After two years of cancellations and postponements in the art world, there is an abundance of exhibitions on offer this summer. Here are some of the highlights on display around the UK – including both a famous Picasso portrait and an exploded garden shed.
True to Nature: Open-air Painting 1780-1870
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, until 29 August
A sun-filled and breezy selection of small, choice works by artists from John Constable to Edgar Degas – and a host of lesser-knowns – who took their easels outdoors.
Reframed: The Woman at the Window
Dulwich Picture Gallery, until 4 September
This thoughtful show examines a motif that is familiar from Vermeer onwards and brings the pensive female figure lit from within up to date with modern variations.
Cornelia Parker
Tate Britain, until 16 October
A haunting retrospective of the work of Cornelia Parker, who has found poetry in defamiliarising familiar objects – from an exploded garden shed, to squashed brass instruments hung like chandeliers.
Edvard Munch: Masterpieces from Bergen
Courtauld Gallery, until 5 September 2022
To see a gathering of more than 20 pictures by the Norwegian master of existentialist angst is a rare treat. Together they reveal an artist of stylistic and psychological range.
Summer Exhibition
Royal Academy, until 21 August
After a missing pandemic year and one autumn iteration, the annual jamboree has returned. What hasn’t changed it what’s on offer – a head-filling mix of genres, sizes and mediums from professional and amateur artists.
Picasso-Ingres: Face to Face
National Gallery, until 9 October
A two-painting show that contrasts Picasso’s 1932 Woman with a Book with Ingres’s bravura mid-19th-century portrait of Madame Moitessier and tests Picasso’s estimation of himself as a modern old master.
Nature and the Ideal: Pioneers of British Landscape
Bishop Trevor Gallery at Auckland Castle, until 2 October
A toothsome collection of work by the Georgian painters who established the British tradition of landscape painting – George Stubbs, Thomas Gainsborough, Richard Wilson et al.
Milton Avery: American Colourist
Royal Academy, until 16 October
The first solo exhibition of the abstract expressionists’ mentor to be held in this country. Avery was a prolific purveyor of pictures that simplified forms and filled them with saturated colour.
© 2022 Milton Avery Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York and DACS, London 2022
The Future Belongs To What Was As Much As What Is, Morag Myerscough
Hadrian’s Wall, until 30 October
Myerscough was commissioned by English Heritage to rebuild the north gatehouse of Housesteads Roman Fort on Hadrian’s Wall. Her recreation offers a joyous 8.5 metre-high spot of colour on the Northumbrian landscape.
A Taste for Impressionism: Modern French Art from Millet to Matisse
Royal Scottish Academy, until 13 November
Thanks to daring early 20th-century collectors, Scotland has particularly rich holdings of French art and some of the best examples – by Degas, Paul Gauguin, Claude Monet and their peers – are on display in this gem-like show.
[See also: How Patrick Nasmyth brought Dutch mastery to Scottish art]
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