A statue of the god Hapy from the ancient city of Thonis-Heracleion. © Franck Goddio/Hilti Foundation. Photo: Christoph Gerigk
The recent discovery of two ancient Egyptian cities, Thonis-Heracleion and Canopus, both submerged at the mouth of the River Nile for more than 1,000 years, is the subject of the British Museum’s first large-scale exhibition of underwater discoveries.
Around 200 objects excavated off the coast of Alexandria between 1966 and 2012 will go on display with objects from Egyptian museums. A version of the exhibition is at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris (until 31 January) and it is due to travel to the Museum Rietberg in Zurich (2017).
Whereas the Paris and Zurich shows centre primarily on Osiris, the god of the afterlife, the London presentation will explore Egypt’s links with Greece.
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Roman Mosaics across the Empire
Getty Villa, Los Angeles
30 March-12 September
Pergamon and the Hellenistic Kingdoms of the Ancient World
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
18 April-10 July
Ctesiphon: Ancient Iran and the Emergence of Islamic Art
Pergamonmuseum, Berlin
29 July-27 November
POST-IMPRESSIONISM AND MODERN ART
Foreign Gods: Tribal Art in the Context of Modernism
Leopold Museum, Vienna
23 September-9 January 2017
Max Pechstein's Still Life with Negro Statues (1918). © Pechstein Hamburg/Toekendorf/Bildrecht, Wien 2015
It is hard to overstate the profound effect that tribal art had on Western art at the turn of the 20th century. When faced with a collection of African masks at the Musée d’Ethnographie in Paris, Pablo Picasso reportedly declared them to be “what painting is really all about”.
Similarly, the German Expressionists were moved by the primeval allure of tribal art from the southern hemisphere, while the Dadaists believed that Oceanic art held the key to accessing the unconscious.
European Modernity, represented by works by artists including Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani, Emil Nolde, Max Ernst and Max Pechstein, will go head to head with objects from the 200-strong collection of tribal art that once belonged to Rudolf Leopold, the museum’s founder.
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Theo Van Doesburg: a New Expression of Life, Art and Technology
Palais de Beaux Arts, Brussels
26 February-29 May
Paul Klee: Irony at Work
Centre Pompidou, Paris
6 April-1 August
Kandinsky, Marc and Der Blaue Reiter
Fondation Beyeler, Basel
4 September-15 January 2017
Yves Klein
Tate Liverpool
21 October-12 March 2017
PHOTOGRAPHY
Diane Arbus: In the Beginning
Met Breuer, New York
12 July-27 November
Early Arbus: The Backwards Man in his Hotel Room, N.Y.C. (1961). Courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art/© The Estate of Diane Arbus
Hers is now a ubiquitous name in the world of photography, but it is easy to forget quite how radical an artist Diane Arbus was when she roamed the streets and took portraits of those considered to be non-mainstream members of society, from disabled people to transgender people. Her work drew praise and criticism in equal measure from leading figures including Robert Hughes, Susan Sontag and Brian Sewell, and her unique aesthetic changed the face of portraiture forever.
Although her work has been exhibited around the world, this show presents around 105 photographs that Arbus took during the first few years of her career (between 1956 and 1962), two-thirds of which have never been published before. Most of the works come from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s extensive Diane Arbus archive, which was donated by the artist’s estate in 2007.
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Daido Moriyama
Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, Paris
6 February-29 May
The Open Road: Photography and the American Road Trip
Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas
27 February-30 May
Robert Mapplethorpe
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
20 March-31 July
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
15 March-31 July
Who Shot Sports: a Photographic History, 1843 to the Present
Brooklyn Museum, New York
15 July-8 January 2017
DESIGN AND DECORATIVE ART
#techstyle
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
6 March-10 July
Dutch designer Iris van Herpen's Voltage 3D-printed dress (2013). © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston/Photo Eloy Ricardez Luna
The future of fashion increasingly looks set to depend on technological innovations that would have seemed impossible ten years ago. Leading designers around the world, including Issey Miyake, Rei Kawakubo, Hussein Chalayan and the late Alexander McQueen, have been at the forefront of fashion and technology, employing laser, electronics, biotechnology and 3D printing.
