Art exhibitions ensure there's plenty to see here

SUMMER is better suited to the beach and reading quietly in the shade, but if you feel energetic there are worthwhile exhibitions across Australia.

Rudolf Schlichter

SUMMER is really better suited to the beach and reading quietly in the shade with a cool drink, but if you feel more energetic there are worthwhile exhibitions all across Australia covering all sorts of media, genres and historical periods.

Some of these have already been reviewed in this column and others will be discussed in the next few months.

Probably the biggest single event in Australian galleries at the moment is Picasso: Masterpieces from the Musee National Picasso, Paris at the Art Gallery of NSW.

Drawn from the immense holdings of the Picasso Museum - essentially the contents of the artist's studio when he died, which were given to the French government in lieu of a considerable tax bill - the show is very big indeed; perhaps too big, but its extent is arguably necessary to convey an adequate idea of the enormous, sometimes exhilarating and sometimes just excessive creative energy of the man who came to personify modern art in the popular imagination.

Just as important, in fact, will be a show that opens today, Matisse: Drawing Life, a survey of more than 300 drawings and prints by the great 20th-century modernist, which has been produced in collaboration with the Bibliotheque nationale in Paris and will be at the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art - its only venue in Australia - until March 4. It will be an opportunity to consider the prolific graphic activity of an artist often predominantly associated with colour.

The Mad Square, an exhibition of German modernism from just before World War I to the tormented years of the Weimar Republic and the rise of Nazism, which recently closed in Sydney, has moved to the NGV International in Melbourne. Devised and curated in Australia, the show is well researched and thoughtfully assembled, and an excellent opportunity to immerse oneself in a fascinating and culturally rich lull between two disastrous storms.

In respect to earlier periods, there are several interesting and important exhibitions across the country. To begin in chronological order, the Ian Potter Museum in Melbourne has an intriguing show of antiquities temporarily lent from private collections in the city, mainly consisting of painted ceramics from Attica and from the very productive 4th-century BC centre of Apulia. The University of Sydney's Nicholson Museum is also home to some very fine ancient ceramics, including Apulian examples, but has an exhibition on the Etruscans and the continuing Travels with Herodotus, in which its Egyptian collection is illuminated by the first outsider's account of the civilisation of the Nile.

The Italian Renaissance is the subject of an important and substantial exhibition that opens next week at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra and comes from the Pinacoteca of the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo; the show, with many great masters of the 15th century and the high Renaissance, should be all the more interesting for including a couple of works that once belonged to Giovanni Morelli, founder of modern scientific connoisseurship.

The Renaissance to baroque periods are the focus of the second in the series of international loan exhibitions at the Art Gallery of Western Australia. Treasures of the Victoria & Albert Museum displays outstanding objects from early modern holdings of art and artefacts while the galleries they usually occupy in London are being renovated.

The single most outstanding item is the bust of Thomas Baker by Gianlorenzo Bernini, greatest of baroque sculptors, a remarkable work even if the marble carving from Bernini's clay model was probably executed by his senior assistant. This exhibition closes on January 9 to continue on its world tour, so any visit to Perth will have to be in December.

The 18th and 19th centuries are represented by a very fine exhibition at the NGV, British Watercolours 1760-1900: The Age of Splendour. The second half of the 18th century was a time of renewed interest in nature and watercolours in their various forms - from ink and wash to gouache as well as watercolours in the narrow sense - were all portable media that could easily be taken out into the field, on a country walk or on a journey through alpine wildernesses.

The exhibition also takes us back to a time when the demarcation between amateur and professional was less defined than it became subsequently, when many people who did not earn their living from art drew and painted for pleasure, just as people used to play music in the home before the advent of radio and television.

Finally, the National Library of Australia in Canberra has just opened Handwritten, an exhibition of 100 manuscripts spanning a thousand years of history, and lent by the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, the greatest library in Germany, which celebrates its 350th anniversary this year. The show will include medieval illuminations as well as orthographs by Michelangelo, Mozart and Napoleon.

In the field of Australian art, the most important exhibition will be the National Gallery of Victoria's outstanding Von Guerard: Nature Revealed, which opens soon in a new and unfortunately slightly reduced form (without some of the European loans that helped to evoke the context of Eugene von Guerard's early career in Rome, Naples and Dusseldorf) at the Queensland Art Gallery.

