Looked at from a critical or scholarly perspective, a good many exhibitions seem hardly necessary. They are often make­weights in a museum’s schedule, a curator’s or art historian’s proposal taken on by an exhibition committee eager to fill its ‘forthcoming events’, to satisfy the conditions attached to funding or the demands of education departments. Often they can simply be crowd-pleasers without a context, but with a famous name or movement in the title to ensure increased visitor numbers. We might contrast here the brazen footfall-chasing of the Albertina in Vienna with the focused scholarly shows at the Louvre or the Metropolitan Museum of Art which can also delight the non-specialist. The Victoria and Albert Museum this past year had a spectacular hit with its David Bowie exhibition, but there was no major show rooted in or stemming from its core collections of applied and decorative arts. Perhaps the Museum has been treading water until its William Kent exhibition arrives from New York (where it is at the Bard Graduate Center to 9th February; in London from 22nd March to 13th July). Painting and drawing has fared better in displays and shows of British works on paper, Constable and Chinese scroll painting (all current). But before looking at a few highlights for 2014, here is a résumé of the last twelve months.

In 2013 the Burlington reviewed close to two hundred exhibitions, ranging from hefty international undertakings to short-lived, one-artist shows in dealers’ galleries, throughout Europe and North America. Our reviews provide an unparalleled illustrated record of a cornucopia of painting, sculpture, architecture, photo­graphy and the applied and decorative arts. Within this remit, however, there have been examinations of the art of Mughal India, fashion and costume, medieval maces, city planning in Los Angeles, the Ballets Russes and recent video and performance art. While there has been a discernible decline in the capacious, monographic retrospective, illuminating shows have looked at specific aspects of an artist’s career – Manet and Venetian art, Picasso in 1901 or Schwitters in Britain – or at relatively brief slices of time. Some reviewers have concentrated almost entirely on what was on show, while others have been more attentive to setting and display. The latter can, of course, make or break a show, as when an idea or concept drowns in too many exhibits. Lighting is a primary concern, as in the Titian exhibition at the Quirinale in Rome where the new experimental lighting was seen to be ‘misleading’ for visitors who might not have known the works on view. On the other hand, the show exploring Manet and Venetian art, with its extraordinary loans from the Musée d’Orsay (and the first ever showing of Olympia outside Paris), was well lit and ‘superbly installed’ in the Palazzo Ducale. Certainly it was superior to the Royal Academy’s exploration of Manet and portraiture, although our reviewer was more generous than most other accounts. The major exhibition in the Palazzo Strozzi of Florentine sculpture in the first half of the fifteenth century (now at the Louvre until 6th January) was seen more as a superb celebration than an occasion for any ‘fresh perspective’. The Louvre’s own show of Giotto and trecento art, the first such exhibition on the subject to be held in the Museum, was ‘full of insights’. And no criticisms were forthcoming for the Pietro Bembo exhibition in Padua, which was outstanding for a deft chronological hang of fine objects illustrating the role of this aficionado of painting and literature. Among exhibitions of later art that drew praise for their curatorial flair were Barocci at the National Gallery, London (‘This is the sort of exhibition that great museums should be staging’); the focused shows on Murillo in Dulwich and the Wallace Collection; on Schinkel in Berlin and Munich; the ‘instructive and beguiling’ Impressionism, Fashion and Modernity in Paris and New York; the near perfection of Becoming Picasso at the Courtauld Gallery; the ‘rich and insightful’ show of the arts in Edwardian Britain at New Haven; the Dalí and Ernst retrospectives (in Paris and Vienna respectively); the survey devoted to R.B. Kitaj (‘we are unlikely ever to see a better one’); and the pairing of Henry Moore with Rodin (at the Moore Foundation, Perry Green, and in Paris) and Moore and Bacon in Oxford; in both shows the visual conversation ‘flew between the artists’. But in this and last month’s issue, reviewers have been highly critical of aspects of Tate Britain’s exploration of iconoclasm, the Royal Academy’s survey of Australian art and the misjudged exhibition on Viennese fin-de-siècle portraiture at the National Gallery.

Looking ahead – and it should be stressed that this is a highly selective guide, partly inflected by many museums’ apparent reluctance to publicise their programmes for 2014 – there are what promise to be some absorbing old-master exhibitions. But, from much earlier, two shows capture the imagination: one devoted to the Emperor Augustus, died AD 14 (currently beautifully installed in the Scuderie del Quirinale, Rome, and coming to the Louvre, 19th March to 13th July); and the British Museum’s revisionary Vikings: life and legend, inaugurating its new Sainsbury Exhibitions Gallery (6th March to 22nd June), which could prove as pop-ular as last year’s show on Pompeii and Herculaneum. The National Gallery has two major old-master exhibitions: Veronese: Magnificence in Renaissance Venice (19th March to 15th June) and Rembrandt: The Final Years (15th October to 18th January 2015), both of which are sure to be unmissable. Two substantial shows in Italy are Rosso and Pontormo at Palazzo Strozzi (8th March to 20th July) and all aspects of the career of Bandinelli at the Bargello, Florence (8th April to 7th September).

Round-number anniversaries this year are thin on the ground but it is good to see that the landscapes of Richard Wilson, born three hundred years ago, will be shown in New Haven (6th March to 1st June) and later in Cardiff. New Haven’s Yale Center will follow Wilson with a substantial show devoted to Victorian sculpture in all its manifestations (11th September to 30th November; at Tate Britain in 2015). Among twentieth-century artists, there will be Ensor in Los Angeles, Malevich in Amsterdam and London and Mondrian in Liverpool and Margate. Italian Futurism 1909–14 is re-examined in an enormous exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum, New York (21st February to 1st September), while Sigmar Polke receives a posthumous retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art (19th April to 3rd August). But possibly the modern show of the year will be Tate Modern’s long-planned Matisse: The Cut-Outs with over 120 works from the artist’s last years (17th April to 7th September; later at MoMA, New York).

Finally, with a feast of works from several centuries, there is Tate Britain’s tribute (20th May to 10th August) to Kenneth Clark, including outstanding works he once owned and exploring his life as scholar, museum man and collector and the broadcaster who brought art and civilisation to millions of homes, the only art historian, he once proudly said, to be recognised by the taxi drivers of London.