'A Gap in the Clouds' (Heong Gallery, Cambridge until Feb 8 2026)

Paul Nash, Spring Landscape, 1914, Jerwood Collection

The Heong, Downing College's pocket-sized art venue, is one of Cambridge's unfeted gems, putting on thoughtful, left-field exhibitions of largely contemporary art. In the last year they've given us, amongst others, Gillian Ayres, volcanoes and now A Gap in the Clouds, billed as an exploration of 'landscape as a way to navigate the relationship between our mental lives and the world around us' but really a show as amorphous, shifting and indefinable as the title suggests. The gallery space has large windows which look out onto elegant college grounds. Previous shows have effectively brought the outside in by including sculpture but here the restrained, constrained nature provides an anchor for the art to pull against.  Andreas Eriksson's spindly bronze, Content is a Glimpse, is like a warped hourglass, standing in dialogue with the Barbara Hepworth beyond the glass, creates silhouette at once more fragile and more solid than the monumental bronze. 

To describe a show that includes Edvard Munch's Melancholy and Ai Weiwei's Wheatfield with Crows as eclectic seems an understatement. Munch's brooding figure is subsumed into a pathetic fallacy of exaggerated perspective and wintery sky, confronted in the bottom left by an animalistic shoreline. Ai Weiwei's inspiration is art, not nature, one of a series of lego recreations which plasticise and politicise over-familiar paintings, in this case with the inclusion of drones. (Added resonance for anyone who saw Anselm Kiefer's reinterpretation of the same painting at the RA this summer). There is precious little overt connection between any of the works here, and in many ways that is the point.

Rachel Howard, You Can Save Me, 2015, Jerwood Collection

Just as you can look up at the sky and see animals, cities or nothing at all, so, the curators assert, artists can take nature, real and imagined, and run with it in all manner of different directions. Two Paul Nash's and David Jones (an artist well represented at that other great Cambridge institution, Kettle's Yard) bring conventionality; Frank Walter's tiny enclosure of bar-like  trees and Yto Barrada's lush turquoises also exploit landscape traditions. Kim Bohie's Towards makes you as languid as the black dog sprawled in the foreground, lazing on a Sunday suburban afternoon. These three have been loaned by the Roberts Collection, Nash and Jones come from Jerwood, but the curators have cast a wide net here and the effort pays off.

Many other works explore landscape through abstraction: Koo Jeong A's minimal monochrome blobs could be mushrooms or microscopic amoebae; Rachel Howard's delicate spidery greys suggest woodgrain, water, mist; Peter Lanyon's Sharp Grass is all gesture. You can start to wonder if the connections are too loose, but this in itself generates a mindfulness of its own. The curation is clean yet quirky: sizes, sight-levels and a consistently uneven rhythm keep you looking. There is a beautiful juxtaposition between Wheatfield, which dominates the end wall of the gallery, and the echoing colours of Latifa Echakhch's gleaming abstraction like falling leaves. The whole exhibition hangs by an intangible thread, teetering on the brink of nothingness. Can you see the gap in the clouds? It is worth going to find out. 

Jacques Louis David (The Louvre until January 26 2026)

Jacques Louis David, The Oath of the Horatii, 1784-5, The Louvre, Paris

The Louvre is the only museum in the world that could host a Jacques Louis David retrospective and even they struggle. The sheer scale, not to mention fragility, of his canvases means that you need to detour into the main collection to see Brutus, Leonidas and the Coronation of Napoleon. And the scale of the works presents near insurmountable difficulties within the show itself. The Oath of the Horatii, a whole wallful, of machismo minimalism is detached from a lovely line of its preparatory drawings. The huge discrepancy in scale between the two versions of Belisarius Begging for Alms means that they too are placed annoyingly far apart and one is forced to peer through the crowds to  compare the ways David responded to criticism of the first version.

