‘You mustn’t miss it – it closes on Sunday’. How often we have heard this or said it. And how often, having failed to catch some important, revealing or enhancing exhibition, we offer a lame excuse – the queue was too long, there was a train strike – for not having experienced this ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ show. We therefore offer here a selection of museum exhibitions to give readers advance warning of some of the potential delights of 2011. Of course it is not always easy to gauge the scope and depth of future shows. Museum press releases put their best foot forward, not always being strictly accurate in their recommen­dations of ‘groundbreaking’, ‘iconic’ and ‘innovative’ shows.

Among the old-master exhibitions, Dutch, Flemish and German artists figure prominently. Chronologically the earliest is Konrad Witz, whose short career and distinctive altarpieces of the 1430s and 1440s are examined at the Kunstmuseum, Basel (6th March to 3rd July). The magisterial show devoted to Jan Gossaert, already seen at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and reviewed in this issue (pp.134–37), runs at the National Gallery, London, from 23rd of this month to 30th May. At the Kunst­historisches Museum, Vienna, is a major loan show examining German portraiture around 1500 with an emphasis on Dürer, Cranach and Holbein (31st May to 4th September). Working shortly after 1500 was Lucas van Leyden, who will be seen in an international context at the Museum De Lakenhal, Leiden (19th March to 26th June). The objective of an exhibition of works by the long-lived, prolific Abraham Bloemaert is to gain for the artist a more secure place in the canon of Dutch painting of the Golden Age (Centraal Museum, Utrecht; 12th November to 5th February 2012). Gabriel Metsu’s position in the Golden Age is assured with a finely chosen touring retrospective, reviewed in this issue on pp.122–24, which was in Dublin, is at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (to 21st March), and travels to the National Gallery of Art, Washington (17th April to 24th July).

More general and thematic exhibitions (and there are many throughout the year, often drawing on permanent collections) include a wide-ranging show at the Musée du Louvre, Paris, of the arts of Macedonia in the time of Alexander the Great; an examination of the role of ancient Afghanistan as an important cultural crossroads (British Museum, London; 3rd March to 3rd July) which overlaps with the same Museum’s major exhibition on the relics and their reliquaries of Christ and the saints in medieval Europe (23rd June to 9th October); and an exploration of art in France under Charles VIII and Louis XII (already seen in Paris; on view at the Art Institute of Chicago, 26th February to 29th May). Renaissance Faces. Masterpieces of Italian Portraiture looks at the development of the portrait (paintings, sculptures, medals, drawings) in late fifteenth-cen­tury Florence, Venice and other centres and will be at the Bode-Museum, Berlin (25th August to 20th November), before going to the Metropolitan Museum. The landscape painting of Italian and French artists in Rome in the first half of the seventeenth century is the subject of a loan exhibition at the Grand Palais, Paris (9th March to 6th June). Canaletto and his Rivals, recently in London, moves this month to the National Gallery of Art, Washington (20th Feb­ruary to 30th May; it is reviewed in this issue on p.117). Grand life in Paris in the Rococo period, with international loans in many media, is at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (26th April to 7th August). Later monographic exhibitions include the paintings of Chardin, a show already seen in Ferrara and con­tinuing at the Prado, Madrid – the first exhibition of this artist in Spain – from 1st March to 28th May. There is also the first show in Europe devoted to George Stubbs, to be held at the Neue Pinakothek, Munich, from 15th October to 15th January 2012. The National Portrait Gallery’s Thomas Lawrence exhibition, a notable success in London (and reviewed on pp.119–20), runs at the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven (24th February to 5th June). As part of a series of collaborative exhibitions between Tate and the regions, John Martin: Heaven and Hell can be seen first at the Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne (5th March to 5th June), and later at Tate Britain (21st September to 15th January 2012).

Shows of later nineteenth-century artists continue to be a safe investment for museums wishing to attract the crowds, as they did in London last year with Van Gogh and Gauguin and in Paris with Monet. Paris will see a substantial loan show exploring aspects of Manet’s career, particularly his ‘modernist’ credentials (Musée d’Orsay, Paris; 5th April to 3rd July). The series of small, focused shows at the Courtauld Gallery, London, turns its spotlight on Toulouse-Lautrec and his muse Jane Avril (16th June to 18th September); the Courtauld’s earlier show in this series on Cézanne’s card players is at the Metropolitan Museum until 8th May. The Von Der Heydt-Museum, Wuppertal, is organising the first retrospective in Germany of paintings by Alfred Sisley (11th September to 29th January 2012); and the work of the elusive Odilon Redon will be fully explored at the Grand Palais (23rd March to 20th June). Beyond French art, a retrospective devoted to Giovanni Segantini continues at the Fondation Beyeler, Basel, to 25th April. Later nineteenth-century British art and design of the Aesthetic Movement is the subject of the substantial exhibition The Cult of Beauty at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2nd April to 17th July). Continuing the story, in some ways, is a survey of modern sculpture in Britain at the Royal Academy of Arts, running from Gilbert and Leighton through Moore and Hepworth to the present (to 7th April). The Vorticist movement is explored in a show at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice (to 15th May; later at Tate Britain from 14th June to 4th September).

Exhibitions devoted to Picasso are seemingly inexhaustible but there are at least two notable contributions: his early work (1900–07) in Paris at the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (18th February to 29th May; later at the Museu Picasso, Barcelona); and Picasso: Guitars 1912–1914, of collages and assemblages, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (13th February to 6th June). The artist turns up again alongside Dalí and Miró at the Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, in a show examining the Catalan background of the three artists. And Miró is the subject of a full travelling retrospective at Tate Modern (14th April to 11th September).

But there can hardly be any doubt that the one true ‘blockbuster’ of the year will come very near its end: the National Gallery’s Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan (9th November to 5th February 2012) promises exceptional loans, new scholarship and enormous popular appeal – very definitely not to be missed.