The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston is complementing works by these designers with pieces from its own fashion collection and a number of loans, including a digitally printed dress from Plato’s Atlantis (2010), McQueen’s final collection.
The show is in two sections: one explores collaborations between designers, mathematicians and scientists, and the other features interactive clothing that makes use of technology for visual effect.
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Architecture as Art
Pirelli Hangarbicocca, Milan
1 April-12 September
Living in the Amsterdam School
Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
9 April-28 August
Masterpieces of Korean Ceramics
Grand Palais, Paris
27 April-20 June
CONTEMPORARY
Marcel Broodthaers
Museum of Modern Art, New York
14 February-15 May
Broodthaers's White Cabinet and White Table (1965). © 2015 Estate of Marcel Broodthaers/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SABAM, Brussels
he Museum of Modern Art is giving Marcel Broodthaers (1924-76), the Belgian artist, film-maker and poet, his first retrospective in New York, bringing together around 200 works in a wide variety of media.
Although the artist has enjoyed critical acclaim, he has remained relatively under-appreciated by the public, and the aim of the show is to help him take his rightful place in 20th-century art history.
The late museum director and critic Michael Rush wrote in 2010 that Broodthaers “may be the best known artist you haven’t seen”, citing his influence on a “bevy of contemporary artists”.
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Peter Fischli and David Weiss
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
5 February-20 April
Georg Baselitz: Heroes
Städel Museum, Frankfurt
30 June-23 October
Moderna Museet, Stockholm
12 November-19 February 2017
Cy Twombly
Centre Pompidou, Paris
30 November-24 April 2017
Robert Rauschenberg
Tate Modern, London
1 December-2 April 2017
19TH-CENTURY ART
Charles Gleyre (1806-1874): the Repentant Romantic
Musée d’Orsay, Paris
10 May-11 September
Alluring and dangerous godesses: Charles Gleyre's La Danse des Bacchantes (1849). Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne/Photo J.C. Ducret
The Swiss artist Charles Gleyre has never had a monographic show on French soil before, although he is considered one of the leading 19th-
century academic painters. For 21 years, Gleyre’s Parisian atelier was one of the most liberal and creative hubs in the city, and a number of soon-to-be-greats, including Auguste Renoir, Claude Monet and Alfred Sisley, passed through its doors when they were still learning the ropes.
Some critics have associated his crisp, clear painterly style and love of mythological subject matter with an old-fashioned resistance to the forces that were reshaping the world around him, but this show aims to accentuate and re-evaluate the elements of passion, violence and Orientalism that exist in Gleyre’s work, despite its overarching rigour and Helvetic precision. Moreover, his depiction of women as alluring but dangerous goddesses can be seen as a precursor to the Symbolist experiments that followed towards the end of the 19th century.
Best of the rest…
Edgar Degas: a Strange New Beauty
Museum of Modern Art, New York
26 March-24 July
City of the Soul: Rome and the Romantics
Morgan Library & Museum, New York
17 June-11 September
Corot's The Italian Woman (around 1870), once owned by Lucian Freud. © The National Gallery, London
We tend to measure the quality of works of art, and their standing in art history, by what critics and collectors have made of them over the years, by the exhibitions they have featured in and by what has been written about them. We rarely wonder which works of art were admired by famous artists.
The National Gallery is drawing on its own collection, as well as loans, to stage a show of around 60 paintings previously owned by artists, including Van Dyck’s Titian, Matisse’s Degas and Lucian Freud’s Corot. By displaying these paintings next to the artist-collectors’ own work, the exhibition explores whether the artists’ artistic preferences were linked to their own creative process.
Best of the rest…
Celebration: 125 Years of Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
8 March-18 september
Venice, the Jews and Europe
Palazzo Ducale, Venice
19 June-13 November
Every People Under Heaven: Jerusalem, 1000-1400
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
20 September-8 January 2017
