Philadelphia Museum of Art – Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.A.
Van Gogh Up Close
February 1 – May 6, 2012
Vincent van Gogh was an artist of exceptional intensity, not only in his use of color and exuberant application of paint, but also in his personal life. Drawn powerfully to nature, his works, particularly those created in the years just before he took his own life, engage the viewer with the strength of his emotions. This exhibition focuses on these tumultuous years, a period of feverish artistic experimentation that began when van Gogh left Antwerp for Paris in 1886 and continued until his death in Auvers in 1890.

Portland Museum of Art – Portland, Maine, U.S.A.
Edgar Degas: The Private Impressionist
February 23 – May 28, 2012
The works within this exhibition demonstrate the ability of Edgar Degas to combine his profound appreciation for the Old Masters with his passion for photography and Japanese prints, while demonstrating his singular “through-the-keyhole” approach. Featuring striking images of ballet dancers behind the scenes at the Paris Opera and women dressing in their boudoirs, these images capture the private side of 19th century Paris. Exhibited are more than 70 drawings, prints, pastels, and photographs, as well as several sculptures by Degas.

Crocker Art Museum – Sacramento, California, U.S.A.
Edgar Payne: The Scenic Journey
February 11 – May 6, 2012
Edgar Payne utilized the animated brushwork, vibrant palette, and shimmering light of Impressionism, but his powerful imagery was unique among artists of his generation. While his contemporaries favored a quieter, more idyllic representation of the natural landscape, Payne was devoted to subjects of rugged beauty. This exhibition traces Payne’s artistic development as he traveled the world in search of magnificent settings: the California coast, the Southwest desert, the Sierra, the Swiss Alps, and the harbors and waterways of France.

Seattle Art Museum – Seattle, Washington, U.S.A.
Gauguin and Polynesia: An Elusive Paradise
February 9 – April 29, 2012
The key feature in Paul Gauguins’s personal mythology is the constant yearning for an exotic paradise . . . he sought it in the bohemian arts community on the coast of Brittany, and later on the South Sea island of Tahiti. When the outpost of French colonialism began to feel too constraining, Gauguin moved to a still more remote location, the Marquesas Islands. His fascination with local cultures resulted in a kind of personal iconography. The show will display about 50 works (paper, paintings, and sculptures) that reveal the influence of Polynesian art and culture on his art.

Portland Art Museum – Portland, Oregon, U.S.A.
Rothko
February 20 – May 16, 2012
Mark Rothko is particularly important to acknowledge as he sets the bar and telegraphs the upper limits of Portland's aspirations as an art city. Finally, Portland hosts a homecoming for its most favorite son. As part of Portland's cultural contribution to world history, it is arguably the most important show to hit Portland Art Museum since the Armory (or Rothko's own solo show in 1933).

Leopold Museum – Vienna, Austria
Klimt: Up Close and Personal. Images, Letters, Insights
February 24 – August 27, 2012
With the help of world-famous paintings and Gustav Klimt’s travel correspondence, the Leopold Museum casts a glance at Klimt as a private individual. Bohemia, Istria, Romania, Italy, Germany, Belgium, England, France, Spain as well as the region of the Salzkammergut and the town of Gastein in Austria were on his itinerary. The museum has not only some of Klimt's main works, but also over 100 drawings. Hundreds of post cards, photos and letters, which Klimt wrote to his life companion over almost two decades, is also in the possession of the museum. The exhibition confronts Klimt's paintings with his post cards, directing attention onto the artist's private life, as well as addressing his way of working and his relationship with collectors. Twenty selected original quotes on the walls give an insight into Klimt's artistic understanding.

National Portrait Gallery – London, England, United Kingdom
The Queen: Art and Image
May 17 – October 21, 2012
To mark the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee in 2012, the National Portrait Gallery is staging an innovative touring exhibition bringing together sixty of the most remarkable and resonant images of Elizabeth II. The exhibition includes formal painted portraits, official photographs, press images, and works by contemporary artists, which explore the evolution of the way The Queen has been portrayed during the sixty years of her reign.

Royal Academy of Arts – London, England, United Kingdom
David Hockney RA: A Bigger Picture
January 21 – April 9, 2012
The Royal Academy of Arts will showcase the first major exhibition of new landscape works by David Hockney RA. Featuring vivid paintings inspired by the East Yorkshire landscape, these large-scale works have been created especially for the galleries at the Royal Academy of Arts.
Spanning a 50 year period to demonstrate Hockney’s long exploration and fascination with the depiction of landscape, the exhibition will include a display of his iPad drawings and a series of new films produced using 18 cameras, which will be displayed on multiple screens and which will provide a spellbinding visual journey through the eyes of David Hockney.

The Museum of Modern Art – New York, New York, U.S.A.
Diego Rivera: Murals for The Museum of Modern Art
Through May 14, 2012
Diego Rivera was the subject of MoMA’s second monographic exhibition (the first was Henri Matisse), which set new attendance records in 1931. MoMA brought Rivera to New York six weeks before the exhibition’s opening and gave him studio space within the Museum. Working around the clock with two assistants, Rivera produced five “portable murals”—large blocks of frescoed plaster, slaked lime, and wood that feature bold images drawn from Mexican subject matter and address themes of revolution and class inequity. After the opening, Rivera added three more murals, now taking on New York subjects through monumental images of the urban working class and the social stratification of the city during the Great Depression. This exhibition will bring together key works made for Rivera’s 1931 exhibition, including full-scale drawings, smaller working drawings, archival materials related to the commission and production of these works, and designs for Rivera’s famous Rockefeller Center mural, for the first time in nearly 80 years.