The show starts strongly with a wall text reclaiming David as an artist of passion. Personally, I think this is a less radical line than the curators suggest - no one can look at Napoleon Crossing the Alps and not feel the artist's patriotic commitment - and even in the earlier austere works, the passion is there pent-up with almost volcanic intensity. In any case the labelling never follows the argument through, veering instead towards connoisseur-y blandness. To push the passion point, they stress David's enthusiasm for Caravaggio. Yet, apart from the obvious borrowing in Cupid and Psyche, David's early work seems more influenced by a more generalised infusion of Italian Baroque, exemplified by his St Jerome, one of the few less familiar works on show.

There is also friction between a  desire to stress his individual genius, and an acknowledgement of David's deliberate campaign to court success. His early career is a masterclass in experimenting with what worked and his ruthless pursuit of Academic success, represented by the annual Prix de Rome competition. The formula he fixed on - a combination of Poussin restraint, Greuze emotion and Baroque drama, with a nice sideline in a more Rococo femininity should the subject demand it - is perfectly illustrated by Andromache Mourning the Body of Hector. Andromache's ostentatious grief is counterbalanced by the shallow depth and empty background, both of which look forward to the Death of Marat. The decaying beauty of the corpse lends a hard-edged melodrama, to a scene which might become too saccharine.

These grand machines are balanced through the show by David's portraits, of himself, his family and of patrons. There is a deceptive mastery here as apparent in the early intimate informality of Dr Alphonse Leroy sitting at his cluttered desk, disturbed from his studies, quill in hand, as in the late poignant pomposity of fellow-exile, Comte de Turenne, proudly showing his family crest on the inside of his hat, sporting his disgraced Napoleonic medals. Most striking if all are the small pencil sketches of fellow prisoners during the period when they, and David himself, had no ideal whether they would live or die. Grim defence and resignation are etched into each profile. The extraordinary Tennis Court Oath fragment, as impossibly huge an undertaking, and as destined to failure, as the political ambitions it represented, pits precisely rendered portraits incongruously against preparatory idealised nude torsos. The exhibition choses not to investigate David's artistic method beyond this and a few sketches - it seems an omission.

Jacques Louis David, The Oath of the Tennis Court (fragment), c.1970-2, Palace of Versailles

Was David the great survivor or a man increasingly clutching at straws? The exhibition hedges its bets, obliquely referencing his difficult relationship with Napoleon and treating the years of exile in Brussels almost as a postscript. The extraordinary Mars disarmed by Venus simply compounds the conundrum. Here juxtaposed with Ingres’ huge and extraordinary Jupiter and Thetis, the curators suggest David is satirising his pupil's louche eroticism. Yet one can trace that lingering rococo softness throughout Davids art through works like The Love of Paris and Helen. Here he combines that with the bolder, hard edged colouration and fussier complexity which can be seen developing in his work from 1800 onwards.

The Louvre presents an unmissable exhibition by a standout artist. The shows tells the narrative, gives the political background and generates at least a sense of David the man. Ultimately, it plays safe, focusing on his unique genius at the expense of saying anything really new or inciteful. He is a painter inexorably connected to politics, and perhaps a more adventurous show might have tried to focus more on his art, his methods, his role as a teacher and inspirer, rather than trot out the revolutionary line. But standing in front of the Death of Marat, none of that matters. The mottled background creating just that hint of emotional swirl, the impeccable simplicity of the packing chest memorial and the stark, emptiness of it all which takes you right back to immediate, stunned silence of 1793. There is no other artist who can say so much, so quietly.

'Turner: Always Contemporary' (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool until Feb 22 2026)

JMW Turner, The Wreck Buoy, 1849, Sudley House, Liverpool

Amidst the 2025 avalanche of Turner anniversary exhibitions, Walker Art Gallery's press office somehow managed the coup of getting their show featured on BBC national news, giving Turner: Always Contemporary a status not even Tate Britain's big show has achieved. There was a certain level of expectation, therefore, and there was a definite buzz in the air on the busy, soggy weekday I visited. The title, and indeed the opening work - Jeff Koon's otherworldly-blue Gazing Ball which enables you to reflect on yourself reflecting on an enlarged and precise Turner reproduction - give the sense that this is about Turner's influence on other artists. However, the show offers a more subtle, although perhaps also more controversial, argument, that Turner is always someone in whom we can see ourselves. 

