Salomon Van Ruysdael, among many others. Landscapes depicting harbors, trade, travel, and leisure abounded, as did the production of maps, still lifes, and portraits. Together, these images offer insight into the identity of the young Dutch Republic.

Presented as part of the Turn Again to the Earth environmental initiative. 

Exploring the many ways that the French artist James Tissot represented modern women and envisioned their relationship to time during the last decades of the nineteenth century, this exhibition presents two of the AGO’s most beloved Tissot paintings alongside a selection of more than 40 works on paper donated by Allan and Sondra Gotlieb. The contradiction of the period come alive in these works, as the quickness of modernity, exemplified by the newfound speed of travel, fashion and commodity culture, is juxtaposed against the constrained pace of women’s everyday lives, characterized by the wait to find a husband, caregiving, tending to customers or recovering from illness.

This exhibition traces the history of the representation of reality in the arts and seeks to pay tribute to a little-known facet of the Museum’s collections, while shining a light on Jules and Paul Marmottan’s penchant for this pictorial genre. [...]

Over the centuries, trompe-l’oeil has been used in various media and has proven to be multifaceted. Not only does it play with the viewer’s gaze, but it is a nod to the potential traps set by our own perceptions. If certain themes of trompe l’oeil are well-known—vanities, hunting trophies, letter holders or racks, and grisailles—other aspects will be explored in this exhibition, such as the decorative variations on furniture, pottery, etc., and even the political significance of this pictorial genre from the revolutionary period up to the modern and contemporary day.

More than eighty key works ranging from the 16th to the 21st century, coming from both private and public collections in Europe and the United States (National Gallery of Art in Washington, Museo nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, the Musée d’art et d’histoire in Geneva, the Museo dell’Opificio delle Pietre Dure in Florence, the Château de Fontainebleau, the Louvre, the Musée de l’Armée, Musée national de la Céramique in Sèvres, the Fondation Custodia, the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Lille, the Musée Unterlinden in Colmar, etc.) will be on display, allowing visitors to understand the formal evolution of the trompe l’oeil genre.

In the exhibition, SMK will juxtapose its own extensive collection of historical casts of Michelangelo’s sculptures with brand new, high-quality 3D-cast replicas. This way, you can experience the majority of Michelangelo’s sculptures in one place – something that would be impossible with the originals, which are never moved. You will also be able to see the largest selection of Michelangelo’s original drawings, letters, and sculpture models ever displayed in Denmark.

Join us as SMK unfolds Michelangelo’s life and art through close studies of his sculptures and focuses on the complex relationship between original and reproduction in the digital age.

Suzanne Valadon had not been the subject of a monograph since the one devoted to her by the Musée National d’Art Moderne in 1967. Presented at the Centre Pompidou-Metz in 2023 (“Suzanne Valadon. A World of Her Own”), then at the Musée des Beaux-arts de Nantes (2024) and the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya (2024), the tribute to this ostensibly modern artist, free of the conventions of her time, continues at the Centre Pompidou in 2025, enhanced by new loans and new archives.

The exhibition showcases this exceptional figure and highlights her pioneering, but often underestimated, role in the birth of artistic modernity. It reveals the great freedom of this artist, who did not really adhere to any particular movement, except perhaps her own. The exhibition of almost 200 works draws on a wealth of national collections, in particular the largest, that of the Centre Pompidou, but also from the Musée d’Orsay and the Musée de l’Orangerie.

The installation highlights picture frames as works of art in their own right, exploring their shifting forms and functions from the altar-like frames of the Renaissance to the experimental, artist-designed frames of the late 1800s. It will include 13 frames from the Johnson Collection, which, together, express the craftsmanship and variety of European frames through the centuries.

For the first time, the Musée du Louvre is dedicating an exhibition to Cimabue, one of the most important artists of the 13th century. The exhibition is the product of two ‘Cimabue-centric’ events of great importance for the museum: the restoration of the Maestà and the acquisition of a heretofore-unseen Cimabue panel, rediscovered in France in 2019 and listed as a French National Treasure: Christ Mocked.

These two paintings, whose restoration was completed in 2024, provide the starting point for this exhibition, which, by bringing together some forty works, aims to illuminate the extraordinary richness and undeniable innovation of Cimabue’s art. Cimabue was one of the first to open Western painting to naturalism, seeking to represent the world, objects and bodies as they truly existed. With him, the conventions of representation inherited from Eastern art, so highly valued until this period, gave way to an inventive art of painting seeking to evoke a three-dimensional space, bodies in volume shaped by subtle shading, articulated limbs, natural postures and human emotions.