Fundacio Joan Miro – Barcelona, Spain
Joan Miro: The Ladder of Escape
Through March 18, 2012
One of the most comprehensive exhibitions of Joan Miro’s work to be organized in Europe in the last twenty years, this exhibition brings together over one hundred and fifty works drawn from public and private collections from around the world.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art – New York, New York, U.S.A.
The Steins Collect Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde
February 28 – June 3, 2012
Gertrude Stein, her brothers Leo and Michael, and Michael's wife Sarah were important patrons of modern art in Paris during the first decades of the twentieth century. This exhibition unites some two hundred works of art to demonstrate the significant impact the Steins' patronage had on the artists of their day, and the way in which the family disseminated a new standard of taste for modern art. The Steins' Saturday evening salons introduced a generation of visitors to recent developments in art, particularly the work of their close friends Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, long before it was on view in museums.

Dayton Art Institute – Dayton, Ohio, U.S.A.
American Chronicles: The Art of Norman Rockwell
Through February 5, 2012
A complete set of 323 of Rockwell’s covers for The Saturday Evening Post are included in this exhibition, as well as carefully choreographed reflections on childhood innocence and powerful, consciousness-raising images.

The Natural History Museum – London, England, UK
Veolia Environment Wildlife Photographer of the Year
Through March 11, 2012
The Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition attracts amateur and professional photographers of all ages from around the world. The images provide a stunning and thought-provoking insight into the natural world, from underwater scenes to urban wildlife.

National Gallery of London – London, England, UK
Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan
Through February 5, 2012
London's National Gallery hosts the largest ever exhibition of Leonardo da Vinci's rare surviving paintings. The display concentrates on da Vinci's career as a court painter in Milan, where he worked for the city's ruler Ludovico Maria Sforza, known as il Moro (the Moor), in the 1480s and 1490s.

Musee d’Orsay – Paris, France
Degas and the Nude
March 13 – July 1, 2012
This exhibition explores Degas's evolution in his practice of the nude, from the academic and historical approach of his early years down to the inscription of the body in modernity throughout his long career. A predominant element in the artist's work, together with dancers and horses, nudes are presented through all of the techniques used by Degas, including painting, sculpture, drawing, printing and above all pastel, which he brought to its highest degree of achievement.

The Smithsonian – Washington, D.C., U.S.A.
Seasons: Arts of Japan
Through March 4, 2012
This exhibition shows how seasonal associations permeate Japanese poetry, art, and customs from springtime cherry blossoms to autumnal scarlet maples.

Moderna Museet – Malmo, Sweden
Early Modernism: 1900-1920 From the Moderna Museet Collection
Through April 8, 2012
Paris was still the European capital of painting – attracting young artists from all over the continent who sought to study, encounter the new art, and meet other artists. Two movements stand out among the great variety of expressions and styles that arose during this period: expressionism, based on the qualities and potential of colour and cubism, based on form. Both movements are represented in the Moderna Museet’s rich collection of early 20th century art, including artists such as Paul Cezanne, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Vasily Kandinsky, Georges Braque, Edvard Munch, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and many others..

The Metropolitan Museum of Art – New York, New York, U.S.A.
Storytelling in Japanese Art
Through May 6, 2012
Japan has enjoyed a long tradition of narrative painting, one that continues even today with the popular contemporary Japanese cartoon and animation. This exhibition will offer particularly stellar examples of illustrated Japanese narrative works from the thirteenth to the nineteenth century. It will feature more than sixty-five exquisitely executed paintings in various formats: handscroll, album, book, hanging scroll, screen, and playing cards.
The exhibition will be organized in five thematic sections: Buddhist and Shinto tales, celebratory tales, tales of warriors and women, romantic tales, and tales of animals and the supernatural.

The State Hermitage Museum – St. Petersburg, Russia
The 19th-20th centuries French painting
Ongoing
This exhibition presents remarkable paintings never been seen before. They belonged to private collections and were on display in separate exhibitions. During the SWW, the paintings were hidden, and after the war they were taken in the Soviet Union like many other displaced works of art. In 1950 a considerable number of items, which had been taken away, was transferred to Germany. On display are only some of the items the Soviet state left and kept in closed museum repositories. On display are works by such prominent masters as Degas, Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, Cezanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec, Matisse, and many others.

Museum of Fine Arts – Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A.
Degas and the Nude
Through February 5, 2012
The nude figure was critical to the art of Edgar Degas from the beginning of his career in the 1850s until the end of his working life, but the subject has never before been explored in a Museum exhibition. This exhibition will feature paintings, pastels, drawings, prints, and sculpture, and will call attention to the evolution of the treatment of the nude from Degas's early years, through his triumphant offerings from the 1880s and 1890s, to the last decades of his working career.

Silver, Salt, and Sunlight – Early Photography in Britain and France
February 7 – October 8, 2012
The invention of photography in 1839 was a pivotal achievement that changed the course of cultural history. The early years of the medium were rich in experimentation. As each process and technique was invented, artists enthusiastically explored new possibilities for visual recording and expression. This exhibition celebrates the golden age of early photography in France and Britain, the two countries in which the medium was simultaneously invented.

Tate Britain – London, England
Colours and Lines: Turner’s experiments
Through April 30, 2012
Discover how Joseph Mallord William Turner revolutionized two different kinds of image-making: watercolour and print. Colour and Line: Turner’s experiments is a two-room display featuring works on paper by Turner, with a variety of experiments and interactive displays exploring his working methods and techniques.

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