SCHWITTERS IN BRITAIN

Check out Tate's website to read about the final touches towards the exhibition that opens 30 January on the late work of Kurt Schwitters, a significant figure of Dadaism forced to flee Germany when his work was condemned by the nazi government. Please, read Emma Chambers' comments on the installation challenges, and watch the video that explores his life in the lake District in the 1940s, or how he created the artwork 'Merz Barn'.

ALISA WEILERSTEIN PLAYS ELGAR

British composer Edward Elgar wrote his cello concert in 1919, the End of the First World War and the Edwardian Era. it is noteworthy how tragedy and nostalgia would reach its most famous interpreter as well: Barenboim's late wife, Jacqueline du Pre. For nearly four decades he didn't perform the concert with another female cellist until Alisa Weilerstein, who grew up listening to her recordings. Worth checking out this moving story at a blog called deceptive cadence.

GAUGUIN AND THE VOYAGE TO THE EXOTIC

With so nuch competition from the public sector, the quality of Madrid private galleries and museums has also improved. The current Gauguin Exhibition at the Thyssen features the voyage as an escape from civilisation, a theme that provided the avantgarde with new impetus, but also as a return to the origins, to the edenic state.

TREASUE ISLAND: BRITISH ART FROM HOLBEIN TO HOCKNEY

'Treasure Island' portrays the artistic evolution of the British Isles, from religious sculptures - damaged by the Puritans during the Reformation - to Pop Art pieces by Blake and Hamilton and Toni Cragg's emblematic 1981 sculpture `Britain Seen from the North´.

According to the organizers, its title 'invokes the eponymous novel by the British writer R. L. Stevenson, showing how the island has a treasure -its art, painting and sculpture- which, like almost every treasure, remains half-hidden, waiting to be discovered.' Very impressive.

FUNDACION JUAN MARCH, MADRID.

GOYA IN THE PRADO

The Museo Nacional del Prado has launched 'Goya in the Prado', a website within its own one exclusively devoted to Goya, which includes documents by the artist. The public and experts can thus access the more than 1000 paintings, drawings, prints and documents housed in the Museum. Go for it.

MIHO SATO

Interested in Contemporary Painting? You will like this: Miho Sato talks to Alli Sharma at her studio in London. (Check out a blog called Articulated Artists)

CHINESE GARDENS: Pavilions, Studios, Retreats

This exhibition explores the rich interactions between pictorial and garden arts in China across more than one thousand years. It features more than sixty paintings as well as ceramics, carved bamboo, lacquerware, metalwork, textiles, and even several contemporary photographs that illustrate how garden imagery has remained an abiding source of artistic inspiration and invention.Through January 6, 2013. 

(Source:The Metropolitan Museum of Art)