Let’s try to be positive. Nobody can pretend that 2022 ended in an entirely rosy fashion for the world’s museums. Still in recovery mode after the pandemic, with visitor numbers in most cases not yet back to pre-2020 levels, and having to cope like everybody else with resurgent inflation and soaring energy costs, they are facing challenges caused on the one side by political activism, as Stop Oil protestors have targeted art as way of promoting their environmental message, and on the other by governments seeking to use museums as tools for social engineering. In November, and with no prior warning to the institutions affected, Arts Council England announced cuts designed to reallocate funds to areas of the country that the government has targeted for levelling-up, making a mockery of the idea that it operates at arm’s length from its political masters. To take only the most egregious example, the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, had its annual grant cut by 50 per cent, from £1.21 million to £617,534, putting its educational and outreach programmes at risk. Our annual selection of exhibitions to look forward to in the year ahead is therefore taking a lead from Mary Poppins – bearing in mind that the Walt Disney Company is celebrating its one hundredth anniversary in 2023 – by offering a spoonful of sugar for bitter times.

Nowhere are they more bitter than Ukraine, where to the wholesale destruction of museums in, for example, Lyman and Rubizhne, has been added the looting of the museum in Mariupol by Russian troops. That backdrop makes the success of Ukraine’s cultural authorities and curators in staging the exhibition In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900–1930s at the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid (to 30th April), all the more impressive. Around seventy works, ranging from oil paintings to collages and theatre designs, trace the avant-garde movements in Ukraine led by such artists as Oleksandr Bohomazov, Vasyl Yermilov, Viktor Palmov and Anatol Petrytskyi. An exhibition with particular resonance for violent events unfolding in another part of the world, the protests in Iran that have followed the death in police custody of Mahsa Amini in September 2022, is Women Defining Women In Contemporary Art of the Middle East and Beyond at the Los Angeles County Musuem of Art (23rd April–24th September), which will present seventy-five works by women artists born or living in Islamic societies who seek to challenge stereotypes. 

In Paris, memories of the fire that engulfed Notre Dame in April 2019 remain vivid, but the rapid progress made in repair and restoration is heartening. An opportunity to see at close quarters the treasures that were so nearly lost will be provided by The Treasury of Notre Dame Cathedral from its origins to Viollet-Le-Duc, at the Musée du Louvre (19th October 2023–19th February 2024), which will highlight the reliquaries ordered by Napoleon for the Crown of Thorns and a fragment of the True Cross. There is perhaps particular pleasure during times of hardship in looking at objects of luxurious splendour, in which case we can look forward to Luxury and Power: Persia to Greece at the British Museum, London (4th May–13th August), which explores the way luxury was used as a political tool in the Middle East and south-east Europe from 550 to 30 BC. If any exhibition can add cheerfulness to life it will be Beyond Bollywood at the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco (31st March–10th July), which celebrates two thousand years of the depiction of dance in the arts of Asia. 

There is no shortage of monographic shows this year. Leading the way with the hottest ticket in town is Vermeer at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (10th February–4th June), which promises no fewer than twenty-eight works by the artist. At the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin, Hugo van der Goes: Between Pain and Bliss, which opens on 31st March (to 16th July), is surprisingly the first-ever exhibition devoted solely to him. Best known for his portrait by Diego Velázquez, the painter Juan de Pareja (c.1608–70) is given his own exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Juan de Pareja, Afro-Hispanic Painter (3rd April–16th July). Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, is staging Berthe Morisot: Shaping Impressionism, her first major exhibition in the United Kingdom since 1950 (31st March–10th September), and the Accademia Carrara, Bergamo, has an exhibition on that most enigmatic and idiosyncratic of Caravaggio’s followers, his lover Cecco del Caravaggio (26th January–4th June). Giacomo Ceruti: A Compassionate Eye at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (18th July–29th October), focuses on this eighteenth-century artist’s hauntingly realistic depictions of beggars and vagrants. Of all the many contemporary art monographic shows, Mike Nelson: Extinction Beckons at the Hayward Gallery, London (22nd February–7th May), is particularly eagerly anticipated. Nelson’s installations will, we are promised, take us into ‘fictive worlds that eerily echo our own’.

It is not a classic year for artists’ anniversaries – the three-hundredth anniversary of Joshua Reynolds’s birth would pass largely without notice were it not for an exhibition at The Box in his native Plymouth, Revisiting Reynolds: A Celebration (24th June–29th October). The biggest name to receive anniversary attention is Picasso, who died fifty years ago, on 8th April 1973. An astonishing forty exhibitions are said to be in preparation, conveniently listed on the website of the Picasso Museum, Paris.[1] The one that seems likely to provoke the widest interest will be at the Brooklyn Museum (2nd June–24th September), still untitled at the time of writing, which promises to examine the issues of misogyny, masculinity, creativity and ‘genius’ that surround the artist’s reputation. 

It would be an interesting debate whether Picasso or Disney can claim to have had the bigger impact on global visual culture. A visitor to one of the Picasso exhibitions can ponder the question at Disney 100: The Exhibition, which opens at the Franklin Institute, Philadelphia, on 18th February and will be seen also in Munich and London.[2] It is now ninety years since the critic Dorothy Grafly, in a famous review of the art of Walt Disney, declared that ‘He goes to nature for his material, but it is the nature of the poet. Quite as much as Picasso he distorts and renders unreal, but from this unreality one derives a fine emotional participation that brings conviction’.[3] Perhaps the comparison is not so absurd: Dalí’s and Mondrian’s admiration for Disney is well known, and anyone who doubted the artistry of his cartoons had the opportunity to be persuaded by the exhibition Inspiring Walt Disney: The Animation of French Decorative Arts, seen in 2021–22 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Wallace Collection, London.[4] In any case many museum directors and curators are probably hoping that 2023 will bring more than the bare necessities.

[1] www.museepicassoparis.fr/en/celebration-picasso-1973-2023, accessed 19th December 2022.

[2] For full details, see www.disney100exhibit.com/en/, accessed 19th December 2022.

[3] D. Grafly: ‘America’s youngest art’, The American Magazine of Art 26 (1933), pp.336–42, at p.342.

[4] Reviewed by Kee Il Choi Jr in this Magazine, 164 (2022), pp.504–07.