As originally presented, this was the outstanding Australian exhibition of the year and will remain of exceptional value and interest even with some losses.

Nicolas Chevalier, the friend and contemporary of von Guerard, is surveyed properly for the first time in what should be another exhibition of great interest at Geelong Art Gallery. It opened a few days ago and will run until February 12.

At the NGA, Out of the West - based almost entirely on a large private collection recently acquired - will be for many viewers a first introduction to some of the colonial and early 20th-century artists of Western Australia.

The National Portrait Gallery's Impressions: Painting Light and Life is devoted to the portrait painting of the Heidelberg period, an aspect of the movement often overlooked because of the special significance of the landscape and subject pictures, but which was the bread and butter of some artists as well as a valuable record of the Australians of the period leading up to Federation. Sea of Dreams, meanwhile, at the Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, gathers images of Port Phillip Bay painted between 1830 and 1914. Also in Victoria, the TarraWarra Museum of Art is holding a survey of the work of William Delafield Cook.

Drawing is represented in the Dobell Prize at the AGNSW; photography is the subject of the portrait exhibition What's in a Face? also at the AGNSW, as well as Looking at Looking at the NGV and Made in Hollywood, a collection of images of stars and celebrities from 1925 to the early 1960s, at the Bendigo Art Gallery and Upstairs Downstairs, with pictures of British life between 1874 and 1990, at the NGA.

In the field of Aboriginal art, Tjukurrtjanu, at the NGV, looks back to the beginnings of the Papunya painting movement in the early 70s; the exhibition will travel to the Musee du Quai Branly in Paris next year.

In Asian art, Beneath the Winds is a survey of Southeast Asian work in the collection of the Art Gallery of South Australia, including several new acquisitions and other items now shown for the first time. The AGNSW is also displaying a range of recent additions to its collection under the title One Hundred Flowers. The National Museum in Canberra has A New Horizon, which comes from the National Art Museum of China and surveys the developments in Chinese art from 1949 to the present.

Among overseas exhibitions, the most important is perhaps the London National Gallery's Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan, which brings together, in the gallery's words, "the most complete display of Leonardo's rare surviving paintings ever held", including the newly attributed Salvator Mundi of which much has been written. Other notable shows relating to the Renaissance include Perugino: Raphael's Master at the Alte Pinakothek in Munich and The Renaissance Portrait from Donatello to Bellini, which opens just before Christmas at the Metropolitan Museum in New York after closing at the Bode Museum in Berlin in November. Also at the Metropolitan is Art in Renaissance Venice, 1400-1515, taken from the museum's collections.

Two exhibitions are devoted to the greatest master of the classical landscape, Claude Lorrain: one is at the Teyler Museum in Haarlem, in The Netherlands, and the other at the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford in Britain; the latter will subsequently travel to the Staedel Museum in Frankfurt. And a little later, in March, the National Gallery in London will hold an exhibition dealing with the relation between this master and one of the greatest landscape artists of the romantic period: Turner Inspired: In the Light of Claude.

The Tate Britain, meanwhile, has a survey of another romantic landscape artist, John Martin, appropriately titled Apocalypse, as this painter specialised in pictures of calamity and destruction and the kind of end-of-the-world scenarios nowadays popular with Hollywood producers.

At the Royal Academy, in contrast, is an exhibition devoted to Degas and his fascination with dance, with a special interest in contemporary developments in photography and film; it is appropriately titled Degas and Ballet: Picturing Movement. Another significant impressionist exhibition is in Madrid, where the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza is holding a survey of Berthe Morisot.

In Paris, the Centre Pompidou has a survey of paintings and drawings by Edvard Munch, while the Louvre presents an exhibition devoted to Alexander the Great and the world of Macedonia in which he grew up.

Finally, there are also important exhibitions to look forward to in Australia during autumn and winter, starting with one at the National Museum on the subject of the Silk Road, that central Asian trade route that also carried religious and cultural influences from India to China. Later, the NGV will have a winter blockbuster devoted to Napoleon and the QAG will be host to an important loan exhibition of Spanish art from the great collections of the Prado in Madrid.