The Van Gogh Museum presents Gauguin & Laval in Martinique. This is the first ever exhibition devoted to a crucial, but up until now neglected period in the artistic career of Paul Gauguin: the four months that he spent in Martinique in 1887, together with Charles Laval. The colourful, innovative artworks that the two friends created on the island proved to have a huge impact on their artistic development and future careers. Gauguin & Laval in Martinique unites a large number of the paintings, drawings and sketches that the two French artists created on the Caribbean island for the first time. Many of the loans are part of private collections and are otherwise rarely exhibited or published, if ever at all. The Van Gogh Museum is home to several significant works by Gauguin and Laval from their Martinican period. Vincent van Gogh and his brother Theo made the initial acquisitions for this collection as early as 1887. As a pa

This autumn Tate Modern is presenting the UK’s first major retrospective of the work of Anni Albers (1899–1994). This exhibition brings together her most important works from major collections in the US and Europe, many of which are being shown in the UK for the first time, to highlight Albers’s significance as an artist. Opening ahead of the centenary of the Bauhaus in 2019, this exhibition is long overdue recognition of Albers’s pivotal contribution to modern art and design, and part of Tate Modern’s wider commitment to showing artists working in textiles. Anni Albers combined the ancient craft of hand-weaving with the language of modern art, finding within the medium many possibilities for the expression of modern life. Featuring over 350 objects including beautiful small-scale studies, large wall-hangings, jewellery made from everyday items,

This year is the 450th anniversary of the outbreak of the Eighty Years’ War, and to mark the event the Rijksmuseum is holding an exhibition entitled ’80 Years’ War. The Birth of the Netherlands’. From 12 October 2018 to 20 January 2019, satirical cartoons, items of clothing, weapons and paintings by Bruegel, Rubens and Ter Borch will be our ‘eyewitnesses’, telling the story of how the Dutch nation was born. In a contemporary exhibition created by the Flemish stage designer Roel van Berckelaer, the Rijksmuseum shows how the 80 Years’ War changed and shaped the Netherlands, and how this conflict gave the southern Netherlands, now Belgium, a distinct character. 80 Years’ War is the first major exhibition to encompass the entire conflict and place it in its international context. It raises many issues – such as religious freedom, self-determination, terror and persecution – that remain highly to

Charting two centuries of photographic history from the early pioneers to digital smartphone snappers, London’s Victoria & Albert Museum opened its new Photography Centre this week. The exhibition “tells the story of photography as a way of collecting the world, from the medium’s invention to today,” V&A director Tristram Hunt told reporters on Wednesday. “In an era when everyone’s iPhone makes them a photographer, the V&A’s Photography Centre explores and explains the medium in a compelling way,” he said, showing off the four new galleries. Museum-goers enter the galleries through an installation of more than 150 cameras spanning 160 years. Visitors can handle cameras from throughout the age