Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Catwalk season for art and fashion in ParisEurope’s most spectacular art venue, the Grand Palais, just reopened. Freshly renovated, with iron and glass roof sparkling, it kicks off the year with an extravaganza on Paris’s favourite subject: fashion. The story of how Italian culture — Murano glass, Byzantine mosaics, Renaissance sculpture, baroque decoration — inspires Dolce & Gabbana’s “Alta Moda” collections unfolds in immersive mise-en-scènes from grand opera and Visconti’s The Leopard to the humble sewing atelier. From the Heart to the Hands: Dolce & Gabbana was a sellout at its launch in Milan last spring; this is the second iteration.In Paris, the show inaugurates a catwalk season of art and fashion across French museums — a glittery theme for 2025. The mighty Louvre ventures into the field for the first time with Fashion (January 24-July 21), juxtaposing haute couture with the classical and antique. Musée du Quai Branly shows oriental textiles in Along the Gold Thread (February 11-July 6). Toulouse’s Fondation Bemberg explores Renaissance jewellery, as objects and in portraits, and its symbolic uses, in All That Glitters (April 4-July 27). Most intriguing is the Louvre-Lens’ Dressing as an Artist (March 26-May 25), tracing the role of costume in painting: Rembrandt’s turbans, Vigée Le Brun’s shawls, the dressing gown Rodin gave “Balzac”, Sonia Delaunay’s “simultaneous dress”, Andy Warhol’s wigs. JWShining moment for Brazilian art across EuropeBrazil’s modernism, fusing European avant-garde ideas with inspiration from indigenous culture and landscapes — tropical rainforests, Copacabana beach — is exuberant, bright, optimistic and a tonic for wintry grey London. It’s a shining moment for Brazilian art across Europe: curator Adriano Pedrosa compellingly brought 20th-century painters from his native country to wide audiences in the 2024 Venice biennale, including several here — Anita Malfatti’s expressionist portraits, Alfredo Volpi’s geometric abstractions, Tarsila do Amaral’s flamboyant, fantastical landscapes. Amaral has a retrospective at Paris’s Musée Luxembourg (to February 2), travelling to the Guggenheim, Bilbao (February 28-June 8). JWEnter the world of Proust’s obsessionsWhat a prospect: to walk into Proust’s musée imaginaire and see his favourite paintings, threading like a tapestry through À la recherche, come alive on the walls — Vermeer, Rembrandt, Watteau, Turner, Monet, Whistler. The show evokes Proust’s actual milieu — the flâneur’s Paris of Haussmann, its boulevards, mansions, parks, theatres (the Petit Palais loans Georges Clairin’s luscious Sarah Bernhardt portrait) — and the impressionist renderings of it which so influenced his novel’s structure of shifting time and changing perspective. There are places of memory, especially Venice and France’s Gothic cathedrals, and the Spanish connection: Proust’s fascination with Mariano Fortuny, whose costumes and fabrics adorn the exhibition. JWThe queen of Italian cities gets her own showSiena in the Middle Ages was, said art historian Bernard Berenson, “then, as always, sorceress and queen among Italian cities”. Nonetheless, it has long been perceived as a byway to the glory of Renaissance Florence, a map which this exhibition of gold-panelled paintings, enamelled metalwork and textiles, seeks to change. It centres on Duccio and his “Maestà” altarpiece for Siena cathedral, a work of gleaming emotional intensity and luxuriant beauty for which the exhibition reunites an unprecedented number of panels. The show arrives from New York’s Metropolitan Museum. JWThe influential sculptor forgotten by history Reading Baudelaire’s essay “Why Sculpture is Boring”, Medardo Rosso (1858-1928) set out to prove that it wasn’t. His fleeting, sketchily modelled, melancholically lovely figures — his concierge at the door, a bookmaker stumbling in the street — were intended as “nothing else than the expression of some sudden sensation given to us by light”. Rosso got thrown out of art school, quarrelled with friends including Rodin, and ended up forgotten by history. That is unfair: his experiments converging the momentary with the monumental influenced the futurists, Brancusi, Giacometti and many others to be shown alongside him here. This will be a resonant exhibition for Art Basel and its recalibrations of modernism. JWAt home with CézanneAny Cézanne exhibition is a must-see, but few rival those taking place in the artist’s native Aix-en-Provence. This one spreads across town: the restored Jas de Bouffan, Cézanne’s home for 40 years, is opening to the public in the summer, while some 100 paintings made there go on display at Musée Granet, with important works coming from Paris, New York, Tokyo and museums across Europe. To see Cézanne immersed in the Provençal light and colour which formed him, with Mont Sainte-Victoire looming, is a rare joy; the last Cézanne exhibition here, in 2006, is a shimmering memory. JWThe pointillist patronWhen Georges Seurat’s and Paul Signac’s pointillist canvases were still being decried as the death of painting, Helene Kröller-Müller bought them, building an exceptional neo-impressionist collection of French, Belgian and Dutch artists, led by Seurat’s high spirited “Can-can”. Their visions of pure colour and glaring luminosity launch the newly refurbished Sainsbury Wing, hopefully bringing this vexed building luck and charm. The independent minded Kröller-Müller was an early Van Gogh admirer; this show follows her museum’s generous loans to the National Gallery’s Van Gogh exhibition. JWAmerica’s most influential living artistAt last! Kerry James Marshall, America’s most influential living artist, who since 1980 has transformed the history of painting by reclaiming it for the Black figure, has never had a public exhibition in London or Paris. Now a full retrospective launches at the Royal Academy, continuing to the Musée d’Art Moderne and Zurich’s Kunsthaus. Marshall’s concept of a “counter-archive”, placing Black subjects in dialogue with European masters from Manet to Mondrian, is more than