The Walker have largely drawn on their own Liverpool museums collections (I visited Sudley House the same day and found it denuded of Turners) and there is a lack of both individual show-stoppers, and of variety. The stand-out example on canvas is The Wreck Buoy, perhaps in part because it is a work which encapsulates Turner's whole career, started in 1807, praised by Ruskin, reworked into late atmospheric imprecision. Many of the other canvases, however, seem rooted in the languid language of Claude: a succession of soft, solar infusions which turn Scotland, Germany and Switzerland into little Italys. They finally dissolve completely into an abstracted pool of near-white light more blast furnace than sun: unsigned and unexhibited, one can argue over whether he considered it finished or not. However, although the exhibition hints at the well-worn Impressionist, modernist narrative that Turner was an artist who started in the seventeenth century and ended up in the twentieth, its thematic structure successfully counteracts this.

In fact, the large scale oils are less interesting than the works on paper which exemplify Turner as an artist of much greater variety and far less pomposity. The wall of Liber Studiorum prints has everything from humour, to tragedy, picturesque, topography and drama. Vertiginous alpine scenes, dissolving Venice, bustling fishermen, leisured ladies with the world at their feet. Turner's eye for observed detail is striking, his ability to see a composition even more so: Lancaster from the Aqueduct from c. 1825 has it all, industrial chimneys, ancient castle, resting and active figures, nature and man, all given an ethereal grandeur which elevates an inconsequential slice of northern England.

George Grainger Smith, The Enemy Raid, 3rd May 1941, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool

The exhibition intersperses Turner with an eclectic, in some cases almost random, selection of artists from both the 19th century and the present day. Monet is an obvious choice, although, Break-up of the Ice on the Seine, near Bennecourt is not his most obviously Turneresque work. The Pissarro represented is Lucien rather than Camille - again perhaps a case of what was available rather than what was most apt. G F Watts almost steals the show with two landscapes which out-Turner Turner with their luminous, literally gold-backed, abstraction. However, it is the less obvious and less well-known examples which really strike home. Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites are melded by Ruskin's enthusiasm and the bright airiness of John Brett and, later, Annie Swynnerton resonates. Locally based George Grainger Smith channels The Burning of the Houses of Parliament into Liverpool's Blitz. Too often, however, the connection is strained: Sheila Fell's moody vertical canvas is all earth not air and Bridget Riley's Egyptian colours form an odd dialogue with Venetian watercolours, especially as she is an avowed Turner agnostic. 

Curator Melissa Gustin's unexpected move is to investigate 'always contemporary' not just as aesthetic influence but in ideological terms. The thematic sections are not afraid to foreground post-colonial and environmental ideas to suggest a sometimes tenuous continuity. Emma Stebbins documentation of glacial recession can be directly linked to locations visited by Turner (and Barns-Graham in the 1950s) and her works provide a strong ending. I am less enthusiastic about the curators pulling out coal-mining, china-making, shipping and slavery and their inclusion of commercial off-shoots like Turner Doc Martins seems more gimmick than substance. Turner does not need to be presented as some kind of artistic Nostradamus, nor do we need to be shunted towards 'relevance'. 

Ethel Walker, Seascape, 1925-50, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool

Nevertheless, this is an hugely enjoyable and effective show. Gustin has admitted to using the Turner brand as an excuse to explore artists and ideas which interest her and the gutsy labelling ('Green Unpleasant Land' is bound to cause some mutterings) and unexpected curatorial choices - Ethel Walker's energetic seascape is a real treat - mean that there is always something to get your teeth into. Do we need Damien Hirst's sharks? Probably not, but in a year which has lauded Turner as an unparalleled practitioner, it is good to bring him down to earth, alongside fellow artists, across time. This is really a celebration of the multifarious ways nature has, to paraphrase Maggi Hambling, grabbed artists by the short and curlies. The ever-inquisitive, thrill-seeking Turner would have loved it and so did I.

''Don't Let's Ask for the Moon...': Nocturnes and Atkinson Grimshaw' (Leeds Art Gallery until April 19 2026)

Atkinson Grimshaw, Nightfall Down the Thames, 1880, Leeds Art Gallery

Atkinson Grimshaw, the self-taught Yorkshireman who made a good living with cosy night-time cityscapes, is often seen as a one-trick commercial pony rather than a serious artist. Well represented in UK collections, seen on the cover of history books and old-fashioned Christmas cards from elderly relatives, he is the sort of artist your eye might have frequently glided over. Nice but dull. Leeds Art Gallery's rather whimsically titled exhibition suggests it is leaning into that view, even perhaps hinting that viewers should not expect too much from what is largely their own collection of Grimshaw's works. The reality is more varied, interesting and challenging than that, partly because of the inclusion of contemporary artists, largely because Grimshaw himself defies expectations.  

Nocturnes does not claim to be a retrospective and a certain amount of joining the dots is required by visitors to unravel the chronology and influences on his career. Early works have a distinctively Pre-Raphaelite interest in precise observation, possibly influenced by fellow Loiner, John William Inchbold. Whether Autumn Glory, The Old Mill was painted from a photograph or not, it has a luminosity and obsessive density of foliage that in combination give it an eerie gothicism. Grimshaw later softened his style, enveloping the rectilinearity of townscapes and masted ships in a smudginess which suited his nocturnal lighting and gave his paintings a built-in glow of positivity. Boar Lane, Leeds takes you straight back to childhood Christmases, all chill air, bright lights and anticipation. But even works dominated by cool, lunar blues have an idealised calm: Nightfall on the Thames is an urban dream-forest of masts centred on the dome of St Pauls rather than a bustling, working, labour-filled and smoke-fueled port. 

There are obvious comparisons with Whistler, made by the man himself and explicitly referenced by Grimshaw in his late Caprice in Yellow Minor, a rare venture into pure landscape and a light, white palette. Caprice is one of several surprising pictures: Sunday Night, Knostrop Cut, linked, in elegiac terms, to the artist's imminent death by the curators, has a warm luminosity and a dramatically emphasised sense of empty recession. Meanwhile Iris, a repeated subject, combines a rather fey winged nude with a minimal violet-hued landscape which reminded me of Klimt's later reductions of nature. Whilst some of these might stretch the definition 'nocturne', they share an entirely appropriate poetry. Grimshaw's attempt at social commentary, Reflections on the Aire - On strike, struggles to hit home for that very reason.

Atkinson Grimshaw, Snow and Mist (Caprice in Yellow Minor) 1892-3, Leeds Art Gallery

This dreamy poetry is felt equally strongly in the contemporary painters chosen for inclusion. Judith Tucker's moonlit caravan parks, exploit the same interplay of artificial and natural light, albeit with a more unsettling surrealism. Elizabeth Magill's mistily indistinct purples work beautifully with a rare Grimshaw watercolour landscape. Less sympathetic, in fact audibly intrusive, Roger's Palmer's The Remains provided a soundtrack that permeates the whole exhibition. Nocturnes has to fight again this, and its awkward location, a three room corridor on the ground floor sandwiched between the gallery shop and the toilets. It probably gets visitors in - it was certainly busy when I went on a weekday morning - but it feels the very opposite of moonlit calm. 

Leeds Art Gallery must work with what it has: a brief glance into the adjoining library shows crumbling decoration and patches of damp. Certainly, make sure you visit the rest of their displays, which include more examples of Grimshaw's work and an excellent one room exhibition The Axis of Abstraction, Art in Cornwall and Yorkshire. Nocturnes establishes Atkinson Grimshaw as a painter of variety, poetry and urban optimism, and the inclusion of contemporary artists gives his work a relevance and modernity. Personally, I would love a proper retrospective of his work (the last was fifteen years ago at Harrogate's Mercer), including figurative and rural landscape paintings, and contextualising him amongst his contemporaries. But don't let's ask for the moon....

'Miniature Worlds: Little Landscapes from Thomas Bewick to Beatrix Potter' (Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle until February 28 2026): Little Goes Large

William Beilby's River Landscape Seen Through Trees, 1774, Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle

It is a brave curator who decides to stage an exhibition of miniatures. Never going to be spectacular, it can look meagre on the walls and it always requires an extra effort on the part of visitors, here, for instance, offered magnifying glasses to peer through. In Miniature Worlds the Laing Art Gallery has taken up the challenge and run with it, presenting a show of 130 works (most of them loans) in paint, print and even sculpture which celebrate 'little' art from Thomas Bewick up to the present day. With Bewick, of course, they have a trump card - a popular, local name - and they also hitch a ride on the Turner anniversary juggernaut with ten of his works from Tate. More importantly, this is a cleverly staged show which has clearly thought about the difficulties of display. 

Their opening information board and  'poster' choice sets the scene: William Beilby's River Landscape Seen Through Trees has a theatrical magicality as he stage sets his background and we are encouraged to mentally shrink and enter his world. His palette is continued in the cool, green Wind in the Willows walls which provide a gentle background which subtly references the landscape theme - later we shift to stone grey. Respite is offered in the comfy chairs of the Book Discovery Zone. And who can fail to be buoyed up by the sight of Mrs Tittlemouse?

One of the great things about this exhibition is how it champions printmaking, especially in wood. Bewick's 'Tyneside's Tiny Masterpieces' (as they are dubbed here) have an infectious combination of skill, charm and humour. William Blake, who could have a miniature exhibition all of his own, is represented by his only series of wood engravings from Virgil's Pastorals,  so rustically rough and dense that they resemble wood grain itself and make Samuel Palmer's etched Herdsman's Cottage look like an exercise in sophistication. We see John Tenniel who drew his designs for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland directly onto woodblocks. There is also a focus on the twentieth century revival with the likes of Eric Ravilious and Claire Leighton, both of whom create a compelling strength and certainty in their work which belies the small scale.

JMW Turner, The Alps (The Alps at Daybreak), for Rogers’s ‘Poems’, c.1830–2, Tate

Names more associated with painted, grandscale drama, like Turner and John Martin demonstrate their quiet side: Martin belligerently cramming a cast of thousands onto a piece of paper; Turner taking a minimalist approach which conjures the Alps' solid rock out of a few brushstrokes, revealed as through a half-defrosted window. However, the real pleasure comes from seeing artists who devoted themselves to the small: Kate Greenaway and Beatrix Potter may be often downgraded to mere 'illustrators' but their mastery of their material is beyond doubt. I am reminded of the nostalgic warmth of Cicely Mary Barker's Flower Fairies exhibition recently at Lady Lever (Greenaway is also the subject of an exhibition at Burgh House in London at present). 

The Modern Visions section offers up new names and an interesting challenge to the perception that contemporary artists tend to go large or go home. Paul Coldwell's sculptures are small worlds in themselves. Joanna Whittle's luminous frames within frames literally enshrine landscapes. Vicken Parsons evokes infinite space and shifting clouds with a few brushstrokes on wood. At the other end of the spectrum, Richard Hamilton homes in on the ultra-specific, in a grainy, granular close-up that creates it's own soft-focus memorialisation. The Chapman brothers' Goya-esque vignettes seem jarringly out of kilter in this world of wonder and strangeness.

Miniature Worlds is a triumph of a show. By the end, rather like playing with a doll's house, reality seems to shrink and we, the viewers, become giants looking intently in. What starts as effort becomes a joy of small things and close looking. Calming, therapeutic, rewarding, who would have thought you could get so much out of so little.

'The Life of the Fields' (St Barbe Museum and Art Gallery, Lymington, until January 10 2026)

Eric Ravilious, The Downs in Winter, 1935, Towner, Eastbourne

St Barbe's The Life of the Fields is part social history, part call for action , all wrapped up in a broad survey of agricultural landscape art over the last hundred years. One of the main problems which has to deal with is that we inevitably view rural images as, at best, nostalgic and, at worse, twee. So, on the surface this looks like a show dedicated to safe, old-fashioned images which have more in common with the nineteenth than the twentieth or twenty-first centuries. The intention is a history of the visual representation of agricultural since the First World War which tackles questions of changing farming practices and changing attitudes to the countryside. The curators are determined to make you look behind the cliches and the prejudices and see these images as both authentic and important. I am not sure it entirely succeeds in its intention, but it is varied, wide-ranging and very satisfying show.

The exhibition sets out its stall as social commentary with divisions into sections like farming practices and rural architecture, and ends with a group of contemporary works which represent farming today. It takes a deliberately wide definition of visual culture to incorporate Charles Tunnicliffe's Ladybird book illustrations and propaganda posters like Frank Newbould's Your Britain, Fight for it Now, as well as significant numbers of printworks from Clare Leighton's wood engraving January to John Nash's humorous lithograph Harvesting, produced as part of the School Prints initiative. There is a good balance of familiar and less familiar names: George Clausen and Lauren Knight sit alongside James Bateman and Thomas Hennell - certainly new to me. Equally, because this is thematically curated there is a huge range of juxtaposed styles. John Arnesby Brown's Millet-influenced Spring has Romanticism in its lowering sky; Eric Ravilious transforms the Downs in Winter with a undulating fluidity in which the roller looks almost like a ship adrift at sea; Frances Hodgkins imbues the Broken Tractor with organic surrealism; Julian Opie reduces fields to minimalist linearity.

John Arnesby Brown, Spring, Southampton City Art Gallery 

The exhibition is very good at contextualising these disparate representations, both in history and in personal experience. Some of the producers were themselves from a rural background, others found themselves in the countryside by chance - Ethelbert White was sent to work on the land in Devon as a conscientious objector - and for many more it was a place of retreat. Harry Epworth Allen was a World War One amputee who travelled round by bus; Kechie Tennent and her husband, who had been imprisoned as a 'conchie', retreated to rural Norfolk after his release; Stanley Anderson moved out of London to escape the Blitz. The importance of agricultural production during both world wars gets good coverage. St Barbe can claim to have pioneered the rediscovery of Evelyn Dunbar with their 2006 exhibition and she is represented here with A Land Girl and the Bail Bull. Randolph Schwabe shows the Land Army working alongside German PoWs; Edward Burra has soldiers bringing in the harvest. Equally, the wartime drive for productivity can be seen in the increased presence of mechanisation in post-War works like Norman Neasom's Woolas Hall.

The great irony of the exhibition is that all these works are painted at a time which postdates the golden age of agriculture and the great population shift from country to town. They are all intrinsically nostalgic even when purporting to be factual observation, and in their determination to be unsentimental there is I think an under-acknowledgement of this on the part of the curators. The long legacy of landscape painting underpins much of the work here, sometimes overtly, as in Robin Tanner's debt to Samuel Palmer, often obliquely. The huge sky with its churning clouds and Jesus-rayed sun in James Lynch's The Last of the Harvest, Mere Down is evocatively elegiac, and not just because it tops industrialised rectilinear fields. The lone figure in Tennant's Ploughing bent effortfully into his work at the same angle as the tree behind, is a figure from Hardy or Clare, or even a Medieval Book of Hours.

I suspect for many visitors, the factual, socio-historical context will be an appealing and instructive way into the art, so I am not going to moan too much. This is a thoroughly-researched and endlessly interesting survey (there is also an accompanying catalogue). It will introduce you to artists, stir memories, evoke emotions and stimulate you to make connections. The time and effort spent by the curators should not be underestimated. Once again, a 'provincial' museum has put on an exhibition which everyone deserves the chance to see. 

'Gothic Modern: Munch, Beckmann, Kollwitz' (Albertina Museum, Vienna until January 11 2026)

Arnold Böcklin, Self-portrait with Death as a Fiddler, 1872, Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin

I'm not sure why the Albertina's iteration of Gothic Modern has decided to highlight three big names: previously in the Scandinavian versions of the show, the more evocative, and optimistic, descriptor was 'From Darkness to Light.' There are indeed wonderful works by Munch, Beckmann and Kollwitz but ultimately this is a thematic, multi-artist exhibition where the ideas and the connections between works and across time are more important than individual names. On the surface Gothic Modern sounds like a crowd-pleasing attempt to attract a younger audience, something reinforced by the prominence of Van Gogh's Skeleton With Burning Cigarette in the publicity. In reality, the curators present a complex narrative which encompasas both Gothic (Medieval and Early Renaissance) art and architecture, and the popular death and angst interpretation of the term whilst also, more interestingly, exploring the assumption than 'modern' necessarily means forward-looking and new. Maybe there is just too much in the mix, but this is a beautifully presented show, full of an eclectic selection of interesting art. You can argue that not everything here is gothic or modern, but everything is worth looking at.

Gothic is of course a moveable feast of a word. We can all conjure up an image of soaring, spired architecture, and many people will think of flattened figures and complex colourful patterns. In this form it is art about God rather than the devil, and there are, perhaps incongruously, Edward Burne Jones' Adoration of the Magi and Marianne Stokes' Madonna as well as a wall of stained glass light boxes, included here. The Medieval world also had its share of the (sometimes humorously) grotesque and the gruesome, think Bosch, doom paintings, misericords and gargoyles, and it is in this context that Van Gogh's Skeleton is presented. This more historical definition, has, however, since the early nineteenth century been overshadowed by the eerie, amorphous weirdness of gothic literature - graveyards and vampires, sex and death. Deep purple and red walls set the tone: a group of three archetypal Munchs (Vampire, Eye in Eye and Ashes) arguably anchor the whole show. 

The vast vagueness of the term gothic brings its own problems.Many of the so-called gothic obsessions on display are simply human nature, visible throughout time and across art forms. Fear of mortality, of the unknown; an association of darkness with evil; sin, temptation and the devil. Images of Adam and Eve are not inherently gothic, nor are attempts to personify death. Is Holbein's Dead Christ, for all it's exaggerated emaciation, intrinsically any more gothic than Mantegna's highly foreshortened version? In juxtaposing the Medieval and the modern, the exhibition by-passes Romanticism, another fin de siecle phenomenon which shared many of the concerns and neuroses of the 1900 generation - war, modernity, introspection. 

Hugo Simberg The Wounded Angel, 1903, Ateneum Art Museum Museum, Helsinki

Despite these issues, the fundamental argument, that modernism was not simply a forward- looking rejection of the past, is compellingly presented. Kollwitz, in two and three dimensions, joins a Medieval pieta in a triptych of desperate, distorting love; Durer and Beckmann both take us to cacophonous women's baths; Schiele images himself as St Sebastian. By the time you get to Kirchner's Rhine Bridge, the picture seems less an Expressionist dystopia of alienating, distorted space and more as if the modern structure is an organic extension of the cathedral behind. Set against light blue walls and opposite Munch's euphoric sunrise it creates an optimistic end after all the gloom. Throughout, the curators have created a series of beautiful groupings and sightlines which bring out the best in the art. Munch and Stokes' Madonnas, polar opposites which nevertheless share a tilt of the head and a weighty pathos. A whole series of attenuated, horizontal male nudes which resonate with the dead Christ. There are enough moments of gothic absurdity for the purist: Hans Baldung's Three Ages and Alfred Bocklin's self portrait complete with leering skeleton. But it is a, sometimes terrible, beauty which really triumphs here.

Gothic Modern is a big exhibition with a big idea which is carried through with commitment and style. It wears its scholarship lightly, and presents a dazzling array of works on paper, sculpture and decorative art alongside the paintings. There is a decidedly Nordic and Germanic focus and as such, for this viewer, the added benefit of introducing new artists: Hugo Simberg, his symbolist Wounded Angel carried by two very earthly and resentful boys; Joseph Alanen giving Disease and Death a Art Nouveau elegance. With my partisan hat on, I feel Britain deserves a bigger role. Juliet Simpson is a co-curator and the later Pre-Raphaelites get a walk-on role, but what a fabulous show we could have had at a UK venue. For anyone lucky enough to be in Vienna before January, Gothic Modern should not be missed.