OVER THE LAST few weeks a mass of press releases and emails have announced exhibition plans for 2010 and, with additional sleuthing, we have gathered together some of the more outstanding museum shows for a highly selective overview of the year. It has to be said, however, that our pulse has not quickened; there are many of considerable interest and potential enjoyment but few that break new ground or that venture beyond Western European painting and sculpture. While scholarly shows tend to be of the smaller, in-focus variety and are often all the better for it, budget cuts have bitten deeply into major loan shows and the usual tranche of blockbusters (as they began to do last year). Much more affordable ‘in house’ exhibitions have become the order of the day. There is no harm in this – indeed it is welcome; a fascinating example which blends scholarly connoisseurship and technical expertise will be the National Gallery’s Fakes, Mistakes and Discoveries (30th June to 10th September); a special issue of this Magazine in June will coincide with this. A modest appetiser, currently (but only to 7th February) at the Victoria and Albert Museum, is Fakes and Forgeries in which works by the notorious ‘Bolton forger’ Shaun Greenhalgh are displayed alongside examples of police methods of detection and investigation.

Such methods might well come in handy at the numerous celebrations marking the four-hundredth anniversary of the death of Caravaggio. We cannot yet vouch for the quality of works that will be displayed under his name but two exhibitions in Italy in particular appear to be showing some works by the artist, one opening in Rome this month at the Scuderie (18th February to 13th June) and another of Caravaggio e i Caravaggeschi, to be held in Florence at the Uffizi and the Pitti simultaneously (22nd May to 17th October). Further exhi­bitions celebrating round-figure anniversaries are thin on the ground. The five-hundredth anniversary of the death of Botticelli was marked a little prematurely by the Städel Museum, Stuttgart, and the resulting show is reviewed in this issue on pp.126–28. And the birth of Jacopo Bassano in, probably, 1510 is celebrated in Bassano del Grappa in an international loan show running from 6th March to 2nd June. But as far as we know the deaths in 1910 of Holman Hunt and Félix Nadar are not being commemorated, although Le Douanier Rousseau, who died in the same year, is remembered in a fine loan exhibition currently at the Fondation Beyeler, Basel (to 9th May).

Modestly conceived monographic exhibitions are sure to reveal unexpected works and new scholarship. They include the London National Gallery’s look at the Danish painter Christen Købke (17th March to 13th June; then in Edinburgh); Gabriel Metsu at the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin (4th September to 5th December; then in Amsterdam and Washington); the impressive survey of sculpture by Houdon (Musée Fabre, Montpellier; 16th March to 27th June); Sir Thomas Lawrence at the National Portrait Gallery, London (21st October to 23rd January); the Hamburger Kunsthalle’s retrospective devoted to Philippe Otto Runge (1st November to 31st January); and Otto Dix is at the Neue Galerie, New York (11th March to 30th August). Already seen in Paris, the show devoted to the influential late work of Renoir is now installed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (to 9th May; then in Philadelphia); there is a full-scale retrospective devoted to Kirchner (Städel Museum, Frankfurt; 23rd April to 25th July); the crucial period 1913–17 in Matisse’s work is explored at the Chicago Art Institute (20th March to 20th June; then at MoMA, New York); and the Arshile Gorky retrospective, recently in Philadelphia, is at Tate Modern (10th February to 3rd May).

The Burlington’s March issue contains articles on Sienese art to coincide with the substantial exhibition of the arts in Siena in the first half of the fifteenth century (in the galleries of S. Maria della Scala and elsewhere; 26th March to 10th July). The show pays particular attention to Jacopo della Quercia, Donatello, Gentile da Fabriano and Sassetta. Other exhibitions of Italian art include Bronzino’s drawings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (to 18th April), and his paintings at Palazzo Strozzi, Florence (24th September to 23rd January); the British Museum’s Fra Angelico to Leonardo: Italian Renaissance Drawings (22nd April to 25th July); Salvator Rosa at the Dulwich Picture Gallery (15th September to 28th November); Canaletto and his contemporaries at the National Gallery, London (13th October to 16th January); and, moving into the last century, a major exploration of the early career and European influence of Giorgio de Chirico, which will be at the Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, from 26th February to 18th July. Italian modernism is well to the fore, alongside German and French art, in the New York Guggenheim’s show Chaos and Classicism: 1918–1936 (1st October to 9th January).

Two more general anniversaries remind us of the extraor­dinary influence of the Russian Ballet and of Post-Impressionism in the early twentieth century. Several shows have already been devoted in 2009 to Diaghilev’s company and its revolutionary designs for the opera and ballet. In England it made its first great sensation in 1911, and the Victoria and Albert Museum is mounting a substantial exhibition, Serge Diaghilev and the Golden Age of the Ballets Russes, 1909–1929, running from 25th September to 9th January. But no exhibition appears to have been planned to mark one of the cardinal shows of the twentieth century in Britain, Manet and the Post-Impressionists, held at the Grafton Galleries, London, from 8th November 1910 to 15th January 1911. However, two exhibitions at either end of 2010 remind us of the impact of two of the best-represented artists in that show. The Real van Gogh: the Artist and His Letters is already on view at the Royal Academy of Arts (to 18th April), marking the superb publication of Van Gogh’s complete correspondence; and Tate Modern is holding a major show (30th September to 16th January) devoted to Gauguin, who was the first of the Post-Impressionists to have gained some favour in Edwardian London. We shall publish a special issue on aspects of Post-Impressionism in December, mindful of the generally supportive position the Magazine assumed in the famously turbulent reception of the Grafton Galleries exhibition.