political; it brings vitality and renewal to figurative painting. Marshall’s attractive, energetic and witty canvases will engross and enchant even those who are tired of hearing the word “postcolonial”. JWThe ‘angelic friar’ in FlorenceThe San Marco convent, home to the “angelic friar” artist, contains the largest group of his paintings, including the “Annunciation” fresco where a pink-gold Gabriel with multicoloured wings swoops down to Mary in a courtyard — a drama of light and space as well as devotion. A pivotal painter, Fra Angelico (1395-1455) absorbed the elegant language of Gothic and pioneered Renaissance mastery of perspective and lifelike figures, meditating on the sacred as reflected in the human. San Marco joins with the Strozzi, boasting a record of blockbuster Renaissance shows (most recently Donatello), to stage Florence’s first Fra Angelico exhibition for 70 years, and the first in centuries to reunite key paintings loaned globally. JWTurner and Constable: double 250th anniversary celebrationTate’s double 250th anniversary exhibition — Turner born 1775, Constable 1776 — celebrates the competing careers of the two painters who held London in thrall during the only epoch when British art was as innovative and exciting as anything happening in Europe. Both chiefly nature painters, they were as different as the “fire and water” to which contemporary critics likened them: Turner the travelling conjuror of sublime romantic effects, Constable seeking fresh authentic depictions of a few beloved places. JWEurope’s first major survey of American photographyAmerican diffidence about European painting lasted into the mid-20th century, but in the new medium of photography Americans were early pioneers: the California gold rush and the civil war were photographed in the 1850s-60s. This show, Europe’s first major survey of American photography, spans three centuries and artists from Diane Arbus and Richard Avedon to Harlem portraitist James Van Der Zee. It explores photography’s evolution as an art form, its response to events in American history, and how it permeates every aspect of life and thought, including the American dream. JWOf German history and mythWhat better present for Kiefer’s 80th birthday than being paired with Van Gogh? Can Kiefer’s paintings — or anyone’s — hold up alongside the father of modern expressionism? Born in the second world war’s final months, Kiefer works around themes of German history and myth, landscape’s destruction and endurance. The Amsterdam show is titled for a new Kiefer painting, which takes its name from the anti-war song (“Where have all the flowers gone?”) popularised by Marlene Dietrich. The exhibition comes in shortened form to the RA. JWA freshened-up FrickSome of New York’s most animated institutions have been out of commission, but this year — construction delays permitting — they’re coming back. The Frick returns to its expanded and renovated ancestral home after a sojourn on Madison Avenue. The Studio Museum in Harlem finally opens its new building, which has been almost a decade in the making. And the New Museum is on track to complete its expansion into the next-door lot on Bowery. There’s construction action around the country: the Portland (Oregon) Art Museum, the Princeton University Art Museum, the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in LA, and the Los Angeles County Museum all have major construction projects headed for the finish line, too. ABA panoramic view of the essential romanticCaspar David Friedrich turned the experience of beholding natural beauty — or rather beholding someone beholding nature — into an act quivering with spiritual, moral, and historical overtones. The Met gives this essential romantic the panoramic treatment, with paintings from the museums of Hamburg, Dresden, and Berlin, plus another two dozen lenders. ABThe return of the Rockefeller WingWhen the glass house on the Metropolitan Museum’s southern flank closed four years ago, it wasn’t just a set of galleries that needed refurbishing, but a whole approach to three different continents. Instead of presenting the arts of Africa, Oceania and the Ancient Americas as a great cauldron of exoticism, the renovated Michael C Rockefeller Wing will trace the cultural exchanges, local traditions and spiritual practices that yielded its collection of more than 1,800 objects. And the renovation includes a daylight-free gallery for the delicate splendour of Andean textiles. ABAn artist of the activist generationRashid Johnson, who emerged a couple of decades ago as one of the crucial Black artists of an activist generation, takes over the museum with a major mid-career retrospective. A polymath for whom almost no medium is off limits — black-soap paintings, spray-painted text, large-scale sculptures, video — Johnson has lately been focusing on oil painting. But the centrepiece of the Guggenheim show will be his recent film “Sanguine,” screened at the top of the spiral in a multistorey scaffolding hung with plants and a piano — a kind of sculptural-botanical-musical hanging garden. ABA retrospective for Michelle Obama’s portraitistAmy Sherald, a portrait painter of solid but unspectacular reputation until 2018, became an overnight celebrity when she was commissioned to paint Michelle Obama’s official portrait. Now she gets a 21-gun mid-career retrospective, featuring dozens of her starkly graphic cutout-like paintings (including a famous portrait of Breonna Taylor, the victim of a 2020 police shooting), plus an assortment of new and early work. ABA feminist provocateur returnsThree decades after her death at 49, Christina Ramberg returns to public consciousness with a comprehensive survey of her feminist provocations. In a bold, linear style that anticipated graphic novels, she painted truncated close-ups — the back of a coiffed head, a foot in a high-heeled shoe, a torso in sexy lingerie — highlighting society’s habits of seeing women as a collection of parts. ABFind out about our latest stories first — follow FTWeekend on Instagram and X, and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen
